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A review by mediaevalmuse
There Plant Eyes: A Personal and Cultural History of Blindness by M. Leona Godin
3.0
(3.5 stars)
I saw this book on a reading list for disability month, and as a lover of literature and cultural studies, I figured it would be up my alley.
Overall, I found this book to have some valuable insights regarding blindness and culture, and I appreciated the way it put those concepts in conversation with the author's personal experiences. Godin uses examples from history and pop culture as a springboard for exploring broader concepts that continue to inform society's "ocularcentrism" - prioritizing sightedness as a default state. She also reflects on her own experiences and how navigating the world as a blind/visually impaired person has revealed the way society is structured around ableism.
But while a lot of this book is useful and introduces readers to challenging ocularcentrism, there are some limitations. For one, this book tries to be a lot of things at once: history, literary criticism, social science, memoir. I appreciate a good genre-defying work, but trying to cover a lot of ground also means that some analyses aren't as deep and well-explored as they could have been. For two, this book centers Western culture, and even that feels very broad. There's not really a lot of information about how disability intersects with race or sexuality or gender (though there are some nods to these topics, the umbrella of "blindness" and "western" feel extremely broad).
But maybe these limitations leave room for future scholars to add their voices. Because There Plant Eyes is so broad, it serves as a good introduction to certain topics, but isn't (or shouldn't be) the end-all be-all of disability studies.
TL;DR: There Plant Eyes is useful for getting readers to start thinking about ocularcentrism in "Western" culture, but if you plan on taking disability studies seriously, you need to build on Godin's work by reading about how disability intersects with other identities.
I saw this book on a reading list for disability month, and as a lover of literature and cultural studies, I figured it would be up my alley.
Overall, I found this book to have some valuable insights regarding blindness and culture, and I appreciated the way it put those concepts in conversation with the author's personal experiences. Godin uses examples from history and pop culture as a springboard for exploring broader concepts that continue to inform society's "ocularcentrism" - prioritizing sightedness as a default state. She also reflects on her own experiences and how navigating the world as a blind/visually impaired person has revealed the way society is structured around ableism.
But while a lot of this book is useful and introduces readers to challenging ocularcentrism, there are some limitations. For one, this book tries to be a lot of things at once: history, literary criticism, social science, memoir. I appreciate a good genre-defying work, but trying to cover a lot of ground also means that some analyses aren't as deep and well-explored as they could have been. For two, this book centers Western culture, and even that feels very broad. There's not really a lot of information about how disability intersects with race or sexuality or gender (though there are some nods to these topics, the umbrella of "blindness" and "western" feel extremely broad).
But maybe these limitations leave room for future scholars to add their voices. Because There Plant Eyes is so broad, it serves as a good introduction to certain topics, but isn't (or shouldn't be) the end-all be-all of disability studies.
TL;DR: There Plant Eyes is useful for getting readers to start thinking about ocularcentrism in "Western" culture, but if you plan on taking disability studies seriously, you need to build on Godin's work by reading about how disability intersects with other identities.