Being SeenBeing Seen

With partial vision in one eye and bilateral hearing aids, Sjunneson lives at the crossroads of blindness and sight, hearing and deafness. 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. As a media studies professor, she has also seen the full range of blind and deaf portrayals on film. Here she deconstructs their impact, following common tropes through horror, romance, and everything in between. In doing so, she explores how our cultural concept of disability is more myth than fact and the damage it does to us all.