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Book Cover
E-book
Author Hammer, Gili, 1980- author.

Title Blindness through the looking glass : the performance of blindness, gender, and the sensory body / Gili Hammer ; foreword by Georgina Kleege
Published Ann Arbor : University of Michigan Press, 2019
©2019

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Description 1 online resource (xiv, 205 pages)
Series Corporealities: Discourses of disability
Corporealities.
Summary "Modern Western culture is saturated with images, imprinting visual standards of concepts such as beauty and femininity onto our collective consciousness. Blindness Through the Looking Glass examines how gender and femininity are performed and experienced in everyday life by women who do not rely on sight as their dominant mode of perception, identifying the multiple senses involved in the formation of gender identity within social interactions. Challenging visuality as the dominant mode to understand gender, social performance, and visual culture, the book offers an ethnographic investigation of blindness (and sight) as a human condition, putting both blindness and vision 'on display, ' discussing people's auditory, tactile, and olfactory experiences, as well as vision and sight, and exploring ways individuals perform blindness and 'sightedness' in their everyday lives. Based on in-depth interviews with 40 blind women in Israel and anthropological fieldwork, the book investigates the social construction and daily experience of blindness in a range of domains. Uniquely, the book brings together blind symbolism with the everyday experiences of blind and sighted individuals, joining in mutual conversation the fields of disability studies, visual culture, anthropology of the senses, and gender studies"-- Provided by publisher
Bibliography Includes bibliographical references and index
Notes Online resource; title from digital title page (viewed on October 16, 2019)
Subject Blind women -- Israel -- Social conditions
Blind women -- Israel -- Interviews
Blind women -- Social conditions
Blind women
Blindness -- Social aspects
Gender identity
Israel
Genre/Form Interviews
Form Electronic book
Author Kleege, Georgina, 1956- writer of foreword.
LC no. 2019980584
ISBN 0472126083
9780472126088