Being Seen
One Deafblind Woman's Fight to End Ableism
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Narrated by:
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Elsa Sjunneson
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By:
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Elsa Sjunneson
About this listen
A deafblind writer and professor explores how the misrepresentation of disability in books, movies, and TV harms both the disabled community and everyone else.
As a deafblind woman with partial vision in one eye and bilateral hearing aids, Elsa Sjunneson lives at the crossroads of blindness and sight, hearing and deafness—much to the confusion of the world around her. While she cannot see well enough to operate without a guide dog or cane, she can see enough to know when someone is reacting to the visible signs of her blindness and can hear when they’re whispering behind her back. And she certainly knows how wrong our one-size-fits-all definitions of disability can be.
As a media studies professor, she’s also seen the full range of blind and deaf portrayals on film, and here she deconstructs their impact, following common tropes through horror, romance, and everything in between. Part memoir, part cultural criticism, part history of the deafblind experience, Being Seen explores how our cultural concept of disability is more myth than fact, and the damage it does to us all.
©2021 Elsa Sjunneson. All rights reserved. (P)2021 Simon & Schuster, Inc. All rights reserved.Listeners also enjoyed...
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What does it mean to be an adult? In the 20th century, psychologists came up with five markers of adulthood: finish your education, get a job, leave home, marry, and have children. Since then, every generation has been held to those same markers. Yet so much has changed about the world and living in it since that sequence was formulated. All of those markers are choices, and they’re all valid, but any one person’s choices along those lines do not make them more or less an adult.
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Not the book that was advertised
- By M. Rogers on 04-13-21
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Why Are Faggots So Afraid of Faggots?
- Flaming Challenges to Masculinity, Objectification, and the Desire to Conform
- By: Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore
- Narrated by: Mark Bachman
- Length: 8 hrs and 30 mins
- Unabridged
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Gay culture has become a nightmare of consumerism, whether it's an endless quest for Absolut vodka, Diesel jeans, rainbow Hummers, pec implants, or Pottery Barn. Whatever happened to sexual flamboyance and gender liberation, an end to marriage, the military, and the nuclear family? As backrooms are shut down to make way for wedding vows, and gay sexual culture morphs into “straight-acting dudes hangin’ out”, what are the possibilities for a defiant faggotry that challenges the assimilationist norms of a corporate-cozy lifestyle?
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Forget the Status Quo South Beach B.S.
- By Susie on 03-14-13
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America 3:16
- By: Graham Allen
- Narrated by: Graham Allen
- Length: 5 hrs and 54 mins
- Unabridged
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What’s the biggest threat to America today? Why are gun rights human rights? And why do so many Christians behave in such un-Christian ways? Graham Allen has the answers. With over two billion views online, the social media star has given a voice to those who feel silenced by the mainstream media and pop culture. Now, with America 3:16, Graham shares a deeper look at the life events that shaped his philosophy on Christianity, politics, family, and country.
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Well written and read
- By Sterling Silver Magnolia on 01-02-21
By: Graham Allen
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Disfigured
- On Fairy Tales, Disability, and Making Space
- By: Amanda Leduc
- Narrated by: Amanda Barker
- Length: 8 hrs and 17 mins
- Unabridged
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Fairy tales shape how we see the world, so what happens when you identify more with the Beast than Beauty? Amanda Leduc looks at fairy tales from the Brothers Grimm to Disney, showing us how they influence our expectations and behaviour and linking the quest for disability rights to new kinds of stories that celebrate difference.
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Mixed bag
- By Kim Padan on 01-18-22
By: Amanda Leduc
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The Unspeakable
- And Other Subjects of Discussion
- By: Meghan Daum
- Narrated by: Meghan Daum
- Length: 6 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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It's a report tempered by hard times. In "Matricide", Daum unflinchingly describes a parent's death and the uncomfortable emotions it provokes; and in "Diary of a Coma" she relates her own journey to the twilight of the mind. But Daum also operates in a comic register. With perfect precision, she reveals the absurdities of the marriage-industrial complex, of the New Age dating market, and of the peculiar habits of the young and digital.
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Complaining about her dead mom.
- By Erik Hermansen on 11-23-14
By: Meghan Daum
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My Two Moms
- Lessons of Love, Strength, and What Makes a Family
- By: Zach Wahls, Bruce Littlefield
- Narrated by: Kris Koscheski
- Length: 6 hrs and 53 mins
- Unabridged
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On January 31, 2011, Zach Wahls addressed the Iowa House Judiciary Committee in a public forum regarding civil unions. The 19-year-old son of a same-sex couple, Wahls proudly proclaimed, "The sexual orientation of my parents has had zero effect on the content of my character." Hours later, his speech was posted on YouTube, where it went viral, quickly receiving more than two million views. By the end of the week, everyone knew his name and wanted to hear more from the boy with two moms.
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You will not regret listening to this.
- By V. Brown on 06-07-12
By: Zach Wahls, and others
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Girl Gurl Grrrl
- On Womanhood and Belonging in the Age of Black Girl Magic
- By: Kenya Hunt
- Narrated by: Kenya Hunt, Ebele Okobi, Jessica Horn, and others
- Length: 5 hrs and 39 mins
- Unabridged
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Black women have never been more visible or more publicly celebrated. But for every milestone, every magazine cover, every new face elected to public office, the reality of everyday life for black women remains a complex, conflicted, contradiction-laden experience. An American journalist who has been living in London for a decade, Kenya Hunt has made a career of distilling moments, movements, and cultural moods into words. Her work takes the difficult and the indefinable and makes it accessible; it is razor sharp cultural observation threaded through evocative and relatable stories.
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Inspired
- By Amazon Customer on 01-29-21
By: Kenya Hunt
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Bad Fat Black Girl
- Notes from a Trap Feminist
- By: Sesali Bowen
- Narrated by: Sesali Bowen
- Length: 6 hrs and 32 mins
- Unabridged
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Growing up on the south side of Chicago, Sesali Bowen learned early on how to hustle, stay on her toes, and champion other Black women and femmes as she navigated Blackness, queerness, fatness, friendship, poverty, sex work, and self-love. Her love of trap music led her to the top of hip-hop journalism. But despite all the beauty, complexity, and general badassery she saw, Bowen found none of that nuance represented in mainstream feminism. Thus, she coined Trap Feminism, a contemporary framework that interrogates where feminism meets today's hip-hop.
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From a Trap Feminist
- By Tanika Thrift on 01-05-22
By: Sesali Bowen
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Selfish, Shallow, and Self-Absorbed
- Sixteen Writers on the Decision Not to Have Kids
- By: Meghan Daum
- Narrated by: Johnny Heller, Jo Anna Perrin
- Length: 7 hrs and 40 mins
- Unabridged
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One of the main topics of cultural conversation during the last decade was the supposed "fertility crisis" and whether modern women could figure out a way to have it all - a successful, demanding career and the required 2.3 children - before their biological clocks stopped ticking. Now, however, conversation has turned to whether it's necessary to have it all (see Anne-Marie Slaughter) or, perhaps more controversial, whether children are really a requirement for a fulfilling life.
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Am I the only sane childfree woman in here?
- By J. Malouin on 09-29-15
By: Meghan Daum
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Manifesto
- On Never Giving Up
- By: Bernardine Evaristo
- Narrated by: Bernardine Evaristo
- Length: 6 hrs and 7 mins
- Unabridged
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From the best-selling and Booker Prize-winning author of Girl, Woman, Other, Bernardine Evaristo’s memoir of her own life and writing, and her manifesto on unstoppability, creativity, and activism.
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Glorious performance and inspiring story
- By Maggi Morehouse on 01-25-22
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Letters to a Young Artist
- By: Anna Deavere Smith
- Narrated by: Anna Deavere Smith
- Length: 4 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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From "the most exciting individual in American theater" ( Newsweek), here is Anna Deavere Smith's brass-tacks advice to aspiring artists of all stripes. In the manner of Rilke's Letters to a Young Poet, Deavere Smith mentors her young artist over a period of five years, sharing her hard-won wisdom about the challenges and rewards of the artistic life.
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Great advice for artists of any age.
- By S. Barker on 10-30-17
What listeners say about Being Seen
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Ms. Kirsty L. Collins
- 05-31-23
Fascinating and important!
This autobiography is not only an important story that everyone should read, but it is also engaging and exciting.
Disabled people develop extraordinary resilience and adaptability skills that bring tremendous value to society when people can overcome their fears of a disabled body and open themselves to learning about them.
As a deaf person with a rare disease, this book helped me see and contend with my internalised ableism which is an ongoing battle. Living in an ableist world with disabilities is exhausting and sometimes terrifying. It's great to hear another voice clearly articulate all of the issues at hand.
Thank you, Elsa Sjuneson!
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- palis
- 07-11-23
The story of my life
I found myself in so many part of this book.. the good, the bad and in between.
Thank you for this amazing book!
I cant wait for more books!
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- Amazon Customer
- 01-05-23
Did not resonate with me
I wanted and tried wholeheartedly to LOVE this book the whole time, but unfortunately I just cannot say that it resonated with me. I can’t quite pinpoint the exact reasons, there were some things that she says blind people do not do that I know the members of my family who are blind do in-fact do, I think that’s a generational thing. There were things she explains away that my disabled students believe are way bigger deals, and she is definitely entitled to her own opinions and obviously her life experiences have shaped those things. I personally believe this book is less about disability and ableism and more about LGBTQIA and how those beliefs and upbringing affected the author as a disabled woman. I wouldn’t say to not read it, but it definitely was not my favorite.
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1 person found this helpful
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- Brandon Cole
- 05-06-22
To Open Your Eyes, Read This Book
As a blind person myself, I absolutely loved this book. While listening to it, I almost constantly felt like reacting to it in the same way one might react to a tweet they agreed with. By that I mean my reaction to nearly every sentence was "Yes! This!" Being Seen is a harsh, real, necessary confrontation as well as being a memoir. Everyone should read this book, disabled or not, because to be honest, we all have a lot to learn. I know I did.
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- Finley Peterson
- 10-26-21
Great book!
This book is tightly written and interesting from start to finish. It encourages all of us to examine our preconceptions about disability, and Elsa reads this with warmth and passion so it feels like listening to a friend. Highly recommended!
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- Scott Lynch
- 11-03-21
A Must-Listen
Illuminating, infuriating, illusion-breaking and essential. As read by the author, full of wry honesty.
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- Kari
- 01-03-22
So true
I loved this book! It brought up so many ableist points that go unheard. For instance most employers need employees with drivers licences, public transportation is not a priority, elevators are not maintained, sometimes handicapped parking is not at good locations, TV is not real life and we are easily “blocked” from attending/denied services. Don’t get me started at the cost of technology specifically for the disabled. This book is awesome!
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