In Indian Cinema, the figure of the deformed and deviant blind woman or man has been degraded to a position of objectification and reductionism from the scopophilic perspective of the sighted audience. Proliferating stereotypes such as the blind beggar, minstrel, visually impaired sister, or mother show how archetypes in real life become cinematically concretized as “visual” tropes on screen. A visually normative representation fixes blind characters in an unaccommodating continuum of visual constriction; denied agency and modes of self-representationality or self-referentiality, blind characters inhabit a plane of dependency, invisibilization, dehumanization and lack. The stereotypical blind woman in Indian Cinema is ascribed a spoiled, stigmatized, and stunted identity; displaced from biological, psychosocial, and cultural matrix of identitarian progression, she is denied selfhood and personhood. Blindness cancels out her prospects of marriageability and procreation so that she is eternally infantilized and asexualized. The blind woman interiorizes her systematically dehumanized and de-eroticized identity and comes to disacknowledge her own sexuality. Structural devices such as abduction, sexual violation, blackmailing, and vengeance ensure that the blind woman inhabits an aesthetic or visual plane whereby her sexuality is inaccessible to herself but indispensable for the re-masculinization of the male savior and narrative resolution of the film. Underrepresented or misrepresented, blind women are reduced to objects of masculine scopophilia as the gaze/stare masculinizes the sighted while objectifying and asexualizing the sightless. Unable to gaze which is a necessary precursor to erotic stimulation, the blind woman inhabits a sterilized and sanitized world of enforced chastity. Indian Cinema further carries forward the association between castration and blindness, as loss of bodily control associates blind men with feminine lack or (psychosexual) emasculation. Inhabiting a state of feminine dependency, blind men are either perceived as de-sexualized/unsexed or hyper-sexualized and posing a threat to sighted women. The lonely, self-pitying, and despondent blind man is seen as a malevolent figure of unsuspecting intrusion and insidiousness whose tactile overtures denote not simply phenomenological exploration of space but also physical violation through groping. This entry explores the “spectacle” of blindness in Indian Cinema through asymmetrical relations of gaze, contamination, and medicalization of blindness.

Indian Cinema

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发表日期：

2026年

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Arunabha Bose

摘要

In Indian Cinema, the figure of the deformed and deviant blind woman or man has been degraded to a position of objectification and reductionism from the scopophilic perspective of the sighted audience. Proliferating stereotypes such as the blind beggar, minstrel, visually impaired sister, or mother show how archetypes in real life become cinematically concretized as “visual” tropes on screen. A visually normative representation fixes blind characters in an unaccommodating continuum of visual constriction; denied agency and modes of self-representationality or self-referentiality, blind characters inhabit a plane of dependency, invisibilization, dehumanization and lack. The stereotypical blind woman in Indian Cinema is ascribed a spoiled, stigmatized, and stunted identity; displaced from biological, psychosocial, and cultural matrix of identitarian progression, she is denied selfhood and personhood. Blindness cancels out her prospects of marriageability and procreation so that she is eternally infantilized and asexualized. The blind woman interiorizes her systematically dehumanized and de-eroticized identity and comes to disacknowledge her own sexuality. Structural devices such as abduction, sexual violation, blackmailing, and vengeance ensure that the blind woman inhabits an aesthetic or visual plane whereby her sexuality is inaccessible to herself but indispensable for the re-masculinization of the male savior and narrative resolution of the film. Underrepresented or misrepresented, blind women are reduced to objects of masculine scopophilia as the gaze/stare masculinizes the sighted while objectifying and asexualizing the sightless. Unable to gaze which is a necessary precursor to erotic stimulation, the blind woman inhabits a sterilized and sanitized world of enforced chastity. Indian Cinema further carries forward the association between castration and blindness, as loss of bodily control associates blind men with feminine lack or (psychosexual) emasculation. Inhabiting a state of feminine dependency, blind men are either perceived as de-sexualized/unsexed or hyper-sexualized and posing a threat to sighted women. The lonely, self-pitying, and despondent blind man is seen as a malevolent figure of unsuspecting intrusion and insidiousness whose tactile overtures denote not simply phenomenological exploration of space but also physical violation through groping. This entry explores the “spectacle” of blindness in Indian Cinema through asymmetrical relations of gaze, contamination, and medicalization of blindness.