Book Review: Sight unseen: Gender and race through blind eyes by Ellyn Kaschak

Abstract

Over two decades ago, in Engendered Lives: A New Psychology of Women’s Experience, Kaschak (1993) described the impact of gendering starting at birth, with the masculine defining the feminine and all aspects of women’s lives. She called this ubiquitous force “the male cultural gaze” and argued that gender constructs what we know: it defines how women see themselves, see others, and are seen by others. In her latest book, Sight unseen: Gender and race through blind eyes, Kaschak begins with questions that emerged from Engendered Lives: “What if the defining sense of vision were absent? Are such crucial human characteristics as gender and ethnicity, race, and sexual orientation discoveries or inventions of a species dependent on sight?” (p. 3). How would we categorize each other if vision were absent? Kaschak maintains that only by studying instances where sight is absent from birth can we explore how vision itself impacts our understanding of ourselves and our gendered worldviews. The ensuing investigation is ground-breaking. It provides a respectful and sensitive window into the lives of people who are blind. It makes clear that vision itself is a language that shapes our understanding of the world. By exploring how individuals without sight describe their experiences and subsequent cultural insights, we grasp the extent to which race and gender stereotypes, assumptions, and prejudices are embedded in the “knowing” of individuals with sight. Since this learning occurs preverbally, it is out of our awareness. We act upon these biases while remaining convinced that we hold no gender or racial biases. In Sight Unseen, the elucidation of the lives of individuals without sight brilliantly highlights the blindness of the sighted. Kaschak’s use of a narrative ethnographic method to study individuals whose “ideas, perceptions, and biases have not entered their brains through their eyes, but through a different route” (p. 18) is highly innovative and creative. This feminist, qualitative approach allowed Kaschak and her student researchers to deeply and personally engage with the participants in naturalistic settings chosen by the participants, a group comprised of cis-males and cis-females, who identified as white, Latinx, African American, heterosexual, lesbian, and bisexual and represented different economic and employment levels. All interviews/interactions were transcribed, and through an iterative process the research team sought to learn how each individual made sense of their own world. Feminism & Psychology 2022, Vol. 32(1) 119–134 © The Author(s) 2021