Spatial Discipline and Queer Futures in the Perkins School for the Blind

This paper considers the role that the environment—architecture, design, layout, objects—played in managing children's sexualities and gender formation in schools for the blind. I argue that these institutions utilized the... [ view full abstract ]

This paper considers the role that the environment—architecture, design, layout, objects—played in managing children's sexualities and gender formation in schools for the blind. I argue that these institutions utilized the environment to train children in heteronormative teleologies of development that they were not intended to access outside the school. In other words, children’s surroundings helped to educate them in norms they did not inhabit upon leaving these institutions. Educations in straight futures worked to ensure children wouldn’t access reproduction, marriage, or heterosexuality as adults. I focus specifically on the Perkins School for the Blind, founded in 1829, and center my analysis on annual reports from the school’s nineteenth-century history to explore how Perkins’ architecture helped to train the children for futures where their sexualities, reproductive capacities, and labor would be under institutional control; through its very physical structure, the institution became an agential force that managed children’s bodies, habits, and affects. However, the very structures that were supposed to separate students, teach them lessons in American domesticity, and synch their bodies with institutional time also had unexpected effects. The annual reports express both the need for same-sex institutions when it came to the blind to prevent the possibility of reproduction, while also acknowledging how this very arrangement can produce intimacies among students that “have all the evils which necessarily attend and follow so unnatural a condition” (Seventeenth Annual Report 1849, 22). This paper considers how the environment maps alternative teleologies for blind children and reflects on the implications of this history for queer and disability studies.