Going Tactile: Life at the Limits of Language

In the 2010s, leaders of the DeafBlind community in Seattle called into question the community's dependence on sighted interpreters and sought new ways of communicating, interacting, and navigating through touch. This effort became the "protactile movement," and it spread quickly across the country. In Going Tactile, Anthropologist Terra Edwards draws on thirty months of ethnographic fieldwork with DeafBlind artists, intellectuals, political leaders, and community members, to show how autonomous spaces away from sighted norms were created and life was re-imagined. In doing so, she offers a new perspective on the nature of language, its limits, and what it means to find a new way of being in the world.