Life of a Blind Woman: An Intersectional Study of Disability, Gender and Race in Elizabeth Kata’s Novel A Patch of Blue

Life of a Blind Woman: An Intersectional Study of Disability, Gender and Race in Elizabeth Kata’s Novel A Patch of Blue
Sourav Patra

Abstract

It is worth noting that persons with disabilities experience various notions of disability in their everyday lives in many ways. In the case of women with disabilities, the experience becomes an increased risk for emotional, physical and sexual abuse. This problem is argued through the Social Model of Disability Studies. Though written on the backdrop of the growing civil rights movement and campaign going on from 1954 to 1968 in the United States, Australian Writer Elizabeth Kata, in her 1965 novel A Patch of Blue, has portrayed daily-based experiences of a visually impaired girl named Sleena D’Arcey who was accidentally blinded by her prostitute mother at the age of five. She knows only one colour, i.e. Blue, from her early childhood when she could see. So, the paper will focus on the intersection of disability with other aspects of subjectivity, like gender and race, based on the everyday experiences of Sleena as a visually impaired girl. And how the colour-blindness of Sleena is used as a strategy to overcome the racism will be another focus of the paper.