Helen Keller as a Social Theorist

Daniel Huebner, University of North Carolina at Greensboro

Although Helen Keller is remembered for inspiring accounts of her education despite being blind and deaf, and as an advocate for those with disabilities, this paper argues that Keller’s multi-faceted writings have gone unexamined as a resource in classical social theory. Through an examination of Keller’s published writings and digitized archival sources, this paper traces aspects of Keller’s social theory. Keller was seriously engaged throughout her adult life in interconnected social reform efforts, including workers’ rights and socialism, women’s rights, international peace, racial equality, and freedom of expression, alongside advocating the rights of the disabled. She participated in social science institutions and critically analyzed changing social structures, including social class, media, electoral politics, education, war, family, welfare programs, the criminal justice system, and religion. She articulated a set of methodological approaches for investigating society, including interpreting social statistics, and what would now be called “autoethnography,” involving a constitutive role for the phenomenology of the senses in social investigation. Keller proposed that disabilities were caused and labeled socially, prefiguring the “social model” of disability by decades. Additionally, the paper outlines how Keller’s analyses of linguistic communication in its relation to social knowledge, thought and mind, metaphor and analogy, and authorship, are virtually unique in the literature. Finally, Keller articulated aspects of what would become intersectional feminism, including the intersecting structures of disability, gender, class, race, and citizenship. She critically responded to the ways she was objectified by others, re-appropriated disabling language to describe “social blindness and deafness,” and reflected on the role of privilege in structuring one’s social standpoint. Although Keller is somewhat controversial in the disability studies literature, this paper seeks to articulate what she contributes to the classical literature in social theory, which has also begun to reconsider the marginalized role of disability in the sociological canon.

No extended abstract or paper available

 Presented in Session 254. Questioning Gifts, Challenging Talent