Between Verbalism and Atypicality: A Description of People by Twenty Blind Speakers
Type de matériel :
39
In Le sentir et le dire, Danièle Dubois (2009) and her collaborators attest to the necessity of deconstructing the implicit visual norm governing contemporary praxis and discourse. The present article analyzes the physical qualifiers used by twenty blind informants to describe a man and a woman that they knew. The distribution of these properties and belief of the speaker in the reality of these properties show how they negotiate with the perceptual visual-centric norm: physical description sometimes appears to go unmentioned—sometimes limited to the visual properties gathered to be the most pertinent according to the interdiscourse (eye and hair color in particular), sometimes complemented or, less often, replaced by properties that were above all else salient for the speaker, like the voice or the skin. The norm is rarely explicitly contested and is reflected in particular in the interviewees’ attempt to express themselves: autocorrections, modalization, phonetic or lexical hesitations, or the slowing of the delivery of tactile or auditory qualifiers.
Réseaux sociaux