(funky music)
- There are a lot of assumptions
that many sighted people make about blind people.
And I think that a lot of them come to us
from our cultural representations,
from films and from novels that importantly
have not been created by blind
and visually impaired people themselves.
My name is Leona Gaudin and I wrote "There Plant Eyes:
A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness."
I would love to share with you some
of the most common misconceptions
that many sighted people have about blind people.
(sultry music)
So one of the things that my blind friends
and I have found to be quite distressing is
how often blind character will ask
to touch somebody's face.
Face touching is not something
that any blind person I know does on a regular basis,
especially not with people that they don't know.
So in other words, the only time
that most blind people touch faces is like
in intimate moments, you know, with their loved ones
or when you're making out with somebody,
then you might do some face touching.
Lionel Richie is singing and is in love
with the blind woman who is
at the same time, sculpting a bust
of none other than Lionel Richie.
- Oh it's wonderful.
- This is how I see you.
(sultry music)
- (laughs) I remember that from the eighties
and I was, you know, still a sighted person at that point
and even then I thought that was a little egregious.
So as a general rule we don't face touch
to get any kind of map of somebody's face,
but just to tell them that we love them
or that we like them a lot.
(sultry music)
And that kind of leads me
into the next maybe ocular centric assumption
that people might have that, oh,
I don't know that blind people are somehow
more virginal than other people, you know,
that maybe we don't like sex.
And so it's pretty important for me to let people know
that blind people also enjoy sex.
And that if we are really honest about it, you know,
we feel kind of oppressed by that urge
that a lot of sighted people have
to kind of make us saintly
or more spiritual than your average person.
(religious music)
(grunts) (glass shattering)
(upbeat rock music)
Contrary to popular belief,
blind people do not necessarily have super powers.
(upbeat rock music)
That urge to have a super powered blind person is kind
of fun and interesting,
but I think it takes away from the possibility
of just being a normal blind person.
(upbeat rock music)
And I think even just saying the phrase right,
"normal blind person" would strike a lot
of people as I don't know, strange or an oxymoron.
(Daredevil screams)
Another big problem in the movies is
that there's a thing called blind face, right?
Where you hire sighted actors to play blind people
and then they have this blank stare, you know,
this thousand mile blank stare.
When I'm speaking with people in person,
I'm going to make an effort to, you know,
look in the direction of where the voice is coming from.
It's kind of an obvious thing.
The voice comes out of a head.
You can kind of gauge in general like
where the eyes would be.
(mellow music)
I think a lot of sighted people think
that we're really sad, you know,
that blind people are living in kind of a sad, dark world.
For example, the other day I was walking home
from a bar with my partner and these kids
on skateboards passed by and one of them says
"Are you blind? That's so sad."
And I said, "Well, why I'm, you know."
Big smile "I'm fine."
You know, feeling kind of buzzed.
I was doing great.
And I said, "There's nothing to be sad about."
And he's like, "That's really sad. I'm sorry."
You know, and then we kind of go our separate ways
and it struck me as so, so strange.
You know, why would he think that this is sad?
we have lots of mood swings just like other humans
and sometimes we're sad and sometimes we're happy
and you know, blindness doesn't have a ton to do with that.
(funky music)
The most pervasive tropes regarding blindness,
I think in our modern era, we might call that
like the Fonzie going blind trope or something.
(sorrowful music)
- I'm blind.
- Or in this day and age,
maybe the Arya Stark in the "Game of Thrones" series
but also the books "Song of Ice and Fire."
And that is blindness as kind of moral corrective,
this idea that you're going about things
in the wrong way, or you're a bad person somehow,
and so you suddenly get struck blind and--
(organ music)
Whoa-ha-ha, the angels sing and you see the light, right?
In a metaphorical sense,
suddenly you see the truth or you have some sort
of understanding that you didn't have
with functioning eyes.
(organ music)
(record scratches)
Well, I would love for this to be true, right?
I would love for all of us who are blind
or visually impaired to be like morally upright citizens
and that we all sort of see the eternal truths
and think correctly,
but I'm afraid that it's just not the case.
- [Man] That's your guy.
- Wait, is he blind?
- Pretty messed up to rob a blind guy isn't it?
- Just 'cause he's blind don't mean he's a saint, bro.
- I think that sighted people tend to have kind
of an all or nothing attitude towards blindness.
I personally have kind of lived on every notch
of the sight blindness continuum.
I started out life seeing normally according
to the eye charts and then, when I was in fourth grade,
I suddenly couldn't really see the writing
on the blackboard.
I was diagnosed with a progressive degenerative disease.
For many, many years. I was somewhere
on that spectrum between being fully sighted
and being totally blind where I am now.
Although I must say that I still have just the tiniest bit
of light perception in the far left peripheral vision,
but for the most part, I'm a totally blind person.
But most people that you will see walking down the street
with a cane or a guide dog, have some vision.
One big takeaway from all this might be
that there's as many ways of being blind
as there are being sighted
and that there's so much variety.
Blindness is not a monolith.
But I am asking people to think about how much
of our world is centered upon vision
to such an extent that other senses are downplayed
and that people who don't have vision
are then discriminated against.
That's really what I'm trying to fight is
that there are other ways of being in the world
other than visual and ocular centrism is kind
of the extreme version of thinking that somebody
is a lesser being because they can't see.
(funky music)