Confronting Everyday Life with Low Vision: The Story of My Own

The complex world of disability assumes significance in the academic circle after the emergence of critical discourse under the rubric of disability studies. Disability is not simply a physical affair, rather it is an ideology that systematically marginalizes persons with disability. They are perceived as helpless victims of their bodies. At times, the contemporary paradigm of disability is more preoccupied with certain categories of impairment that are visible. For instance, when we talk about visual impairment, it is blindness that attracts more attention than low vision. In a sense, low vision itself is an invisible category within the visually impaired group. In common parlance, it is very difficult to draw a line of demarcation between the ability and inability of a low-vision person. I, myself am a victim of such impairment as I have been suffering from congenital glaucoma and have undergone several medical interventions since my childhood. Being a person with a low vision my own experience with a disability allows me to realize my internal oppression and the social imagination of disability. My intimate and emotional relations with able-bodied persons sometimes make me rethink the categories of vision, power, knowledge and romance and their connections with disability. I believe that life experiences and personal narratives are essential to understand the conscious and unconscious selfhood of disability; as well as situations and conditions of life. We all are surrounded by such narratives and stories, but they are less represented in academic and emancipatory discourses. In the present paper, I attempt to share some of my personal experiences, the way I encounter disability, the lessons that I have learnt from my visually impaired body and the cultural milieu in which I have grown up.