The White Cane – A tool that both helps and hinders
Bodies, shame, normality and the agency of objects
Maria Bäckman
The article discusses the attempts of visually impaired individuals tosometimes pass as seeing. The background is the resistance that many blind or visually impaired people testify they feel, during their ongoingrehabilitation, about a white cane. Often, on these occasions they provid descriptions of dramatic narratives in which the user explains what it was like when they first realized that it was now really time to start using a cane (for example: When I fell in the water from the quay, or stepped out in front of a bus, etc.). However, many also relate the way a cane, even in more mundane contexts, makes the individual’s visual inability obvious to others and thereby makes the person particularly vulnerable. The tool that connects the visually impaired with the outside world is thus also a material expression which makes both the visual damage and the cane usersmore noticeable as less than a fully functional individual.By holding on to the materiality of the cane and its nature of being a physical object, our understanding can be increased of the ambivalent relationship that many visually impaired people develop with a white cane. On the basis of social materiality studies and the concept of ableism, taken from critical handicap research, the article shows how the use of a white cane takes place in a public space; a space where the user variously inhabits an “imaginary” full-sighted body and another, existing body, which on the contrary is characterized by its weakened vision. However, it is important to realize that the persistent rejection mechanism that many visually impaired people have for a cane is intimately linked to ableism and existing norms of bodily functions. A desire to repel an object that reduces one to something else, and consequently to a somewhat lower standing, is a perfectly reasonable reaction to a deeply rooted social conflict. For many people with visual impairment, the resistance to a white cane must therefore be understood as a refusal to embody a functional normative failure.
Vita käppen – redskapet som hjälper och stjälper
