Blindness in V Acts

Download or read book Blindness in V Acts written by Devon Kathryn Healey and published by . This book was released on 2019 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: This dissertation engages the cultural meanings and movements of blindness from a dramaturgically inflected form of critical creative inquiry. It addresses how blindness is lived in the particular contexts of its appearance - in offices of ophthalmology and psychiatry, in classrooms of higher education, in accessibility service offices, on the street and at home. My dissertation reveals the performative enactment of blindness that is lived in the public as well as in the private corners of the self, that orients to blindness as a necessary and creative feature of the sensorium, and that demonstrates how blindness is a form of perception. Influenced by narrative inquiry, this work introduces methodological twists from theatre and drama while drawing from theorists such as Erving Goffman, Rod Michalko, and Tanya Titchkosky. This dissertation takes the form of a play and is written in five acts as a way to explicate the everyday life of blindness, its being and its feel, its ontology. Each act represents a stage, a context, upon which the everyday life of blindness is performed. The narrative follows the life of Erin, a young and recently blind woman. The first three acts dramatize how Erin's blindness is conceived of and understood in medicine, education and the street. The fourth act turns to the self, exploring the philosophical question of blindness as an identity. The first four acts end with a "Theoretical Intermission" where blind studies is exemplified in relation to disability studies and phenomenology, again, with a dramaturgical twist. The fifth and final act is written as a separate, but related, one act play dramatizing the precarious life of blindness. This dissertation contributes to the fields of blind and disability studies, education, cultural studies, interpretive sociology and phenomenology as well as theatre, drama and performance studies by releasing a poetics of the eyes. This dissertation cultivates the possibility of an interpretative relation to both blindness and sight by employing a unique methodology that privileges blind eyes in knowledge production on the stage of everyday life.