Between Worlds

Deaf Women, Work and Intersections of Gender and Ability

Cheryl G. Najarian

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• Topic: Social Sciences
• eBook ISBN:
  9781135864231
• Subtopic: Gender Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

The purpose of this book is to illustrate the struggles of Deaf women as they negotiate their family, educational, and work lives. This study demonstrates how these women resist and overcome the various obstacles that are put before them as well as how they work to negotiate their identities as Deaf women in the Deaf community, hearing world, and the places 'in between.' The scope of the book traces these women's lives in these three major sectors of their lives and provides a discussion of the implications for other linguistic minorities.

Chapter One

Introduction

In an ever changing workforce, the experiences of women both at home and in the paid work sector have undergone radical changes in recent years. These changes have influenced the shape of families and workplaces that we have come to know today. The experiences of people with disabilities in the workplace, particularly those of women who are seen as “disabled,” have also undergone dramatic shifts. One such group to consider is deaf women, who are seen by some as “disabled,” but who also argue that they are bilingual and part of a linguistic minority. What can deaf women, in their positions as mothers and workers, contribute to our ideas about work and family? As these deaf women navigate their ways in these various work and family settings, we gain interesting insights into our ideas about women, work, disability, and family life.

This study, then, will address the invisible and visible work that deaf women do in their family, educational, and work lives to negotiate their identities. A major theme in this research is how the women describe experiences of being “between worlds” in these aspects of their lives and how they carve out places for themselves in the Deaf world, hearing world, and the places in between. Through semi-structured, open ended interviews, this research investigates this work and shows how it is done in a larger social context, which has rendered it as seemingly innate and invisible. Through feminist methodologies and qualitative research, this study puts women's everyday experiences and paid and unpaid work lives at the center of sociological analysis with the intention of understanding how their work is organized, performed, upheld by larger social institutions, such as the family, schools, and workplaces, and serves to create and maintain women's identities. This project also uncovers the implications this work has for women, families, and children.

REVIEW OF RELATED RESEARCH

My study draws on and contributes to several bodies of literature. I will first address the literature which focuses on education and deafness. In addition to these schools of thought, I will also include a discussion of unpaid work and deafness as well as a literature review of paid work and balancing mothering and paid work. As part of this overview, I will also make brief mention of the connections between bilingual women of color and the deaf women of this study.

Education and Deafness

Overview of the Deaf Community

Members of the Deaf community consider themselves part of a linguistic minority who have a shared native language, American Sign Language (ASL), history and culture which is separate from the hearing world (Padden & Humphries, 1988). The Deaf community differs from those who identify as deaf, where the latter usually refers to those who are defined by the medical definition of “the audiological condition of the not hearing” (Padden & Humphries, 1988). People who are deaf are often, although not always, older Americans who lose their hearing and become deaf later in life and do not consider ASL their native language. There are also those who consider themselves hard of hearing, which is seen by the Deaf community as a more acceptable way to name what the medical discourse defines as “hearing impaired.” Instead of viewing themselves as people who have an impairment or something that needs to be fixed, hard of hearing people use this term as a political way of identifying themselves and resisting medical notions of deafness. Many hard of hearing individuals, although not all who define themselves in this way, consider themselves as part of the Deaf community.

According to recent research, there are, in the United States, approximately twenty to twenty-two million people that are hard of hearing and one and a half million who are deaf (Bruyere, 2004). According to scholars at the Gallaudet Research Institute (GRI), the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) also provides similar national statistics, which are gathered from the National Health Interview Survey (NHIS); however, as the GRI rightly points out, this and other reports do not provide estimates to indicate those who were born deaf or hard of hearing and those who lost their hearing later in life (Holt, et., al., 1994; Mitchell, 2002). Also, it does not include estimates of those who consider themselves part of the Deaf community. Therefore, we simply do not know how many Deaf, deaf, and hard of hearing people there are, much less those who are college educated women.

Although these statistics create a murky picture, we do know that the Deaf community is a strong one which has various regional and state Deaf Clubs, foundations, and its own private non-profit organization, The National Association of the Deaf (NAD). Founded in 1880, NAD is the oldest and largest organization which safeguards the accessibility and civil rights of deaf and hard of hearing Americans in education, employment, health care, and telecommunications (NAD website, 2002). Their website includes position statements of the organization on various salient issues for the Deaf community including education opportunities, employment options, cochlear implants, and information about Deaf culture.

One of the most important issues for members of the Deaf community has been to be recognized as a linguistic minority rather than as people who have a disability and whose deafness needs to be fixed. This can be seen in the NAD's view on the Deaf community's official stance on cochlear implants, a device that can be surgically placed in a deaf person's cochlea to presumably “improve” their hearing. The procedure is costly and involves wearing an apparatus that attaches to the outside of one's ear and also inside to the cochlea and connects to the waist. It also requires that individuals go through speech therapy and often be part of a support group after the operation so that they might adjust to their new identity. In some cases, individuals who have a cochlear implant operation experience a “decrease” in their hearing “abilities,” while for others they notice that they are able to hear sounds more clearly. According to the NAD's website (2000), the Deaf community's official stance on cochlear implants is that: “Cochlear implantation is a technology that represents a tool to be used in some forms of communication, and not a cure for deafness.”

While wanting to remain open to the technology of cochlear implants, the NAD argues that the Deaf community and hearing world should not view deafness as a disability and something that needs to be “cured.” Others who have a more radical view of the use of cochlear implants argue that it is one way in which the medical community “colonizes” the Deaf by encouraging them to be more like hearing people and discouraging the Deaf to use their native language of ASL (Lane, 1999). While the controversy regarding cochlear implants continues to be debated in the Deaf community, it is also connected to another area of discussion on deaf education.

History of Deaf Education in America

According to Baynton (1996), there are two major historical events that served to organize deaf education and the history of the deaf in America. The first was the founding of the first school for the deaf, the American Asylum for the Deaf at Hartford, Connecticut, in 1817 by Thomas H. Gallaudet and Laurent Clerc. In 1815, after studying in Paris with the French teacher of the deaf, the Abbe Sicard and his student, Laurent Clerc, Gallaudet, who had traveled to Europe to learn about deaf education, was impressed with Sicard's method of teaching the deaf through sign language. He asked Clerc to accompany him back to America where they established the first deaf school with Clerc as the head teacher. This first of many residential schools was located near the sizable deaf community on Martha's Vineyard, where many deaf individuals had begun to develop their distinctive community, culture, and language (Groce, 1985). The second major event in America regarding the history of the deaf and deaf education was the formation of a group of reformers, in the late nineteenth century and continuing on into the twentieth, led by Alexander Graham Bell and others who favored eugenics and who sought to undo this growing deaf community. They favored prohibiting “manualism,” or the use of sign language, both in and out of the classroom and replacing it with “oralism,” which relied on teaching the deaf to communicate using only lip-reading and spoken English.

As Baynton (1996) argues, these two ways of organizing deaf education were actually reform movements, which were embedded within particular moments in American history. Manualists were evangelical Protestants who viewed the use of sign language as a way of converting people who might not, in their minds, have previous access to the gospel. Oralists, in the late nineteenth-century, were instead concerned with the “national community” and thought more in terms of “scientific naturalism” and evolutionary theory than about religion (Baynton, 1996, p. 9). Oralists associated those who used sign language with inferiority by equating them with animals and used deaf schools as a place to eliminate sign language and “normalize” the deaf.

Throughout the twentieth century, deaf children in America were segregated into both oral and manual residential schools for the deaf and were not allowed equal access to hearing schools. With the Disability Rights Movement of the 1960s and passage of the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act (IDEA) of 1975, grew the concept of “mainstreaming” where deaf children were put into public hearing elementary and secondary classrooms. Unfortunately though, deaf children and their parents had to fight for the right to have sign language interpreters in these schools as a “reasonable accommodation” for their deafness and the Supreme Court denied them that right (Smith, 1996). Many of the women of this study experienced their early years of elementary and secondary education at this time and were often mainstreamed without the assistance of sign language interpreters or note takers. The effects of this denial on the Deaf community in America have often been equated with a type of cultural genocide and termed as part of the “failure of deaf education” (Foster, 2001; Lane, 1999). Experiencing this kind of education, many of these women and others in the Deaf community have described the feeling of being “between worlds.” Due, in part, to the set up of our school systems, they have struggled to find places for themselves in the Deaf world, hearing world, and the places in between.

With the passing of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in 1990, deaf children and their parents were able to advocate more effectively for the right to sign language interpreters and support in public hearing elementary and secondary schools. As Baynton (1996) outlines, the new term for mainstreaming has become “inclusion,” which proposes to integrate deaf students into local public schools. As he describes, the debate of deaf education today is mainly between mainstreaming, usually with interpreters who use a manually coded English system such as Sign Exact English (SEE) or cued speech rather than ASL, on one side, and those who support a bilingual and bicultural education that uses ASL as well as English (Baynton, 1996). Oral schools (schools where ASL is forbidden) still exist in the U.S. today and now many of them go under the guise of “cochlear implant schools,” where the students have had cochlear implant surgery. These different educational experiences have made it challenging for the Deaf to communicate among themselves, since various deaf individuals still, to this day, may not learn ASL until they reach college. In fact, some may never learn ASL at all or “pick it up” somewhat from interacting in the Deaf community. The TTY (telephone for the deaf) and electronic mail have aided in the Deaf community's ability to gain access to each other, but barriers in terms of learning a similar language still remain due to the structural organization of deaf education programs and schools.

Educational opportunities for the deaf and hard of hearing have been somewhat broadened by the ADA, however, there exist only three colleges in the U.S. that have sizeable programs which are geared toward Deaf people: Gallaudet University, the National Technical Institute for the Deaf (NTID) (a college within Rochester Institute of Technology), and California State University, Northridge (CSUN). Gallaudet University is the only Deaf university in America and where the March 1988 protest, Deaf President Now (DPN), occurred. During this protest, two thousand deaf students, faculty, and staff rose, rejected their newly appointed hearing president who they forced to resign, and elected their first ever new deaf/Deaf president Irving King Jordan (Brueggemann, 1999). This moment was a major turning point in Deaf education and speaks to the strong Deaf community that exists at Gallaudet University. Similar and yet also different from this community, are the campuses of NTID and CSUN. The Deaf communities on these campuses are part of the larger hearing culture of their universities and are thus more a mix of Deaf, deaf, and hard of hearing individuals. For the women of this study, these postsecondary options and limited choices were important influences on how the women developed their own identities as Deaf women and saw themselves as part of the Deaf community, hearing world, and the places in between.

Despite the increase of educational opportunities for deaf women to attend college, many may find themselves searching for a job where they feel both challenged and socially integrated. Often, social integration becomes a barrier and causes many deaf women either to go work in the “deaf world” or to become stay-at-home mothers. Thus, it appears that many deaf and hard of hearing women are working in jobs that their college education seemingly over qualifies them for and that track them into working with the deaf: working as teacher's aides in deaf education programs in both predominantly hearing and deaf schools, as teachers and administrators in schools for the deaf, at deaf camps, or at deaf daycares. Certainly this is not true for all college educated deaf women; however, a large majority of them seem to experience this. My research uncovers how these college educated deaf women, who are seemingly privileged by their education, experience their paid and unpaid work lives. It also investigates the structural challenges that they encounter and how they resist these challenges in their daily activities.

What is (Dis)ability?

Recently, the field of disability studies has undergone major changes in how scholars as well as activists define the term “disability.” This scholarship has also had an influence on as well as been influenced by the field of Deaf studies. What follows is a brief overview of some of the major literatures in these two fields as well as how it relates to sociology and this project on deaf women and their family, education, and work life experiences.

Erving Goffman's (1963) sociological conceptualizations of stigma as a kind of “spoiled identity” or deviant status have been used by various disability studies scholars to discuss how people who are seen as disabled have often been marginalized in society. Higgins (1980), who did a sociological study of the deaf, used Goffman's framework along with Becker's (1963) concept of “outsiders” to argue that the deaf were outsiders in a hearing world. Much of the scholarship at this time was focused on the idea that people with disabilities, such as the deaf, were seen as the “other” rather than fitting the “norm” in society.

Other sociologists have been interested in viewing “disability” through a different lens from the perspective of deviance and instead called for a “sociology of acceptance” (Bogdan & Taylor, 1987). Further, they argued that “handicapism,” much like notions of racism and sexism, was linked to theories of representation in our culture (Bogdan & Taylor, 1977). This research prompted sociologists and disability studies scholars to think more critically of how we have come to know what we know about definitions of the term “disability.”

Drawing on and included in this literature, various scholars further emphasized that disability is a social construction, that it is another sector of oppression, and that it is linked to issues of representation in various discourses such as the medical, education, and legal discourses (Bogdan, 1988; Bogdan & Biklen, 1977; Bogdan & Taylor, 1994; Linton, 1998). Linton (1998) also argued for a “claiming” of the term disability and argued that we need to put disability studies at the “center” of our analyses because it adds, as she states: “a critical dimension to thinking about issues such as autonomy, competence, wholeness, independence/dependence, health, physical appearance, aesthetics community, and notions of progress and perfection-issues that pervade every aspect of the civic and pedagogic culture” (p. 118). These perspectives greatly inform this study of deaf women and their experiences in their family, educational, and work lives. This project seeks to put deaf women at the center of analysis and to call the term “disability” into question.

Another contribution to the fields of sociology and disability studies has been the notion of performing or passing for “normal” in various contexts (Goffman, 1959). The idea that deafness is an “invisible” ability or disability in certain contexts is informed by these perspectives. This is also an area where scholars often collide with disability rights activists and those who are proud of their “disabled” identity. Scholars who consider the Deaf community as a legitimate and visible linguistic minority as well as notions of Deaf Pride and history are important aspects of this literature and what the Deaf community sees as the claiming of their identity as a civil rights issue (Padden & Humphries, 1988; Shapiro, 1994).

Some scholars argue that a constructionist view risks missing important connections between disability, bodily pain, suffering, and materiality. For example, feminist disability studies scholars have focused on the body as a site of analysis to show how ideas of ability, disability, and gender become embodied as well as how they relate to cultural notions of “able bodied” workers (Thomson, 1997; Wendell, 1996). These literatures inform this project on deaf women by pushing us to think how theories of disability relate to the concept of being part of a linguistic minority and connect with the body ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Table of Contents
• List of tables
• Acknowledgments
• Chapter One Introduction
• Chapter Two Methodology
• Chapter Three Family, Educational Experiences, and Relationships
• Chapter Four Motherwork, Deafness, and the Role of Activism in Families
• Chapter Five “Between Worlds”: Communication in Relationships and Paid Work Experiences
• Chapter Six Conclusion: The Language Work of Deaf Women
• Appendix A Interview Questions Guide
• Appendix B Mother's Day Letter
• Appendix C Follow-up Interview Questions Guide
• Tables
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index