Metanarratives of Disability

Culture, Assumed Authority, and the Normative Social Order

David Bolt, David Bolt

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000388435
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Disabilities in Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

This book explores multiple metanarratives of disability to introduce and investigate the critical concept of assumed authority and the normative social order from which it derives.

The book comprises 15 chapters developed across three parts and, informed by disability studies, is authored by those with research interests in the condition on which they focus as well as direct or intimate experiential knowledge. When out and about, many disabled people know only too well what it is to be erroneously told the error of our/their ways by non-disabled passers-by, assumed authority often cloaked in helpfulness. Showing that assumed authority is underpinned by a displacement of personal narratives in favour of overarching metanarratives of disability that find currency in a diverse multiplicity of cultural representations – ranging from literature to film, television, advertising, social media, comics, art, and music – this work discusses how this relates to a range of disabilities and chronic conditions, including blindness, autism, Down syndrome, diabetes, cancer, and HIV and AIDS.

Metanarratives of Disability will be of interest to all scholars and students of disability studies, medical sociology, medical humanities, education studies, cultural studies, and health.

'offers a well-structured, accessible collection of disability narratives that foreground disabled voices' Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies 16.1 (2022)

PART I

International developments of the foundational concept

1

The metanarrative of blindness in North America

Meaning, feeling, and feel

Devon Healey and Rod Michalko

Preliminary discussion

This chapter explores the metanarrative of blindness in contemporary Western culture. Zygmunt Bauman (2001, 1) tells us that all words have a meaning and some also have a ‘feel’; blindness is one such word. The meaning of blindness cannot be separated from its feel, nor can its feel be separated from its meaning. The two comingle and live together in the single word Blind. The word itself almost forces a meaning and a feel into the world. It comes with a narrative, one replete with a feel of meaning and a meaningful feel. The word itself evokes a feeling in us connected to its meaning, and this feel comes to us automatically, naturally. It comes to us, too, as the authoritative voice of what blindness is. This voice is, of course, the voice of culture, and it tells the story of blindness, the metanarrative of what perception is, and of what it means to perceive. The voice of culture almost always speaks the meaning and feel of blindness in terms of its opposite, sight; and, it speaks blindness as though it were the opposite of sight, the lack of sight, as sight gone missing.

Methodological discussion

Our critical approach to the metanarrative is to explore the connection between the meaning of blindness and its feel through comparative analyses of two representations of blindness. We make use of the film Scent of a Woman ¹ to reveal the ocular normative (Bolt, 2014) formation of blindness in contemporary Western culture. Al Pacino, a sighted actor, plays Lieutenant Colonel Frank Slade, a blind character in this Hollywood film. Scent of a Woman is a cinematic portrayal of blindness and, like most of these portrayals, relies entirely on the ocular-centric (Levin, 1997) version of sight as the only legitimate way of being in the world and the ocular normative version of blindness as a severely limited way of being in the world. This film, set in New York City in the early 1990s, depicts blindness as the worst possible thing that can happen. Yet worse still is the fact that blindness happened to a white, middle-class military man. Conventional versions of masculinity, race, sight, and blindness intersect in this film. Blindness is shown to be a way of life not worthy of living, through the tacit invocation of the metanarrative of blindness as pity, tragedy, loss, and so on. We use this film as a backdrop to the version of blindness presented in the play Weights, written and performed by Lynn Manning.

1 All quotations are taken from our viewing of the film, Scent of a Woman. Quotations are also taken from our listening to the audio recording of a live performance of the play, Weights. We are responsible for any inaccuracies in the transcription of quotations used in this chapter.

It is crucial to note that a key feature of our methodology is our experience of blindness. This allows us to explore representations through the epistemological position of the experience of blindness. We treat blindness not as a lack of perception but as itself a perception that reveals an episteme particular to the experience. One of us is totally blind; the other, legally blind. These two experiences of blindness generate a further particularity of expression and a further epistemological positioning. This allows us to attend to language and to examine how it creates meanings of blindness in relation to sight. Dian Million (2014) puts it this way: ‘I try to work with an attention to language – to listen for the way that people make meanings from the various meanings that are “always-already” available and the way they reach to move beyond these meanings’ (41). She calls this methodological process ‘languaging’ (Million, 2014, 41). Our method, at the bottom, may also be understood as languaging – as an analysis of the language and thus the meaning and place of blindness in the world and its creative potential for making new meanings of and, places for, blindness.

Analytical discussion 1

A tale of two blindnesses

At age 23, in October 1978, Lynn Manning became blind. Like Al Pacino in Scent of a Woman, Manning’s blindness came in extremely traumatic and even dramatic circumstances. Unlike Pacino’s, Manning’s blindness was real. Pacino’s blindness came to him in the script of a Hollywood film; Manning’s came to him in his life. Whether revealed in fiction or in non-fiction, blindness comes to us in a neatly wrapped but unrecognizable package of the life-world (Husserl, 1970; Schutz, 1967), of a world we have in common, a common-sense world. The life-world, with its assumed authority, presents blindness to us as though it were a ‘natural condition’ – understood as the result of the ‘natural condition’ of sight-gone-wrong. This authority is comprised of a plethora of implicated assumptions and presuppositions regarding what blindness is, its negative influence on people, what to do about such an influence, and how to live with it if nothing can be done to remove it. Both film and play rely upon the assumed authority of blindness for their production. They re-present versions of this authority in the presentation of blindness to their audiences.

What does each of these representations do with the assumed authority of blindness? Do they merely imitate it, or do they change it? How does each contribute to the sustaining of this authority? And finally, do both or either unsettle this assumed authority?

With these questions in mind, we analyze the circumstances of blindness in each portrayal, including the extreme trauma. Like blindness, this trauma relies upon an aspect of the assumed authority of the normative order. This authority intersects gender (specifically, masculinity) and race to produce the trauma socially. Both Scent of a Woman and Weights are set in the United States: the former, as we have said, in New York City in the early 1990s, and the latter in Los Angeles in the late 1970s.

Pacino plays his ‘military man’ character to its stereotypical hilt. This is understandable since the Colonel’s blindness occurred in the midst of this stereotype. He was drunk and, as a way to show off his masculine military courage, juggled live grenades. Predictably, one exploded in his face, blinding him, perhaps the film’s attempt to inflict a dent in the ‘military man’s’ sense of courage and masculinity. Whether this attempt succeeded is doubtful since the assumed authority of the normative order’s version of blindness intersecting with masculinity and the stereotype of the ‘military man’ orients the film from beginning to end.

The most striking difference between Manning’s and the Colonel’s onset of blindness is that the former is real. Manning was a 23-year-old Black man living in Los Angeles. Just before his blindness, his life began taking a turn for the better. He was the second oldest of nine children. Although his first few years of life were happy and he experienced family bliss, it did not last long. His parents began to drink heavily and have violent arguments. Manning and his siblings were relegated to the bedroom where they could hear their parents fight. ‘Our new knowledge of the violent possibilities’, he says in Weights, ‘caused the nights to fall with ominous swiftness. Sleep for me came through quiet rocking and prayers to God that I’d awaken in the morning and find that it had been all one long bad dream’ (Manning, 2000).

The nightmare culminated with Manning’s mother stabbing his father and the two separating. His mother continued to drink heavily, resulting in the family living in ‘squalor’ and ‘abject poverty’ (Manning, 2000). It did not take long for the state to remove Manning and his siblings from their home, to place them in foster care. None of the children ever returned home. Manning moved from foster home to foster home, from school to school, until he eventually secured a ‘good job’ (Manning, 2000) in the same boys home in which he was detained from time to time when he was a juvenile. Manning’s father taught him to draw when he was a child and he pursued this love in adulthood. He began painting on canvas and was an aspiring artist. The ‘universe’, as he put it, ‘was turning in my favor’ (Manning, 2000). It was then that Murphy’s law (i.e. anything that can go wrong will go wrong) kicked in.

Manning went to his favourite Hollywood bar to celebrate his good fortune. He was provoked into a fight that ended badly and he was shot in the head. The bullet severed his optic nerve and left him blind in both eyes. Manning’s understanding of blindness, however, began much earlier.

Guided by Murphy’s law, Manning prepared for the most difficult of fates for a visual artist. ‘What’s the worst possible thing that can happen to you?’ he asked himself. ‘To go blind’, was his answer (Manning, 2000). With this in mind he began preparing for blindness; tying his shoes, using the telephone, washing dishes – he did these things in the dark or with his eyes closed. This was Manning’s version of blindness. It was simply not seeing; it was the lack of sight, and it was doing things that sighted people did, but doing them without sight. He did not want blindness to ‘catch’ him ‘off guard’ (Manning, 2000). It was five years later (i.e. half a decade after he began to prepare for blindness) that the worst thing happened: he became blind. But, his experience of blindness was not the blindness for which he had prepared. Instead of not seeing, he was seeing. Yet, he was seeing sights that he had not seen before: ‘colour and geometric shapes’ (Manning, 2000).

With this experience, and ‘cruising on pain killers’ as he lay on his hospital bed (Manning, 2000), he became anxious regarding the cause of his blindness. One aspect of the taken-for-granted character of blindness, an authoritative sensibility that comes to us automatically, is that it indicates something wrong and that it is caused by something, something external to itself. Manning wondered whether he had subconsciously brought on his blindness, if he was subconsciously fulfilling his own ‘orbit prophecy’ (Manning, 2000). He knew that despite seeing colours and geometric shapes on his mental canvas, that this was, nonetheless, blindness. ‘But’, then again, he wondered, ‘is this blindness or madness?’ (Manning, 2000). He concluded he could ‘handle’ blindness as long as he did not bring it on himself, as long as his blindness was not ‘hysterical blindness’ (Manning, 2000).

‘Something akin to joy surges through me’, was Manning’s response when the doctor informed him that he would be blind for the rest of his life and that it was a gunshot wound that caused his blindness. He was not ‘mad’. ‘You do understand what I am telling you, Mr. Manning?’ was the doctor’s response to Manning’s expression of joy at the news. The doctor informed his mother and sister that his reaction to being told that he would be totally blind for the rest of his life was ‘abnormal’ and that he would ‘bear close watching for a while’ (Manning, 2000). This made his hospital visitors both sad and cautious around him, so Manning spent most of his time ‘trying to cheer them up’, which was understood as ‘more abnormal behaviour’ on his part (Manning, 2000).

But, as he says, ‘loss has been an integral part of our family history’ (Manning, 2000). The assumed authority of the normative order that surrounds blindness in our culture frames it as a loss, a devastating one at that. Like any loss, blindness framed as such generates the implicit requisite of grieving. Celebrating blindness, feeling it as ‘akin to joy’, according to the metanarrative, could be understood as nothing other than a sign of mental health deterioration brought on by the shock following the devastating loss. Manning’s response to blindness did not rely on this metanarrative resulting in his being psychologized as not accepting his loss, his blindness. This is why the necessity of grieving comes with the prerequisite of the metanarrative of loss, one that is ubiquitous in Scent of a Woman.

Unlike Manning’s prior knowledge of, and preparation for the possibility of, blindness and his subsequent joy in being blind, Lieutenant Colonel Frank Slade is portrayed in Scent of a Woman as a man encumbered with, and by, blindness. The assumed authority of this film relies upon the tropes of loss and tragedy. The loss of one’s sight and the tragic life of blindness in a world of sights to be seen is what grounds both the meaning and the feel of blindness.

Colonel Slade is committed to ending his life, as a life in blindness is one that, to him, is not worth living. He laments, ‘What life? I got no life! I’m in the dark here! You understand? I’m in the dark!’ (Scent of a Woman, 1992). The cultural understanding of blindness as darkness is one that haunts both sighted and blind people alike. The being of blindness has been narrated as though the person who is blind is in a constant state of vulnerability, trapped in a world cloaked by the unknown and unrecognizable darkness that is blindness. There must, however, be a glimmer of hope, some semblance of resilience within the blind character – otherwise, why watch? And so, the metanarrative of blindness becomes the story of the resilience, not of people but of the senses.

There are the sounds of movement, the smell of freshly baked bread, and of course, the scent of a woman. There are the memories hidden deep within the body – muscle memory – to do, to dance, to drive. The heightened abilities of ‘the blind’ to tap into a world unknown to those with sight, these are the gifts from, and of, darkness that work to make the metanarrative of blindness not desirable but at least palatable. Pacino’s character knows the exact brand of perfume a woman is wearing from a distance; he can dance the tang...