Blindness Through the Looking Glass [book review]

Abstract

This review analyzes Gili Hammer’s Blindness Through the Looking Glass: The Performance of Blindness, Gender, and the Sensory Body. This book offers insight into the lives of blind women in Israel and challenges assumptions about beauty, femininity, and gender through interviews and years of Hammer's fieldwork as an anthropologist. She shows how blindness is not defined by what is missing, but by how women use their experiences to shape their own understandings of gender and society. The book explores gender identity, visual culture, and the sensory body, highlighting how blind women navigate a world so centered on visual beauty while also redefining what it means to embody femininity.