Attraction and Beauty in Women who are Visually Impaired: Concept Application Blog

Throughout school and through my mom's work in a group home, I've had a lot of different experiences interacting with people with varying disabilities. For this project, I spent my first blog examining my own gender identity. I then selected to look at beauty and attraction in women who are visually impaired, a gender identity different from my own, in order to both understand my and that gender identity better. Since in the media and many people's minds beauty is such a physical thing, I wanted to know how perceptions of beauty and attraction differ in people who are visually impaired. In the past month I have interviewed women who are visually impaired, as well as tried to place myself in the shoes of members of this community and find additional background information. I wanted to answer the questions: "How would you describe your gender identity?," "How do you define attraction?," "What makes you attracted to someone?." "How do you define beauty?," "What does it mean for there to be beauty in another person?," and "How do you define beauty within yourself?"

The concept of gender as performance fits will with the information I am trying to find. As stated by DeFrancisco and Palczewski (2007), ". . . Individuals participate in the construction of their personal and group identities through daily enactments, or citations, of gender/sex" (p. 53). 'Butler (2004) explains that even though "gender is a kind of doing, an incessant activity performed, in part, without one's knowing and without one's willing," that does not mean it is "automatic or mechanical" (p. 1). Gender is a command performance in which actors maintain minimal control over the content of the scene' (DeFrancisco & Palczewski, 2007, p. 84). Societal expectations play a large role in the development of our gender performance, as well as individual factors.

The information I have found supports Butler's ideas of gender as performance. I had the opportunity to interview Kelly, a sophomore at UNL, and Nicole, a PhD. graduate student at UNL who was a student teacher in my British Literature class my sophomore year of high school. Kelly described attraction as someone who makes you feel good about yourself. She described what makes her attracted to someone as their personality, the pitch of their voice, how they smell, and also that she likes people who are taller. 

 
Nicole, who has a broader range of vision and said she can see facial details of the people sitting next to her, described attraction in terms of someone with good moral character, a good personality, and their voice as being important. She stressed voice as an important characteristic to her, and said that she is often more forgiving of someone's appearance if she hears and likes their voice first before she sees their face. However, she also can look at a person and know whether she thinks they are physically attractive. She and I talked about how the idea of attractiveness is so engrained in our culture, that there are many parallels between sighted and blind people. She said she sees some men who are stereotypically attractive as unattractive because of the associations with the stereotypical personalities and the fact that she feels these people to be unobtainable.

When I spoke to Kelly about the concept of beauty, she defined beauty within herself from her confidence, but also said that she doesn't have much to compare the standard of beauty to when looking at other people.

Nicole described beauty in people by how they sound, what they say, and how they say it. She talked about several people from when she went to guide dog training, and how they internalized beauty. One woman, who was totally blind, still put on makeup every day and would ask other people to make sure she hadn't gotten mascara, etc. on her face. Another woman didn't wear any makeup, but still cared about how her clothes looked, and would ask others to make sure that they matched and she'd put them on correctly. There were also two people, both blind, who came into a relationship during the training. They commented on each others' voices, and associated certain personalities with certain voices. Through their daily interactions and expectations of society, Kelly and Nicole have both developed their sense of gender performance.  

Going forward to the third blog, I want to continue to learn more about this gender identity. Kelly has offered to email  a group of people who are blind across Nebraska, to see if they can offer additional responses to some of the questions I've posed. I also plan to get in contact with the people from the Nebraska Commission for the Blind and Visually Impaired who have offered their help. It has been suggested to me by Nicole that I may not want to look only at females' perspectives, but the perspectives of males and couples who are both blind as well. She also suggested a book called Crashing Through, which she said is a memoir about a man who lost his vision when he was young, and the process of meeting his wife, and how he reacted to seeing her for the first time when he regained his vision. I look forward to continuing to build my knowledge and seeing what other information I can come across!  
 

DeFrancisco, V. P., & Palczewski, C. H. (2007). Communicating gender diversity: A critical 

      approach. Los Angeles, CA: SAGE Publications.