Sight Unseen: Gender and Race Through Blind Eyes

by Ellyn Kaschak

Sight Unseen reveals the cultural and biological realities of race, gender, and sexual orientation from the perspective of the blind. Through ten case studies and dozens of interviews, Ellyn Kaschak taps directly into the phenomenology of race, gender, and sexual orientation among blind individuals, along with the everyday epistemology of vision. Her work reveals not only how the blind create systems of meaning out of cultural norms but also how cultural norms inform our conscious and unconscious interactions with others regardless of our physical ability to see.

Genres: Nonfiction

208 pages, Hardcover, ebook

First published April 1, 2015

Reviews

[Natalie Porter · Rating 5 out of 5]

Sight Unseen: Gender and Race Through Blind Eyes (2015) is a ground-breaking exploration of how vision impacts what we “know,” how we know it, and how we act as a result. The book, through the analysis of transcripts from years of meeting with and interviewing blind individuals, addresses the question of what role vision plays in everyday experiences and behavior, or as Kaschak has posed, “What if the defining sense of vision were absent?... Are such crucial human characteristics as gender and ethnicity, race and sexual orientation discoveries or inventions of a species dependent on sight? How would we categorize each other, how would we discriminate were it not for the details of vision transmitted to our human brains?”
Sight Unseen illuminates the fundamental role vision plays in developing and shaping knowledge, even earlier than through language. Although “seeing” may be a function of neurology, vision is organized by social and interpersonal meanings. Because it is pre-linguistic, vision is also largely unconscious in sighted individuals, learned before the person could put words to the experience. It is shaped by our contexts and by those with whom we interact and within particular cultural contexts. Through studying persons without sight, Kaschak has attempted to reveal the epistemology of vision, including the role and limits of vision in shaping one’s worldview, the “blindness” of the sighted, and how blind persons must put words to visual concepts, even when they lack firsthand exposure.
This innovative ethnomethodological approach sheds light on how the participants make sense of their own worlds including the development of the complexities of identity and critical race and gender theories through the in-depth narratives presented. Through the compelling case narratives, it produces insight into the role and function of visual knowledge in constructing gender, sexual orientation, and race.

[Jacobo Schifter · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. It is a vision of vision through blindness. I found the interviews riveting and I was learning at the same time the world of darkness, the world of sight and how difficult it is to set them apart. I was impressed on how much blind people want to pass and how unlearned we are to this. It is like being gay in the 1950´s. Each character is absolutely real and it makes you want to know more and more. I recommend this book to all my students on gender, sexual orientation and race. They find it eye-opening for these matters.

[Arlene Kock · Rating 5 out of 5]

Kaschak’s Sight Unseen is a pioneering work unmasking the cultural underpinnings of gender and sexual attraction. A work that took over 10 years to research and write is like no other book that delves into this complex topic. Kaschak’s approachable writing style cuts through and lands on compelling insights that support the contention that we create what we see and create what we are told to see. A phenomenal book that will withstand the test of time...and any mature assessment of her scholarly work.

[Joan]

This comes out in April 2015. Recommended by someone in a reading group I'm in.

[Sara Sharratt · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was fascinated by this book. I have been a scholar of gender and race for most of my career and have read many excellent books on these topics. Sight Unseen is a standout in this field. It is an ethnography of vision done by studying the absence of vision. The methodology is unique and, as a result, so are the results. Kaschak is an astute observer and a gifted writer. Her sensitivity to the blind and ability to convey the details of her own experience really touched me. She may be the heir to Oliver Sacks in making this material accessible to the public. It is an original book about the blindness of the sighted. A five star jewel, Sara Sharratt, Ph.D