Sex Education; or, How the Blind Became Heterosexual

This essay began as a general inquiry into the interaction between sexuality and blindness. I expected to draw on a wealth of materials, written from a number of perspectives: scientific, autobiographical, and theoretical.

The first thing that confronted me was the paucity of materials. Barely a word was written about the sexuality of the blind for much of the twentieth century. Perhaps, on the one hand, this fact was related to the social and political marginality of blind people at the time, coupled with the general reluctance to discuss sexual matters, which left the story of blind sexuality unwritten. Perhaps, on the other hand, it was thought that blind people's sexuality, already dealt with in the supposedly general writings on human sexuality, demanded no special treatment.

Whatever the reasons for this relative silence, it was abruptly punctured in the 1970s. In 1975 the American Foundation for the Blind published its eighty-eight-page Resource Guide and anthologized a "selection" of relevant papers in book form; influential American blindness journals published at least eighteen articles between 1971 and 1986; two journals devoted special issues to the subject. The authors of these articles were invariably sighted professionals who drew on their experiences in working with blind people in institutional contexts. It is curious that so little was written before and so little has been written since that flurry of activity.

The material is remarkably homogeneous not only in terms of its historical and geographic origins but also in terms of its content. It is characterized by a relentless focus on the problem of whether (and how) to educate the blind about sex. It eschews the task of giving a broader account of blindness and sexuality, as might be gained from ethnographic or autobiographical accounts.

Such limitations are probably to be expected. The written word is a technology developed by and for the sighted, through which the blind are spoken about but rarely to. Nowhere in the literature do educationalists pause to wonder if perhaps a blind person might know more about his or her own sexuality than they do. I acknowledge that my own position as the sighted author of this written essay is problematic. The absence of any blind account of blind sexuality in the published record has no doubt diminished my research. I hope that in the future blind people will wrest control of the story of their own sexuality from the hands of the sighted, for the available material, painfully limited though it is, constitutes the totality of our cultural inheritance of official information on the subject. Presumably, it will be referred to as such by the relevant social actors and will play an important role in informing contemporary sex education.

The present essay has a number of purposes. It starts as a critique of the literature on the sex education of the blind. It seeks to expose the complicity of this literature with the regime of compulsory heterosexuality and the normalization of difference. I argue that the sex education literature makes visible the crises endemic to the institution of compulsory heterosexuality, both in the sense that those crises are discernible in the literature and in the sense that the literature suggests how centrally connected those crises are to a regime of the visible or sighted. Blindness threatens to disrupt the heterosexual matrix described by Judith Butler and Monique Wittig, and it seems that educationalists have a stake in this discursive regime. They defend it by suppressing, through educational programs, any sexual heterogeneity or "abnormality." My analysis concludes that blind people are in a sense queer, in that heterosexuality, at least in its institutionalized forms, presumes a sighted subject.

It is necessary, before I proceed, to clarify such terms as blind people, blindness, and the blind. I use the blind in this essay to mean the congenitally blind and those blinded in early childhood. Excluded from...