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Review - Open Your Eyes - Philosophy
Every now and again, something happens that creates a flurry of media interest in deafness. These days it's often to do with biomedical technology and the response to it of the "culturally Deaf" -- people with audiological deafness who consider themselves members of a cultural grouping rather than disabled. So we have the rejection (by some Deaf people but not all) of cochlear implants, or the use (by some Deaf people, but not all) of reproductive technologies to "select for" deafness. The resulting discussions might be described as dialogues of the deaf, if the pun were not so obvious and so bad, and in fact so wrong (most deaf people can dialogue with each other perfectly well. It's dialogue between Deaf and hearing that can get problematic).
Open Your Eyes goes some way towards explaining why deafness may be considered a more-or-less normal form of human variation. Less ambitiously, it also aims to "open eyes" to the value of Deaf Studies as something other than an academic freak show. The collection originated in a 3-day "Think Tank" held in 2002 at Gallaudet University, Washington DC, the world's only university for Deaf people, and reflects the interests and concerns of the assembled scholars. The first section, Framing Deaf Studies, provides a basic context. Subsequent chapters then tackle key points of research, and often of contention, within Deaf Studies: these include the uniqueness (or not) of Deaf identity and community, the place of language(s), the social locations and boundaries of Deaf communities, and ultimately the long-simmering question of whether the Deaf community can/should/would identify with the terminology of "disability" or not.
The Deaf world today is in transition. With less than 5% of deaf children born into Deaf families, and most of those educated in mainstream schools, the nostalgia for the historical modes of transmitting Deaf culture (via residential schools and clubs) is being replaced by recognition that Deaf people are "a largely decentralized community that forms in specific geographical places only at prearranged times", often conferences or similar events (p. 105). There is a sense now of searching for vehicles of cultural transmission that better suit a world of educational mainstreaming and Instant Messenging, in which the Deaf community's membership is diversifying across categories of Deaf/hard of hearing/partially hearing/hearing children of Deaf families/cochlear implanted, and others, and where American Sign Language (ASL) is the fifth most commonly taught language in college across the United States (p. 185).
The book is therefore timely. Its ethos is also welcome. Its contributors come from a variety of subject positions (some are Deaf, some are hearing, and others are at "all points in between" as the introduction puts it), but notwithstanding this diversity all share a commitment to the reality of Deaf culture and to the value of Deaf studies. This sets the project apart: I don't think I have previously encountered a book that takes this commitment for granted and at the same time subjects some of the dearly held concepts and assumptions of the Deaf world to rigorous scrutiny. Not all the contributors are equally successful here, and there are some spots of special pleading, but on the whole the authors avoid the equal gaucheries of Deaf polemic, hearing bigotry, or liberal guilt-fuelled romanticism about deafness.
The balance of topics covered, too, is indicative of a significant turn in Deaf history. It's traditional for books about Deafness intended for a hearing readership to argue the case for the status of signed languages as languages. A couple of contributors here do explore linguistics, considering the characteristics of sign, the sociological impact of sound and the power of "audism". One chapter by Lawrence Fleischer, "Critical Pedagogy and ASL Videobooks", describes how his disappointment with the quality of the language used in video materials aimed at deaf ASL learners, prompted a deeper examination of the pedagogic and communicative pitfalls of trying simultaneously to instruct in English and in ASL -- an example of the subtle problems that can be overlooked by both Deaf and hearing. Overall, though, it's refreshing to find so little attention being given to defending the validity of Deaf modes of communication, which suggests that this battle, at least, may have been won.
Meanwhile, the amount of space given over, explicitly or otherwise, to exploring Deaf identities suggests that this is what occupies Deaf studies at the moment. Several contributors examine the unique features of the Deaf world that make its cultural and political claims to recognition so contentious. Frank Bechter calls it a community of converts; indeed, he proposes that "far from being 'a culture like any other'" (as its advocates have argued), "deaf culture is what we might call a convert culture", and he follows the implications through various strands of Deaf community life. He seems to favor recognition of the radical "otherness" of Deaf life, arguing against a universalist construction that assumes Deaf culture is "what hearing culture would look like if hearing people were deaf." (p. 66) This construction fails to recognize the value of the Deaf world in itself. Deaf culture and signing (for example) are not just handy for deaf people to have, but goods -- enrichments of the world -- from which everyone benefits. The "conversion" Bechter is talking about, then, has something to do with the transformation of perspective that allows people to see this.
Part of the value of this book lies in its display of the diversity of Deaf experience. The lives of CODAs (hearing children of Deaf adults) exemplify the sometimes unexpected outcomes when biology and social identity intersect in the Deaf world. Robert Hoffmeister's chapter is excellent on the anomalous social and ontological position of hearing children growing up in Deaf families, a position neatly encapsulating the contested nature of audiological versus cultural Deafness: as he says, for CODAs "the identity issue is a psychological division having no physical demarcation...in essence we must borrow our parents' physical condition as part of our own identity process." (p. 196). In some respects this intersection of biology and culture is more interesting than the conventional intersectional identities addressed in section 5. My criticism is that the forms of intersection it treats -- Deafness and race/and gender/and sexual orientation -- seem depressingly familiar. The literature on social/cultural identities contains enough examples of strung-together discussions which look at X, where X is the characteristic of interest, and then at how the experience of being X is affected by being also of a minority ethnicity, a woman, or GLBT, or something else. This is not, I hasten to add, to negate the value of those discussions, and the chapters here raise important points in readable ways: in "The Burden of Racism and Audism", for example, Lindsay Dunn uses a novel dialogical style to set out the arguments about "the twin conditions of race and audism that are heavy burdens on Deaf people of color" (p. 235) I can't help looking forward, though, to the time when the politics of identity will be able to move beyond having to remind ourselves and each other that identity, whatever else it does, never tracks along a single axis.
Not all the claims made by Deaf Studies scholars here can or should go unchallenged. In "Talking Culture and Culture Talking", Tom Humphries suggests that until recently there was a "pressure to 'make nice' with hearing people and not offend", which included "little white lies about ... our desire to have Deaf babies (we said we didn't want them) ...We wanted them but we could not say that we wanted them so we lied." (p. 37) It's difficult to know how to evaluate a statement like this. On the one hand, the available empirical evidence, which admittedly is not very much, suggests that only a minority of even culturally Deaf people would claim an active preference for deaf children over hearing ones (see Middleton et al 1998, 2001; Stern 2002). But then, if what Humphries says is true, maybe the participants lied to the (hearing?) researchers. Or Humphries' point may be more rhetorical than empirically accurate. Or the data could reflect differences between the US and the UK. Here Paddy Ladd's chapter relating Deafness and colonialism provides a useful background for comparing the two countries. Drawing on their different histories of colonialism, he notes that "to the Deaf foreigner visiting the United States, the most obvious cultural difference is a greater 'Deaf pride', a greater self-belief and confidence", but also that in the US Deaf world high status seems to follow skill in ASL (which normally implies having grown up using it at home), rather than what Ladd identifies as a British focus on political service to the community as the criterion for belonging (p. 52). Here is another indication of how this collection scores through its ability to go beyond a Deaf/hearing dichotomy that effectively homogenizes the real geographic, social and political diversity of the Deaf world.
In a similar vein, Douglas C Baynton attempts to take the reader "Beyond Culture" -- that is, beyond the idea of Deaf culture. Although recognising how powerful that notion has been politically, Baynton thinks that culture is "inadequate by itself" to explain the embodied experiences of Deaf people and the empirical operation of the Deaf community. Hence in the debate about deafness's relationship to disability, he holds that, "The common argument that Deaf people are a cultural and linguistic group and therefore are not disabled wrongly characterizes culture and disability as mutually exclusive....Not only is it entirely possible for Deaf people to be both a distinct cultural group and disabled, it is necessary if Deaf and Disability scholars are to produce a coherent account of the Deaf community." (p. 297)
The final section poses a question with which, in my experience, even the most enlightened hearing people may struggle. In "Postdeafness", Lennard J Davis starts a series of rhetorical questions with "Are Deaf people handicapped?", while Harlan Lane's title asks, "Do Deaf people have a disability?" The obvious answer for most hearing people ("Yes") is increasingly contested by a variety of voices from the Deaf and also, interestingly enough, from the disabled hearing community. These responses can run from "no" through "not in the same way as other disabled people" to "what is a disability anyway?" Davis' and Lane's questions are really about the point(s) at which forms of human variation become identified as disabling. Since the 1970s, disability scholars have argued that our understanding of disability needs to be reconsidered: not that there is no such thing as a disability, but that the criteria for deciding that a physical form or capacity will not be accommodated as a variant but singled out as an anomaly, are glossed over as too obvious to be worth discussing. In reality they are not obvious, and the decisions that are made here define the parameters of normality. The notion of a "Deaf world" tests those parameters to their limit.
What many of the assembled theorists are doing is asserting the phenomenological and empirical evidence of Deaf lives against the theoretical constructs of the hearing majority. Anthropologists and sociologists have contended that Deaf people, seen collectively, do not satisfy the criteria for a culture; the Deaf community can't be a "real" one because "the hearing children of Deaf adults are removed from the Deaf world after one generation" (Hoffmeister p. 191); Deafness cannot be an identity because it does not comfortably fit the models used in conventional identity politics. Rather than give up these theoretical claims or try to redescribe the Deaf world to make it comply, these writers seem to be saying that is time to admit that the models are wrong, or at least inadequate, for Deaf people and therefore as models at all. Joseph J Murray for example asks, "Is it possible that an adherence to theories and structures designed to explain the place of other minorities....not only unwittingly ties us to nation-specific narratives but also obscures just what it is that is most Deaf about being Deaf?" (p. 101) And Davis' chapter ends with a plea for Deaf Studies to develop a theory of Deafness that had its own internal coherence and cohesion without trying to ape the minority status, ethnicity, or exclusive worlds models; to "think about the beyond-identity issues floating in the public sphere", and find a more flexible way of conceptualizing the experience of being D/deaf in the world today.
Easy as this sounds in theory, the real difficulties are brought sharply into salutary focus in the final postscript describing the protests in October 2006 at Gallaudet. In contrast to the better-known protests of 1988, where the problem (that the President of Gallaudet had always been a hearing person) was clear, it remains uncertain exactly what the disturbances of 2006 were really about -- whether, as some argue, it was simply the unsatisfactory management style of the then-provost of Gallaudet or, as others say, the protests reflected a more general anxiety about the changes in Deaf identity examined in this book. Whatever the truth of the matter, the fact is that Gallaudet now has a mission statement which for the first time gives explicit commitment to "inclusive bilingualism" (of English and ASL). "More than ever", says the editor in his closing words, "the Deaf community senses the urgency to make the case....why the world needs Deaf people and their signed languages." (p.335) There are interesting times ahead.
References
Middleton A, Hewison J, & Mueller R. Prenatal diagnosis for inherited deafness: what is the potential demand? J Genet Couns 2001; 10: 121-131
Middleton, A., Hewison, J. & Mueller, R. F. Attitudes of Deaf adults toward genetic testing for hereditary deafness. Am. J. Hum. Genet. 63, 1175–1180 (1998)
Stern SJ et al. Attitudes of deaf and hard of hearing subjects towards genetic diagnosis of hearing loss. J Med Genet 2002; 39: 448-453
Author: Dr Jackie Leach Scully
Every now and again, something happens that creates a flurry of media interest in deafness. These days it's often to do with biomedical technology and the response to it of the "culturally Deaf" -- people with audiological deafness who consider themselves members of a cultural grouping rather than disabled. So we have the rejection (by some Deaf people but not all) of cochlear implants, or the use (by some Deaf people, but not all) of reproductive technologies to "select for" deafness. The resulting discussions might be described as dialogues of the deaf, if the pun were not so obvious and so bad, and in fact so wrong (most deaf people can dialogue with each other perfectly well. It's dialogue between Deaf and hearing that can get problematic).
Open Your Eyes goes some way towards explaining why deafness may be considered a more-or-less normal form of human variation. Less ambitiously, it also aims to "open eyes" to the value of Deaf Studies as something other than an academic freak show. The collection originated in a 3-day "Think Tank" held in 2002 at Gallaudet University, Washington DC, the world's only university for Deaf people, and reflects the interests and concerns of the assembled scholars. The first section, Framing Deaf Studies, provides a basic context. Subsequent chapters then tackle key points of research, and often of contention, within Deaf Studies: these include the uniqueness (or not) of Deaf identity and community, the place of language(s), the social locations and boundaries of Deaf communities, and ultimately the long-simmering question of whether the Deaf community can/should/would identify with the terminology of "disability" or not.
The Deaf world today is in transition. With less than 5% of deaf children born into Deaf families, and most of those educated in mainstream schools, the nostalgia for the historical modes of transmitting Deaf culture (via residential schools and clubs) is being replaced by recognition that Deaf people are "a largely decentralized community that forms in specific geographical places only at prearranged times", often conferences or similar events (p. 105). There is a sense now of searching for vehicles of cultural transmission that better suit a world of educational mainstreaming and Instant Messenging, in which the Deaf community's membership is diversifying across categories of Deaf/hard of hearing/partially hearing/hearing children of Deaf families/cochlear implanted, and others, and where American Sign Language (ASL) is the fifth most commonly taught language in college across the United States (p. 185).
The book is therefore timely. Its ethos is also welcome. Its contributors come from a variety of subject positions (some are Deaf, some are hearing, and others are at "all points in between" as the introduction puts it), but notwithstanding this diversity all share a commitment to the reality of Deaf culture and to the value of Deaf studies. This sets the project apart: I don't think I have previously encountered a book that takes this commitment for granted and at the same time subjects some of the dearly held concepts and assumptions of the Deaf world to rigorous scrutiny. Not all the contributors are equally successful here, and there are some spots of special pleading, but on the whole the authors avoid the equal gaucheries of Deaf polemic, hearing bigotry, or liberal guilt-fuelled romanticism about deafness.
The balance of topics covered, too, is indicative of a significant turn in Deaf history. It's traditional for books about Deafness intended for a hearing readership to argue the case for the status of signed languages as languages. A couple of contributors here do explore linguistics, considering the characteristics of sign, the sociological impact of sound and the power of "audism". One chapter by Lawrence Fleischer, "Critical Pedagogy and ASL Videobooks", describes how his disappointment with the quality of the language used in video materials aimed at deaf ASL learners, prompted a deeper examination of the pedagogic and communicative pitfalls of trying simultaneously to instruct in English and in ASL -- an example of the subtle problems that can be overlooked by both Deaf and hearing. Overall, though, it's refreshing to find so little attention being given to defending the validity of Deaf modes of communication, which suggests that this battle, at least, may have been won.
Meanwhile, the amount of space given over, explicitly or otherwise, to exploring Deaf identities suggests that this is what occupies Deaf studies at the moment. Several contributors examine the unique features of the Deaf world that make its cultural and political claims to recognition so contentious. Frank Bechter calls it a community of converts; indeed, he proposes that "far from being 'a culture like any other'" (as its advocates have argued), "deaf culture is what we might call a convert culture", and he follows the implications through various strands of Deaf community life. He seems to favor recognition of the radical "otherness" of Deaf life, arguing against a universalist construction that assumes Deaf culture is "what hearing culture would look like if hearing people were deaf." (p. 66) This construction fails to recognize the value of the Deaf world in itself. Deaf culture and signing (for example) are not just handy for deaf people to have, but goods -- enrichments of the world -- from which everyone benefits. The "conversion" Bechter is talking about, then, has something to do with the transformation of perspective that allows people to see this.
Part of the value of this book lies in its display of the diversity of Deaf experience. The lives of CODAs (hearing children of Deaf adults) exemplify the sometimes unexpected outcomes when biology and social identity intersect in the Deaf world. Robert Hoffmeister's chapter is excellent on the anomalous social and ontological position of hearing children growing up in Deaf families, a position neatly encapsulating the contested nature of audiological versus cultural Deafness: as he says, for CODAs "the identity issue is a psychological division having no physical demarcation...in essence we must borrow our parents' physical condition as part of our own identity process." (p. 196). In some respects this intersection of biology and culture is more interesting than the conventional intersectional identities addressed in section 5. My criticism is that the forms of intersection it treats -- Deafness and race/and gender/and sexual orientation -- seem depressingly familiar. The literature on social/cultural identities contains enough examples of strung-together discussions which look at X, where X is the characteristic of interest, and then at how the experience of being X is affected by being also of a minority ethnicity, a woman, or GLBT, or something else. This is not, I hasten to add, to negate the value of those discussions, and the chapters here raise important points in readable ways: in "The Burden of Racism and Audism", for example, Lindsay Dunn uses a novel dialogical style to set out the arguments about "the twin conditions of race and audism that are heavy burdens on Deaf people of color" (p. 235) I can't help looking forward, though, to the time when the politics of identity will be able to move beyond having to remind ourselves and each other that identity, whatever else it does, never tracks along a single axis.
Not all the claims made by Deaf Studies scholars here can or should go unchallenged. In "Talking Culture and Culture Talking", Tom Humphries suggests that until recently there was a "pressure to 'make nice' with hearing people and not offend", which included "little white lies about ... our desire to have Deaf babies (we said we didn't want them) ...We wanted them but we could not say that we wanted them so we lied." (p. 37) It's difficult to know how to evaluate a statement like this. On the one hand, the available empirical evidence, which admittedly is not very much, suggests that only a minority of even culturally Deaf people would claim an active preference for deaf children over hearing ones (see Middleton et al 1998, 2001; Stern 2002). But then, if what Humphries says is true, maybe the participants lied to the (hearing?) researchers. Or Humphries' point may be more rhetorical than empirically accurate. Or the data could reflect differences between the US and the UK. Here Paddy Ladd's chapter relating Deafness and colonialism provides a useful background for comparing the two countries. Drawing on their different histories of colonialism, he notes that "to the Deaf foreigner visiting the United States, the most obvious cultural difference is a greater 'Deaf pride', a greater self-belief and confidence", but also that in the US Deaf world high status seems to follow skill in ASL (which normally implies having grown up using it at home), rather than what Ladd identifies as a British focus on political service to the community as the criterion for belonging (p. 52). Here is another indication of how this collection scores through its ability to go beyond a Deaf/hearing dichotomy that effectively homogenizes the real geographic, social and political diversity of the Deaf world.
In a similar vein, Douglas C Baynton attempts to take the reader "Beyond Culture" -- that is, beyond the idea of Deaf culture. Although recognising how powerful that notion has been politically, Baynton thinks that culture is "inadequate by itself" to explain the embodied experiences of Deaf people and the empirical operation of the Deaf community. Hence in the debate about deafness's relationship to disability, he holds that, "The common argument that Deaf people are a cultural and linguistic group and therefore are not disabled wrongly characterizes culture and disability as mutually exclusive....Not only is it entirely possible for Deaf people to be both a distinct cultural group and disabled, it is necessary if Deaf and Disability scholars are to produce a coherent account of the Deaf community." (p. 297)
The final section poses a question with which, in my experience, even the most enlightened hearing people may struggle. In "Postdeafness", Lennard J Davis starts a series of rhetorical questions with "Are Deaf people handicapped?", while Harlan Lane's title asks, "Do Deaf people have a disability?" The obvious answer for most hearing people ("Yes") is increasingly contested by a variety of voices from the Deaf and also, interestingly enough, from the disabled hearing community. These responses can run from "no" through "not in the same way as other disabled people" to "what is a disability anyway?" Davis' and Lane's questions are really about the point(s) at which forms of human variation become identified as disabling. Since the 1970s, disability scholars have argued that our understanding of disability needs to be reconsidered: not that there is no such thing as a disability, but that the criteria for deciding that a physical form or capacity will not be accommodated as a variant but singled out as an anomaly, are glossed over as too obvious to be worth discussing. In reality they are not obvious, and the decisions that are made here define the parameters of normality. The notion of a "Deaf world" tests those parameters to their limit.
What many of the assembled theorists are doing is asserting the phenomenological and empirical evidence of Deaf lives against the theoretical constructs of the hearing majority. Anthropologists and sociologists have contended that Deaf people, seen collectively, do not satisfy the criteria for a culture; the Deaf community can't be a "real" one because "the hearing children of Deaf adults are removed from the Deaf world after one generation" (Hoffmeister p. 191); Deafness cannot be an identity because it does not comfortably fit the models used in conventional identity politics. Rather than give up these theoretical claims or try to redescribe the Deaf world to make it comply, these writers seem to be saying that is time to admit that the models are wrong, or at least inadequate, for Deaf people and therefore as models at all. Joseph J Murray for example asks, "Is it possible that an adherence to theories and structures designed to explain the place of other minorities....not only unwittingly ties us to nation-specific narratives but also obscures just what it is that is most Deaf about being Deaf?" (p. 101) And Davis' chapter ends with a plea for Deaf Studies to develop a theory of Deafness that had its own internal coherence and cohesion without trying to ape the minority status, ethnicity, or exclusive worlds models; to "think about the beyond-identity issues floating in the public sphere", and find a more flexible way of conceptualizing the experience of being D/deaf in the world today.
Easy as this sounds in theory, the real difficulties are brought sharply into salutary focus in the final postscript describing the protests in October 2006 at Gallaudet. In contrast to the better-known protests of 1988, where the problem (that the President of Gallaudet had always been a hearing person) was clear, it remains uncertain exactly what the disturbances of 2006 were really about -- whether, as some argue, it was simply the unsatisfactory management style of the then-provost of Gallaudet or, as others say, the protests reflected a more general anxiety about the changes in Deaf identity examined in this book. Whatever the truth of the matter, the fact is that Gallaudet now has a mission statement which for the first time gives explicit commitment to "inclusive bilingualism" (of English and ASL). "More than ever", says the editor in his closing words, "the Deaf community senses the urgency to make the case....why the world needs Deaf people and their signed languages." (p.335) There are interesting times ahead.
References
Middleton A, Hewison J, & Mueller R. Prenatal diagnosis for inherited deafness: what is the potential demand? J Genet Couns 2001; 10: 121-131
Middleton, A., Hewison, J. & Mueller, R. F. Attitudes of Deaf adults toward genetic testing for hereditary deafness. Am. J. Hum. Genet. 63, 1175–1180 (1998)
Stern SJ et al. Attitudes of deaf and hard of hearing subjects towards genetic diagnosis of hearing loss. J Med Genet 2002; 39: 448-453
Author: Dr Jackie Leach Scully
