En route: Helen Keller’s travels

Abstract

ABSTRACT From a triple perspective including travel writing studies, disability studies and gender studies, this article addresses a corpus of works and letters by deafblind activist and political writer Helen Keller (1880–1968). An experimental, collective sensorium emerges from Keller’s strange prose, its passion for speed and machinic rhythms contrasting with its more lyrical moments. As a socialist, a member of the Industrial Workers of the World, a Wobbly, and as the first deafblind woman to graduate from Radcliffe college, she was not only an exceptional individual; she had to critically adjust to the values of American “exceptionalism”, and claimed her interest for “matters-that-are-not-me”. Her countless voyages, business trips and journeys in the company of other women – her helpers – were the occasion for novel orientations in space as well as in gender. Looking “back” at her writings involves blindly groping into the future of queer studies.