Being Seen

One Deafblind Woman's Fight to End Ableism

Elsa Sjunneson

• Publisher: S&S/Simon Element
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN:
  9781982152406
• eBook ISBN:
  9781982152413
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Science Biographies
• Index: Social Sciences

A deafblind writer and professor explores how the misrepresentation of disability in books, movies, and TV harms both the disabled community and everyone else. As a deafblind woman with partial vision in one eye and bilateral hearing aids, Elsa Sjunneson lives at the crossroads of blindness and sight, hearing and deafness—much to the confusion of the world around her. While she cannot see well enough to operate without a guide dog or cane, she can see enough to know when someone is reacting to the visible signs of her blindness and can hear when they're whispering behind her back. And she certainly knows how wrong our one-size-fits-all definitions of disability can be.As a media studies professor, she's also seen the full range of blind and deaf portrayals on film, and here she deconstructs their impact, following common tropes through horror, romance, and everything in between. Part memoir, part cultural criticism, part history of the deafblind experience, Being Seen explores how our cultural concept of disability is more myth than fact, and the damage it does to us all.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Author’s Note
• Chapter 1: The Building Blocks of Blindness
• Chapter 2: We Need to Talk About Helen
• Chapter 3: Language Acquisition Through the Sound Barrier and Other Deafblind Mysteries
• Chapter 4: My Body and Other Histories
• Chapter 5: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Identify Ableism
• Chapter 6: Your Vision of Blindness Is Impaired
• Chapter 7: How I Learned to Drive, Play with Swords, and Other Things You Shouldn’t Do at Home
• Chapter 8: Yes, Virginia, Even Blind Men Can Be Assholes
• Chapter 9: The Call Is Coming from Inside the House
• Chapter 10: Cripping My Dance Card
• Chapter 11: Coming Out of the Closet
• Chapter 12: There Are No Blind Moms on TV
• Chapter 13: I Am Not a Teaching Tool
• Chapter 14: Welcome to the Cyberpunk Future, It’s in My Ears
• Chapter 15: We Have Always Thrived in the Castle
• Chapter 16: Cane in One Hand, Protest Sign in the Other
• Chapter 17: Hindsight Is 20/20, Except If You’re Me and Then It’s [REDACTED]
• Acknowledgments
• About the Author
• Copyright