The Debate Within: Authority and the Discourse of Blindness

Abstract

This article reviews three articles that add to the debate on the terminology that is used to represent people who are blind. It argues that authority is not limited to just one person or one organization, but is shared through an intertextuality, or utterance, of other authorities, and that conflict within blind discourse communities does not dissolve the notion of community—as exemplified by the attempts by several organizations for people who are blind to express individual and competing desires for “appropriate” terminology.