Structures of seeing
Blindness, Race, and Gender in Visual Culture
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 4364677 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Elizabeth Davis (0009-0009-6468-9752) |
| Year | 2019 |
| Volume | 14 |
| Issue | 1 |
| Pages | 63-80 |
| Publication date | 2019-01-02 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | The Senses and Society (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 1745-8927 • E-ISSN: 1745-8935 |
| Publisher | Informa UK Limited (PUBLISHER • GB) |
| DOI | 10.1080/17458927.2019.1569331 |
| OpenAlex | W2923108165 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 6 |
| References cited | 23 |
This essay draws on critical disability studies and blindness studies to rethink our commonsense understanding of vision and unsettle the normative sensory subject that is lodged in visual culture studies. Through a disability studies critique of visual culture studies and a juxtaposition of blind studies alongside the canonical images of the “male gaze” and the “white gaze” this paper argues that (visual) difference does not exist in the world waiting to be seen, but that difference is produced in visual power relations. This essay proposes that the possibilities of visual culture are determined by structures of seeing, rather than physiology or optics, arguing that as long as visual culture and social justice studies are lodged within a Cartesian conception of the subject, they falter in conceptualizing the social construction of perception and difference, for they have not destabilized the “distribution of the sensible” (Rancière) of their own epistemic tradition. Race, gender, and disability are apprehended here not primarily as identity categories, but as possibilities of the body that develop(ed) in tandem in complex socio-historical formations
Aesthetics · Blindness · Epistemology · Gaze · Identity (music · Inattentional blindness · Normative · Perception · Psychoanalysis · Race (biology · Sociology · Subject (documents · Visual culture · Anthropology · Art, Politics, and Modernism · Gender Studies · Philosophy · Photography and Visual Culture · Posthumanist Ethics and Activism · Psychology
The Politics of Aesthetics
Scenes of subjection
Marxism and literature
Visual Culture
In the Wake
Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema
Discipline and Punish
The science question in feminism
The Disability Studies Reader
An Introduction to Visual Culture
Habeas Viscus
The question of access
Visibility in Social Theory and Social Research
Blackness and Nothingness (Mysticism in the Flesh)
Mama's Baby, Papa's Maybe
Situated Knowledges
The Evidence of Experience
| Unique citing works | 6 |
|---|---|
| Citations per year | 1 |
| Citation span | 2020 - 2026 (7) |
| Citation velocity | current |
| Highly cited | No |
| Citation types | Neutral: 6 |