A “Vacant Receptacle”? Blind Tom, Cognitive Difference, and Pedagogy

Abstract

If disability studies is often overlooked at universities today, cognitive disability is often overlooked by scholars in disability studies. How should we think and talk about mental difference? Our academic enterprise privileges intellect, as is appropriate. But how should we properly account for human beings who are intellectually disabled? How does mental disability relate to other disabilities or to more familiar identity categories like race and gender? Perhaps no one illustrates these questions better than an intriguing figure who captivated audiences in nineteenth-century America: Thomas Wiggins, also known as Thomas Bethune but most popularly known as Blind Tom.

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