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  • When Love Is Blind:Critical Ontology and Queer Desire
  • Jeffrey Escoffier (bio)

… the eye objectifies and it masters. … In our culture the predominance of the look over smell, touch and hearing has brought an impoverishment of bodily relations.

—Luce Irigaray1

I didn't have to see a dick to know I didn't ever want to touch one. You mean to tell me those people didn't know what kind of genitalia they liked 'til they saw someone naked? Weird.

—Waitingon Voat2

You ever just smell a food from afar and think to yourself, "that must be delicious?" It's like that. Except it's dicks.

—MyLeftShoe3

Loss of sight—complete or partial—will probably affect almost everyone reading this article whether it's from the process of aging, injury or infection. Vision loss is among the top ten disabilities in the United States: almost three and half million Americans over the age of forty are either legally blind or severely visually impaired. Probably a little less than 1 million Americans are blind from birth.

The human senses—hearing, touching, smelling, tasting and seeing—are the means through which we "know" the world, identify our place as "subjects" in it and situate our bodies in it. Though they are, of course, the result of our biological evolution and our place in nature, it is the historical and cultural organization of sense perception that shapes our experience of time, space and bodily self—both as a knowing subject and as a speaking subject. Each sense offers us a qualitatively different connection between ourselves and our environment. And none [End Page 119]


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"Self-Portrait, After Going Blind" by Jorge Luis Borges. Copyright © Jorge Luis Borges, used by permission of The Wylie Agency LLC.

[End Page 120]

of them is completely autonomous. They all work in conjunction with the other senses.4 Yet in our culture only "seeing is believing." The "epistemological faith" in sight dominates our other senses and serves as the guarantor of what is real.

Blindness and the loss or severe impairment of vision also has a significant impact on human sexuality. For those born blind or who lose their sight, sexual excitement will usually engage other senses. But under the prevailing hierarchy of the senses, loss of vision hits queer people especially hard because in contemporary LGBT cultures sexual desire is so profoundly dependent on visual representation.5 So many of the stylistic features of LGBT identities are presented almost exclusively through visual signs—iconographic identifiers such as dress, hairstyles, tattoos, make-up, comportment, and visual looks. In addition to these styles of presentation, many practices and devices such as the activity of cruising, and communication media like Grindr and Zoosk, internet pornography, and Facebook, all have primarily visual dimensions to them. And so many of us in the contemporary world experience the first stirrings of desire through visual images. In such a world the blind are sidetracked and live inside a closet within the queer world.

In his pioneering study of sexual excitement, psychoanalyst Robert Stoller argued that sexual desire was triggered by psychological codes embedded in our unconscious from childhood:

a genteel clean woman in a quiet marriage of low erotic intensity is stabbed with excitement at the look and smell of physically disreputable man of clearly lower class; a twelve-year-old boy puts on his sister's clothes, never before having cross-dressed, and has an instantaneous spontaneous orgasm, his first; a forty-year-old woman, well-experienced in sexual activity, is with a new man, who without warning gives her a slap on the buttocks, causing her to experience, simultaneously rage, humiliation, and fierce genital excitement; a man looks at a woman with a certain hairstyle and becomes nauseated; a philosopher (male or female) looks at an erect penis and starts to write a political tract; a woman looks across a room at an unknown man and decides she will marry him. The number of examples is endless.6

Smell and touch play a role in several examples, but sight dominates.

The loss of sight as a queer adult triggers a profound reconfiguration of...

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