Disability,trauma,and the place of affect in identity: Examining performativity in visual impairment rehabilitation

Abstract

This paper examines rehabilitation services for visually impaired individuals as, in part, an amplified instantiation of disciplinary social forces maintaining heteronormative, ableist, and neoliberal norms. We problematise traditional rehabilitation's predominantly material focus, which elides experiences that are internal, emotional, relational, and reflective of issues of identity and social belonging, while creating links between gendered and ableist performativity. To do this, we draw on two qualitative data sources: firstly, interview data from a study of rehabilitation service organisations in South Africa, and secondly, a vignette provided by the second author, which describes a graduation ceremony (a performative ritual at a rehabilitation organisation). By means of a critical feminist disability studies lens, we consider the transmission of meanings and performative imperatives in these services, which tend to disallow the expression and processing of socially engendered trauma, thereby limiting the ability of visually impaired individuals to explore secure and authentic self-identities. Through the prism of visual impairment rehabilitation, commonalities between forces of dehumanisation resonant in the lives of both women and people with disabilities are brought to light, with implications for secure identities based on diversity, as well as for the creation of caring societies that embrace the reality of interdependence.

Rehabilitation is closely connected to ideas about restoration, and hence to the regulation of the social order (Ravaud & Stiker, 2001). It has been defined as actions that aim to return an individual to a former status (Michalko, 1998). In rehabilitation services provided to disabled people, this restoration tends to be overtly focused on physical function and capability but is also argued to hold a hidden curriculum of normative social expectations (Gibson, 2016). As one influential approach, the World Health Organization (WHO) defines rehabilitation as “a set of interventions designed to optimise functioning and reduce disability in individuals with health conditions in interaction with their environment” (2017, p. 1). Similarly, the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (UNCRPD; United Nations [UN], 2006) states that rehabilitation services should “enable persons with disabilities to attain and maintain maximum independence, full physical, mental, social and vocational ability, and full inclusion and participation in all aspects of life” (Article 26).

Undoubtedly, interventions that enable individuals to adapt to impairment and to move forward into life with a disability by providing them tools and techniques to restore capability, and thereby contribute to their well-being, are important (Dodds, 1993). However, such ideals are also intertwined with neoliberal imperatives towards autonomy, productivity, and accumulation, often marginalising experiences that are internal, emotional, relational, and reflective of issues of identity and social belonging (Botha & Watermeyer, 2022b; Sullivan, 2005; Watermeyer & McKinney, 2022).

In this article, we examine rehabilitation services for visually impaired people as, in part, an amplified instantiation of disciplinary social forces maintaining heteronormative, ableist, and neoliberal norms. If unchecked, disability can be provocative and destabilising, foregrounding human attributes that are anathema to modernity's dominant ableist ideals. These include the universality of dependency, the flux and frailty of embodiment, the pervasiveness of trauma, and the centrality of affect in human experience. Our data from South African service organisations suggest that, while also providing essential practical and material skills to those who have experienced vision loss, rehabilitation serves to create disabled people who are docile and primed to collude with disablist inequality. Through a splitting off of issues of emotion and identity from disability experience, the empowerment that may emanate from an engagement with these subjective aspects (in race, gender, disability, sexuality) tends to be avoided. This de-legitimation of affect is well known to feminist scholars such as Ahmed (2010); in the case of disability, affect tends to be superseded by an enforced normalcy (Davis, 2002).

This distortion elides the reality of socially engendered and impairment-based trauma experienced by those adjusting to the onset of disability. Such adjustment is for many a period of profound identity flux, largely due to ableist barriers. The loss or alteration of previous roles leaves individuals in need of, and vulnerable to, signals regarding who they are now and where they belong in the social order.

The reluctance to acknowledge and explore trauma as an aspect of impairment and disability experience can be traced to the dominance of a historical materialist tradition in foundational iterations of disability studies (Berger, 2004; Watermeyer & Swartz, 2016). Haunted by the medical model's view of disability as bodily deficit and personal tragedy, materialist disability scholarship and activism have, perhaps understandably, often resisted centring trauma, the body, and experiences that include loss and struggle related to both impairment and socially engendered disadvantage (Lourens, 2020; Watermeyer, 2009, 2012), notwithstanding recent correctives to this problem (Kafer, 2016). However, this inadvertent collusion with neoliberal ideals does not mitigate inequality for disabled people, but rather compounds it, requiring that they silence experiences of loss and struggle. These experiences are not peculiar to disability, but intrinsic to the human condition (Kleege, 1998; Watermeyer, 2009, 2014).

Given this tendency within the wider discipline, we consider what feminist and critical approaches in disability studies can bring to questions about trauma and self-identity through the prism of rehabilitation and adjustment to one's repositioning as “disabled.” A critical feminist lens sheds light on the commonality of forces of dehumanisation resonant in the lives of both women and disabled people, with implications for secure identities based on diversity, as well as for the creation of caring societies that embrace the reality of interdependence (Garland-Thomson, 2002, 2011; Kittay, 2011). In particular, Garland-Thomson (2011) describes how the particularities of embodiment interact with material and discursive aspects of context to create experiences of “misfitting,” which may be responded to with pathologisation, patronisation, or denial by a social world intent on maintaining its order.

In this article, we draw on qualitative data gathered as part of a study of rehabilitation organisations for visually impaired South Africans, tracing how newly disabled people navigate both physical and psycho-emotional aspects of their new world. We present analyses based on two data sources: (a) interviews with service providers and users and (b) an autoethnographic account, written by the second author (MB), to trace how the enforcement of neoliberal and heteronormative ideals in rehabilitation narrows possibilities for engagement with the self, with emotion, and with trauma, limiting the exploration of diverse, empowered, and authentic identities.

The vignette is included in addition to the interview data because it brings life to the performative imperatives that individuals adjusting to blindness may be subject to in rehabilitation and, by extension, in societal life. As in Longmore's (1997) landmark work on disability charity telethons in the United States, we examine the ritual of the graduation ceremony to illuminate how performances demanded of disabled people are inculcated in cultural settings not only grounded in capitalist ideas of autonomy and productivity, but also tinged with the disentitling guilt of charity.

Using a critical feminist disability studies lens (Garland-Thomson, 2002, 2011) and Butler's (1997) notion of performativity, we show how rehabilitation service users are surrounded by a network of stakeholders who value performances that demonstrate restored physical function and capability, reflecting a collective, cultural eschewing of the fact of human vulnerability, while also denying the personal and affective layers of experience that feminist critiques view as pivotal to political conscientisation (Ahmed, 2010; Garland-Thomson, 2002, 2011; Gibson, 2016). Though Butler's (1997) concept of performativity was originally used in relation to gender, we draw on it here to explain how repeated embodied performances of dis/abilities can produce particular subjectivities and reinforce dominant social norms. Our analyses demonstrate how performativity in these settings involves the denial of trauma, which, in turn, precludes experiences of belonging based on authentic acknowledgment from others, as well as oneself (Ahmed, 2010; Cheng, 2000; Watermeyer, 2016). Being drawn into the performative imperatives that are (re)produced in rehabilitation services may inhibit the formation of vital and authentic disability identities as individuals move into life with visual impairment, confounding both personal and political power (Gibson, 2016; Seers & Hogg, 2023).

To provide the necessary context for our investigation, we begin with a discussion of vision loss as an experience that includes traumatic aspects, drawing on autoethnographic literature on blindness.

Visual impairment, displacement, and trauma

Traumatic events can be overwhelming and, at least initially, feel inexplicable, causing physical, emotional, and psychic upheaval, and disrupting previously held assumptions about the world (Borg, 2018; Morrison & Casper, 2012). Trauma can also shatter the self, separating individuals from who they once were and often displacing them from their social roles and places of belonging in communities and families (Morrison & Casper, 2012; Watermeyer & Swartz, 2016). While vision loss certainly involves bodily trauma—occurring, sometimes suddenly, through illness, accident, or even violence—it is the experience of personal and social dislocation that is foregrounded in many accounts of adjustment to this form of impairment. Displacement is a theme cutting across these personal accounts found in the rich, albeit limited, autoethnographic literature on vision loss and blindness. This refers to a sense that blindness, being connected to negative social and cultural discourses, threatens identity, belonging, and relationships (Botha & Watermeyer, 2021; French, 2004; Kuusisto, 1998; Michalko, 2002).

Michalko (2002) describes experiencing vision loss as a threat to the previously secure place he had enjoyed in his “homeland,” referring to a sense of community held together by shared norms and values, and by expected and accepted roles and behaviour. Even as a child, Michalko sensed that the homeland did not welcome blindness and that if the effects, especially emotional, of vision loss were not carefully concealed, exile would result. For Michalko, exile is marginalisation, being unentitled to participation and viewed as a failure, and as a body “gone wrong” (2002, p. 120), ideas resonant with disparaging constructions of femininity. Similarly, Kuusisto (1998) describes how vision loss destabilised his place in the “world of the sighted.” He recalls as a child overhearing the “gloomy voices” of his mother and a social worker arguing about “where [he] should be in the world” (1998, p. 13). Recognising that the “world of the blind” was a marginal space, he recounts burying his spectacles in his backyard and, without their considerable assistance, “attempting bravely to see” (1998, p. 10).

Early in their lives, these two authors encountered clear signals that communicated to them that blindness is not a valued way to be, that it exposes impermissible aspects of human experience, and that it must, therefore, be defended against. The resulting predicament, involving a forced alienation from the emotional consequences of one's embodied and sociocultural experience, is what Judith Butler and others term a state of socially engendered melancholia (Butler, 1997; Cheng, 2000; Watermeyer, 2016), a central analytical concept that we elaborate on later.

Visual impairment is subject to a set of particularly evocative cultural ideas that shape anxious fantasies in society about the experience of blindness, maintaining largely negative beliefs about the nature of blind people (Bolt, 2014; Michalko, 1998). These anxious fantasies about blindness involve the fear of descending into darkness, resulting in a loss of knowledge and self-control born of domination by “primitive” emotions (Kleege, 1998, 2005; Michalko, 1998). These echo anxieties regarding the unruliness hatefully attributed to women's bodies, emotional lives, and sexuality (Garland-Thomson, 2002). Many philosophical and literary depictions of blindness suggest that, having “no awareness” of the world around them, blind people are likely to tend towards unruliness—antisocial behaviour, sexual deviance, and uncontrolled emotions (Bolt, 2014; Kleege, 2005). Likewise, blind characters in literature depict a spectrum of negative qualities, from deviousness and narcissism to haplessness and neediness (Bolt, 2014), presenting a catalogue of emotions and mores that visually impaired individuals should take care to constrict within themselves if they are to escape stereotyping, however barely.

Defending against negative cultural constructions of blindness as a blind person involves performances that conceal and limit its difference. Botha, for example, recounts performing sight and denying vulnerability to escape the marginal space of special education for blind learners in South Africa. She recalls, when attending a so-called mainstream school, “striding confidently around the campus [she] had learned by heart” (Botha & Watermeyer, 2021, p. 8). In a postapartheid context, this performance was essential for Botha to remain seen as a “typical middle-class, White …schoolgirl” (p. 6) and not a blind person to whom associations of poverty, Blackness, disability, and degeneracy could be attached.

Vision loss as a threat to belonging is often connected to other axes of identity. In relation to gender, Michalko (2002, p. 21) recounts being ridiculed by male peers as a teenager when blindness became harder to conceal. He describes the “feminising taunts” used to belittle and exclude him. These had to be countered with an aggressive, hyper-masculine performance. Michalko needed to adopt a heteronormative masculine persona, prescribed and expected in his “homeland,” to retain status as a socially acceptable man able to participate. The denial of both affect and embodiment was essential to this transformation. Similarly, Hammer (2019) explores strategies of “appearance management” employed by blind women in Israel. She found that the blind women in her study were invested in carefully managed, often time-consuming and expensive performances of acceptable, heteronormative femininity related to dress, make-up, and grooming. For these women, maintaining an acceptably feminine appearance was important for ensuring social inclusion and status in the community (Hammer, 2019), partly through publicly eschewing incipient projections of vulnerability or unruliness. These examples highlight the links between compulsory able-bodiedness and compulsory heteronormativity identified by several feminist and queer disability theorists (Chapel, 2015; Garland-Thomson, 2002; Kafer, 2006; McRuer, 2002; Slater et al., 2018).

Defensive performances that conceal vision loss to attain social acceptability are costly, requiring investments in effort, time, and money (Botha & Watermeyer, 2021; Hammer, 2019; Watermeyer, 2009, 2013). These performances are also costly in the sense that they require denial—outwardly and internally at the psychological level—of the practical and psycho-emotional implications of vision loss in social worlds marked by othering and inaccessibility (Botha & Watermeyer, 2021; French, 2004; Michalko, 2002). For instance, French (2004) explores her childhood experience of a clear imperative to deny the embodied and emotional aspects of her blindness primarily to comfort the anxieties of adults. The need to soothe others’ disability-related anxieties—which connect to the deeply embedded, negative cultural ideas described above—is also found in other autoethnographic accounts (Botha & Watermeyer, 2021; Kleege, 1998; Lourens, 2020). Comforting others’ anxieties through normative performances and disguising trauma means that positive and authentic blind identities remain elusive.

Working through trauma requires space within relationships to mourn the self that was, and to recreate self-identity through opportunities to develop new self-narratives (Borg, 2018). But the foregoing shows how these opportunities may not be afforded to blind individuals. Instead, autoethnographic literature on blindness sheds light on assaults on the self, encountered by individuals experiencing vision loss. These involve not only material access barriers and exclusion, but also negative imputations of what blind people are like, and who they can be (Botha & Watermeyer, 2021; Kuusisto, 1998; Michalko, 2002). In the face of these assaults, visually impaired people may find it extremely difficult to create authentic and positive blind identities, being compelled instead to defend against a malignant narrative of blindness as something dangerous that must be stopped (Bolt, 2014). Rehabilitation services are central players in the creation and transmission of meanings to do with visual impairment, which led us to examine the discourses that prevail in organisations that perform this function.

Context of the study

Our study explored dominant discourses in rehabilitation services for adults experiencing the onset of visual impairment in South Africa. Within a qualitative paradigm, we gathered extensive interview data from both rehabilitation practitioners and service users, focussed on how services operate, and on perceptions of providing and receiving rehabilitation interventions. We received ethics approval from the Health Research Ethics Committee at the University of Cape Town. By way of background, in South Africa, blindness rehabilitation is largely housed not in medical spaces (hospitals and clinics), but rather in organisations that operate as charities. These local organisations rely on government and corporate funding to provide services at no cost to individuals who have undergone, or are undergoing, vision loss. As in many parts of the world, an archaic, charitable approach to disability remains embedded in these organisations, which tend not to be cognisant of disability as a social justice concern (Ebrahim et al., 2020). This traditional welfare approach impacts relationships in rehabilitation, which many service users in our study described as unequal, limiting, and patronising (Botha & Watermeyer, 2022b). Further complicating these power dynamics, the vast majority of those receiving rehabilitation interventions at these organisations are people of colour from disadvantaged socioeconomic circumstances, while many White people have financial resources to access private services. This pattern is a legacy of apartheid's institutionalised racism in South African social services more broadly.

The services offered at these organisations include orientation and mobility training (involving learning to navigate with a white cane), computer literacy training with assistive software, braille training, and training in various kinds of craftwork (e.g., basket and carpet weaving). In addition to these more traditional rehabilitation services, organisations often provide other development programmes, including life skills (covering an array of topics including personal hygiene, sex education, goal setting, and personal financial management), public speaking, event co-ordination, and entrepreneurship. These tend to be unaccredited courses, not registered as formal qualifications with the South African Qualifications Authority. Therefore, they are not recognised by educational institutions and employers. While possibly providing useful knowledge, particularly for younger people or those with low skill levels, these programmes are unlikely to impact on an individual's employment prospects.

Interviews with service users and providers

We found that counselling services are not readily available to service users in these organisations. The limited counselling that was available tended to be informal (not provided by registered professionals) and ad hoc (dependent on the availability of volunteers), reflecting a denial, or at least marginalisation, of the psycho-emotional aspects of the onset of impairment. Yet, service users felt that they urgently needed psycho-emotional support, as a participant said: “We need counselling … I’m not coping at all with my condition.” Accounts from newly visually impaired individuals in this study resonate with the autoethnographic literature discussed above. Participants described the ways in which vision loss impacted not only their physical function but through exposing them to negative, ableist beliefs and practices, complicated their sense of self, primarily by often-traumatically complicating their sense of belonging in families, communities, and workplaces (Botha & Watermeyer, 2022b).

“An important aspect of belonging,” Watermeyer and Swartz (2016, p. 274) note, “is an experience of having one's circumstances known and shared by others.” Our findings clearly evidence how unlikely such experiences were for visually impaired individuals, in rehabilitation services and elsewhere, largely owing to pervasive disablist prejudice that excludes and marginalises disabled people, rendering disability not only invisible but also to some extent unspeakable. Of particular interest in our discussion is how the prohibition and concealment of affect is central to this oppression. The concept of melancholia as described by Butler (1997) and others centres on how members of subordinated groups undergo an internal alienation from feelings of suffering and grief related to their social predicaments, with negative implications for empowerment and collective action. At the heart of collective melancholia or, in the words of psychoanalyst Ann Cheng (2000), “melancholic suspension,” is the simple truism that dominant groups in society do not want to know how oppressed people feel. And, as importantly, dominant groups limit the extent to which those from oppressed groups can hold compassionate awareness of their own feelings. Obviously, the danger of the emotional reverberations of lives of subordination coming to light, lies in their potential for fueling collective action based on a recognition of social injustice (Watermeyer, 2016).

The requisite performances of capital productivity and stoicism alienate members of oppressed groups not only from themselves, but also from one another. Accordingly, newly disabled people may forgo opportunities to connect with communities of other disabled people due to the persistent imperative to disidentify from the stigma associated with disability (Watermeyer & Swartz, 2008). This can leave little space to heal the self through creating and nurturing a positive disabled identity, based on compassionate insight into experiences of trauma. In this situation, group-based rehabilitation interventions rooted in principles of Freirian conscientisation (Freire, 1970; Peters, 1999) hold potential as spaces where those adjusting to the onset of disability may find accurate, sensitive validation of their experiences.

Our study suggests that this potential is only partially realised in rehabilitation services in South Africa, and through informal rather than formal aspects of rehabilitation. For many of our participants, developing relationships with others who could relate to their experience was a beneficial aspect of attending rehabilitation programmes. A participant said: “[I]t's nice to know that there are other people out there with problems … otherwise … I would feel very alone, really very alone.” Rehabilitation practitioners also recognised such relationships as beneficial but viewed them as a fortunate by-product of rehabilitation work, rather than a central priority. Instead, the practitioners foregrounded the provision of practical solutions to the functional problems caused by vision loss as the primary goal, aligning with the definitions from the WHO and UNCRPD cited earlier. A common theme in these practitioner accounts connects practical mastery and emotional well-being, suggesting that as service recipients gain skills to adjust to sight loss, they will inevitably begin to feel better in themselves (Botha & Watermeyer, 2022a).

Service users certainly felt that the skills and techniques for adjusting to sight loss that they gained in rehabilitation were valuable, but their accounts do not support the “virtuous circle” of practical skills and emotional well-being constructed by practitioners. For example, a participant who had experienced sudden and complete vision loss said:

[P]eople have got life-changing experiences, total trauma. There's no one that you can really deal with trauma with, that should be first on the list. You’ve just lost your sight . . .  You need to not just learn how to cook and learn how to read braille and learn how to walk with a cane, you need to be given the tools to live a well-rounded, mentally well life.

This respondent suggests that the tendency to prioritise traditional, material skills and techniques associated with blindness rehabilitation disregards trauma, preventing individuals from being able to develop “well-rounded” wellness. While a host of scholars (Botha & Watermeyer, 2022a; Garland-Thomson, 2002; Gibson, 2016; Hughes, 2019; Sullivan, 2005) do not dispute that techniques and assistive devices can enable participation, they take issue with the way that capability is narrowly defined in terms of capitalist and patriarchal norms that value bodily autonomy, self-sufficiency, and independence—a view that can prohibit those who have experienced the onset of visual impairment from exploring alternate ways to be in the world. The performance required of visually impaired people is one devoid of vulnerability, of negative affect, of any evidence of dependency, and of political language—the quintessential docile subject (Foucault, 1977).

Autoethnographic data

The vignette below describes a ritual, an annual graduation ceremony, that takes place at a South African organisation that provides visual impairment rehabilitation services. The vignette is written from the perspective of the second author (MB), a former rehabilitation worker who has also experienced progressive vision loss and received various rehabilitation services. MB observed the ritual several times as an employee of the organisation.

The graduation ceremony

The graduation ceremony is the exit point for those who have completed the organisation's rehabilitation programme, which spans 6 to 18 months depending on the courses that are taken. It is hosted at the organisation's premises, in a large hall with plastic seats set out in rows. In attendance are the organisation’s management board, various important donors (including government officials), the organisation's celebrity patrons (a soap opera star and a radio presenter), and family members there to support their loved ones as they formally exit the rehabilitation programmes that they have attended for anything from 6 to 18 months. The event is designed to mimic closely, if unsuccessfully, an academic graduation ceremony and, accordingly, the programme begins with a procession. The graduating service users enter the hall in an orderly line, each person with their hand on the shoulder of the person in front of them, a staff member flanking the procession to guide everyone seamlessly to their seats. A scratchy recording of the song “Gaudeamus Igitur,” traditionally sung at university graduations, is played, and service users wear black academic gowns donated by a local academic outfitter.

The ceremony takes a similar form every year. It begins with a prayer, followed by the singing of the national anthem, and a musical item performed by either a present or former service user. A special guest—often a person with a disability who has achieved something remarkable—delivers an inspirational speech, with a message related to overcoming adversity through resilience and the pursuing of personal goals and dreams. A graduating service user is also chosen to give a speech at the graduation event. This person is carefully prepared and finessed. Staff members choose this representative and assist them to prepare the speech, which is practiced and honed several times before the event. The address presents a story about having the resilience, despite blindness, to overcome challenges. It focuses on what the person's life was like before coming to rehabilitation services, and how the rehabilitation programme offered at this organisation has changed them for the better. Then, certificates are presented to the service users. Staff members station themselves along the route to the platform to assist the service users, who are passed from hand to hand. As each name is called, the service user is guided up the steps and across the platform, where an important donor waits to shake hands and congratulate them. The local press is also in attendance, and photographs are snapped as the donor hands over the certificates, shakes hands, and pats shoulders.

The ceremony is shot through with emotion. Service users appear to be excited; they cheer one another on warmly and laugh at references to memories from the past year or personalities in the group. The songs and speeches elicit strong emotions from donors and families, many attendees shed tears, and there is warmth and goodwill in response to the service recipients as they accept their certificates. The programme closes with an address from the organisation's manager, who reiterates the message of personal resilience and inner strength, telling the service recipients that they can achieve their goals despite blindness and it is now “up to them” to make their dreams a reality. She goes on to thank the donors and partners, affirming that the organisation's work to empower blind people would not be possible without their generosity. Several are singled out by name for special thanks.

Once the ceremony has ended, the service users are instructed to form an orderly queue at the serving hatch of the kitchen at the back of the room. They each receive a brown paper bag containing a burger, a packet of chips (crisps), and a juice box, donated by a local business. Meanwhile, the donors, government officials, and celebrities are ushered downstairs to another venue where lunch is served. A long table has been laid. Bottles of red and white wine are opened, and the staff brings platters of meat, vegetables, and salads to serve the organisation's senior management and donors. There are also two visually impaired people seated at this table, both organisation staff members, whose role is to speak with the donors and partners about the organisation's work, encouraging them to continue giving.

Performance, docility, and disguising trauma

Participants in the graduation ceremony are likely to be experiencing the personal and social dislocation often experienced by those adjusting to visual impairment, as highlighted by the autoethnographic literature and our qualitative work discussed above. They have likely endured bewildering changes to their sensory experience of the world; frightening and frustrating encounters with medical professionals as diagnoses and treatments are sought; potential loss of employment, income, and professional identity; strain, uncertainty, and abandonment in interpersonal relationships; the violent disruption of roles in families and communities; and the shock of inauguration into life with a stigmatised identity, among much else. As reflected clearly in our qualitative data (Botha & Watermeyer, 2022a, 2022b), these people are likely to be amid ongoing psychological trauma. Facing a host of profoundly negative myths and meanings regarding blindness, they find themselves in a situation in which much of what previously comprised their identity feels damaged or stripped away, creating a vulnerability to new imputations of who they are now, where they belong, and what they can reasonably expect from society. From this precarious position, signals regarding what one needs to do to regain and maintain some form of social acceptance—as offered by the graduation ceremony—are likely to be gratefully internalised.

Delving below the surface of the graduation ritual to examine dynamics of power and representation, what comes into view is a performance that, for participants and observers alike, cements a social order built on the silencing of affect in those marginalised on the basis of negatively valued identities pertaining, inter alia, to gender, race, and disability (Ahmed, 2010; Calder-Dawe et al., 2021). While there is certainly affect present at the ceremony, only a particular register of emotion is allowed. Affect serves a clear purpose in the ceremony: to strengthen the positioning of altruistic givers in relation to grateful charity recipients, to establish the bounds of socially acceptable blindness, and to silence and obscure unpalatable responses to experiences of sight loss, blindness, and rehabilitation (Ahmed, 2010; Longmore, 1997; Watermeyer, 2016).

There are several things to notice about how blindness and its redemption are represented at the graduation ceremony. Firstly, it is notable that, throughout the ceremony, blindness is discursively framed as an unfavourable characteristic that must be defended against. At first glance, this may seem unremarkable, even self-evidently true, because of the hegemony of negative cultural beliefs about both blindness and blind people (Hughes, 2019). The problem here is that the almost irresistible social currents driving visually impaired people to internalise such a view, position members of this group squarely in a melancholic predicament. The issue is this: in these lives, visual impairment is a constant and essential part of embodiment, influencing one's being in the world; it is not an optional add-on that can be assumed or eschewed as one chooses. Like visually impaired people in the broader community, those at the graduation are on the receiving end of profoundly negative, even hateful, projections about blindness, which, in the words of historian Bill Hughes (2019), is culturally constructed as “a fate worse than death” (p. 168). Yet, even as these attributions are made, visually impaired people are paradoxically required to both internally and publicly repudiate this “blind imago” and, along with it, that part of their own self to which affect and embodiment rooted in visual impairment is intrinsic (Garland-Thomson, 2002). As Butler (1997) explains, the consequence of these double-binding imperatives is that people carrying devalued social identities are drawn away from, not toward, an authentic engagement with subjectivity, affect, and embodiment. She writes: “The melancholic thus burrows in a direction opposite to that in which he might find a fresher trace of the lost other, attempting to resolve the loss through psychic substitutions and compounding the loss as he goes” (p. 182).

In some sense, rejection of blindness, along with all that the experience of blindness means emotionally, embodies a rejection of self and the donning of a performance of nondisabled wholeness and productivity befitting neoliberal ideals (Butler, 1997). Dreams, goals, and achievements are positioned in opposition to blindness; they are possible despite blindness and if an individual is resilient enough. Blindness and excellence are constructed as incompatible, and blindness is presented as something to overcome, rather than to embrace. Consider, for example, that until painstakingly reclaimed, explored, and valued, feminine characteristics in a patriarchal society are not only unwanted but in some sense hated, both by others and oneself (Mitchelle, 1974).

Secondly, a “resilience narrative”—which declares that blind persons must transform their challenging circumstances through cultivating inner strength while eschewing the emotional traces of trauma—is woven throughout the graduation ceremony. This narrative constructs disability-related disadvantage as an individual problem, amenable only to individual solutions. Yet, in a further paradox, visually impaired individuals are simultaneously positioned as vulnerable unfortunates, who are dependent on the charity of others for, at best, a conditional place in society. As the donors are honoured, thanked, and validated both verbally and symbolically, the citizenship of the objects of their benevolence is correspondingly watered down (Longmore, 1997). At the ceremony's end, the widening distinction between the dependent and the powerful is materialised, as the groups are separated like children from adults. With instructions about social place and affect regulation affirmed, the graduates are rewarded and silenced with childlike treats, while the grown-ups retire downstairs to contemplate their contribution to restoring the social order. The signal is clear: despite messages about resilience and overcoming blindness, they are in fact not equal citizens at all. This separation appears as a microcosm of the segregation and marginalisation of disabled people in society, a startling enactment of the belief that disabled people are not worthy, and perhaps not even fully human (Garland-Thomson, 2011). In this way, the ceremony itself can be understood as a traumatising event where negative discourses that surround blindness might be deeply felt and internalised (Kafer, 2006).

The third noteworthy aspect is the way the ceremony is stylised to replicate an academic graduation. This is ironic because, as noted above, the qualifications being bestowed have no official standing and are unlikely to lead to employability. Further, economic barriers in a vastly unequal postapartheid South Africa, as well as issues to do with systemic ableism in academia (Brown & Lee, 2020; Dolmage, 2017), mean that accessing “real” higher education opportunities for the graduation participants is, to say the least, very unlikely. In his account of mimesis, Taussig (1993) describes how mimicking the behaviour and mores of others is not a sign of similarity, but in fact evidence of a deeply felt difference; those who are included have no need to perform inclusion. There is evidence of this anxiety about difference, about exclusion from normalcy, in the copied trappings and rituals of the ceremony, which barely manage to paper over likely experiences of ongoing trauma and dislocation.

There is simply no place here for what we know to be true from a host of scholarly contributions about the experience of visual impairment in a social context. One may argue that, since this is a celebration, difficult feelings do not fit here. However, in our view, what has occurred here is not a once-off event, but a symbolic climax and final reification of principles instilled both overtly and structurally throughout the rehabilitation process. Society (including rehabilitation practitioners) values interventions that deny what Michalko (2002) calls “the difference that disability makes,” and performances that comfort anxieties about disability-related struggles. Here, all who are present are drawn into an instinctual validation of the orderly, resilient, and stoic blindness imago which the ritual upholds, as anxieties about carnal difference, as well as a society shot through with injustice, are suspended. It is, of course, natural that family members seek assurance that their loved one has moved through emotional and practical barriers toward a simulacrum of normalcy, while donors similarly hope for stories that prove that their money has led to a restoration of wholeness and dignity. Yet, what is presented here is a docile blind performance that obscures, rather than engages with, pressing human and societal issues to do with ability, identity, social justice, and the universality of human frailty.

Foucault suggests that all social arrangements (including institutional structures, procedures, and practices), while not necessarily “bad,” should always be viewed as “dangerous” (Tremain, 2005, p. 9). Power circulates subtly within organisations, producing knowledge that attaches to bodies, and acts on those bodies to make them manageable and productive (Garland-Thomson, 2002; Tremain, 2005). Feminist scholars connect docility and performance. They recognise that gender is enacted, that patriarchal power dictates the script to which gendered bodies must adhere, and that there are serious social, political, economic, and bodily costs attached to deviating from acceptable gendered performances (Garland-Thomson, 2002; Hammer, 2019; Slater et al., 2018; Wilchins, 2006).

Conclusion

Increasingly, a drive towards producing docility in rehabilitation practice has been recognised and critiqued (Botha & Watermeyer, 2022b; Garland-Thomson, 2002; Gibson, 2016; Hughes, 2019; Michalko, 1998; Sullivan, 2005). These critical perspectives consider the impact of being exposed to a normalising drive-in rehabilitation on the self-identities of disabled people, and the ways in which a focus on correction strengthens, rather than disrupts, prevailing negative societal beliefs about life with disability. However, there is a need for more explicit theorising on how this “corrective tendency” impacts on the ability of disabled people to work through trauma. Healing from trauma requires not only space to narrate traumatic events, but others who are willing to bear witness to the narration, enabling broken bonds of trust in the traumatised subject to be reestablished (Borg, 2018). While the graduation ceremony involves witnesses, it is not a communicative act where trauma is expressed, held, and processed. Rather, it is a performative act where the observers are protected from unpalatable realities as trauma is disguised.

In her memoir, Sight Unseen, noted critical visual impairment studies scholar Kleege (1999) begins by stating: “Writing this book made me blind” (p. 1). She refers not to the physical process of vision loss, but to an experience of self-creation, the shaping of a positive blind identity through writing, and thereby narrating, her life with visual impairment. Rehabilitation services capable of a truly grounded empowerment must reflect the courage, flexibility, and humanity to allow for such narrations of trauma, since it is only when differences in both experience and embodiment are named that human commonality, and hence mutual compassion, can be realised. Without this authentic engagement, those adjusting to the onset of visual impairment are left stranded between a performance of ability and the silent but ever-present spectre of blindness as something malignant, something unspeakable (Bolt, 2014; Michalko, 1998). In the mix of embodiment, disparaging projections, and subjectivity, both women and disabled people must somehow integrate experiences of socially engendered trauma, a process which simultaneously requires care and contributes to the creation of societies with care at their centre (Kittay, 2011).