The suffering body in the cultural representations of disability: the anguish of corporal transgression

Abstract

Grounded on a long ethnographic account of the experiences of blind people in Portugal within the Portuguese National Association of the Blind (ACAPO), my research has been devoted to exploring how blindness is culturally represented and experienced. On the one hand, the effort is to understand the processes through which the hegemonic cultural values towards blindness and disability are produced and reproduced.On the other hand, the effort is to explore how those dominant values relate with the experiences of blind people, those who know blindness and its implications in the flesh.