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Books > Health, Home & Family > Family & health > Coping with personal problems > Coping with disability
A Deafblind writer and professor explores how the misrepresentation
of disability in books, movies, and TV harms both the disabled
community and everyone else. As a Deafblind woman with partial
vision in one eye and bilateral hearing aids, Elsa Sjunneson lives
at the crossroads of blindness and sight, hearing and deafness-much
to the confusion of the world around her. While she cannot see well
enough to operate without a guide dog or cane, she can see enough
to know when someone is reacting to the visible signs of her
blindness and can hear when they're whispering behind her back. And
she certainly knows how wrong our one-size-fits-all definitions of
disability can be. As a media studies professor, she's also seen
the full range of blind and deaf portrayals on film, and here she
deconstructs their impact, following common tropes through horror,
romance, and everything in between. Part memoir, part cultural
criticism, part history of the Deafblind experience, Being Seen
explores how our cultural concept of disability is more myth than
fact, and the damage it does to us all.
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