Memories and Re-Memories of My Mom’s Eye Bandage: Trans-Relation Among the Norms, Otherness, and Resistance

Abstract

A mother and daughter from South Korea construct re-memories about the mother’s visual impairment. The paper uses the concept of re-memory that Toni Morrison uses in her novel, Beloved: the act of revisiting a memory in order to reconstruct “past realities.” The aim is not to “tell” the story of what it means to live as a person with a visual impairment while being a single mother and working as a special educator in Korean society, or what it means to live as the daughter of that person. There is no attempt to claim an authoritative version of “our stories.” Instead the goal is to recognize our own social construction and cultural conditioning through re-reading our shared memories. Conceiving ourselves as sites for cultural critique and social change, the presentation will interrogate the ways in which mother and daughter have been constituted by historically, socially, and culturally specific discourses. The presentation will interrogate the ways in which our memories and experiences are enmeshed in a web of ableism, classism, sexism, and ageism. Finally, the paper will discuss what ethical work mother and daughter may/can do on themselves as educational researchers and teacher educators.