Devon Healey

University of Toronto | U of T · Department of Social Justice Education

Everything has a beginning. Blindness is said to have a genesis. This chapter explores this beginning. This chapter shows how the protagonist, Erin, first “sees” her blindness. An oil spot, a rainbow, is what she sees when she looks no matter where she looks. Seeing an oil spot is not something anyone should see unless, of course, you are looking a...

This chapter concludes with the understanding that there is a distinction between blind and blindness. Blind is a life; blindness is a culmination of the conceptions, understandings and attitudes that exist in our culture regarding what it is to live blind. Living blind, then, is to live with blindness in culture. Erin lives blind, but changes blin...

Blindness happens everywhere, especially to blind people. This act explores how blindness happens in a university classroom. It follows Erin’s experience of postgraduate studies as a blind student. She learns quickly that research and inquiry require an “inquiring eye.” This act demonstrates how her blindness is interpreted and treated at the unive...

Act V shows how acquiring blandness is not the same as being blind. It conveys this difference in a one-act play. It dramatizes the wait for blindness; it portrays Erin, the protagonist, as she waits for her blindness to arrive, and she does so while watching her sight depart. Waiting perched precariously atop a high stool, blindness arrives; but,...

This act explores the invisibility of blindness and the feeling of detachment from the world blind people sometimes experience, a feeling of being there without being there. This generates the need to fit in, to pass as someone who belongs in the streets, in the world. Moving in the streets while blind requires an understanding of its rhythms, how...

Building on Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical model, this act reveals the drama in the quiet moments of blindness. It shows that this drama does not leave the blind person even when she is home alone. The protagonist Erin continually feels the presence of both her sight and blindness battling for dominance in her life; a battle that compels her to con...

Dramatizing Blindness: Disability Studies as Critical Creative Narrative engages with the cultural meanings and movements of blindness. This book addresses how blindness is lived in particular contexts—in offices of ophthalmology and psychiatry, in classrooms of higher education, in accessibility service offices, on the street and at home. Taking t...

In Blindness Through the Looking Glass: The Performance of Blindness, Gender and the Sensory Body, Gili Hammer draws on the first-person narratives of 40 blind women in Israel and ethnographic fieldwork to challenge visuality as the dominant mode of understanding and experiencing gender identity, visual culture and the sensory body. Devon Healey re...

Blindness Simulation and the Culture of Sight Tanya Titchkosky, Devon Healey, and Rod Michalko University of Toronto Blindness Simulation and the Culture of Sight “What’s it like?” This question has stimulated the simulation of disability through such activities as sitting in a wheelchair, putting in ear plugs, or putting on a blindfold. Disability...

Blindness lives in a world, one both organized and defined by the eye that sees itself as sighted. Seeing is believing, and this belief, eyes believe, is learning. But, what if the eyes that are “seeing” are “blind”? Do we believe these eyes as we do those that see? Do we learn from blind eyes as we do from sighted ones?This paper seeks to question...