Going Tactile

In the 1990s, leaders of the DeafBlind community in Seattle (people who started out as Deaf children, acquired American Sign Language, and eventually became blind) called into question the community's dependence on sighted interpreters, and sought new ways of communicating, interacting, and navigating through touch. This effort became the "protactile movement," and it spread quickly across the country. In Going Tactile, Terra Edwards explores life in DeafBlind communities in the U.S. through an ethnographic lens. Drawing on thirty months of anthropological fieldwork with DeafBlind artists, intellectuals, political leaders, and community members, the author shows how the protactile movement created autonomous spaces away from sighted norms. These spaces of communication call into question the nature of language and the relationship between being in, and representing, the world. Highlighting the possibility of life after collapse, Going Tactile assesses the limits of language and representation and, ultimately, what it means to find a new way of being in the world.