Sight Unseen

Creative writer and university lecturer Georgina Kleege was diagnosed with early onset macular degeneration (Stargardt disease) when she was eleven years old. Part memoir, part cultural criticism, she discusses how she coped with going blind in a family and culture that encouraged her to conceal her condition. She also sets out to educate the fully sighted about the permutations of sight, making it clear that to be blind does not necessarily mean without any kind of sight. She dismantles negative stereotypes about the blind as embodied in film, literature, and the sometimes-insensitive words and actions of the fully sighted.