About this Book

"Going Tactile is an ethnographic exploration of life in DeafBlind communities in the U.S. during a time when political efforts were shifting away from gaining access to visual worlds and toward the discovery of new, tactile worlds. In the years leading up to this moment, the goal was to obtain resources that could be used to pay for sighted interpreters. Unlike interpreters who translate from one language to another, these interpreters were trained to give DeafBlind people access to the immediate environment by describing it. In the early 2010s, DeafBlind leaders intervened, arguing that descriptions of the world are no substitute for the world itself. They advanced the radical claim that hearing and vision are not necessary for things like joining or leaving a conversation, observing others, or being with them in silence. They called their effort "the protactile movement". As this movement took root in practices and institutions, DeafBlind people who had once faced existential collapse due to excessive social constraints on touch, found themselves in an vivid, intelligible world, replete with possible paths forward. Drawing on 30 months of anthropological fieldwork with DeafBlind artists, intellectuals, political leaders, and community members involved in the protactile movement, this book asks: When the world is collapsing around you, and existence is at stake, how can language be of use, where are its limits, and how can we understand the forms of meaning that lie beyond it?"--