Deaf Subjects

Between Identities and Places

Brenda Jo Brueggemann

• Publisher: NYU Press
• Year: 2009
• ISBN:
  9780814791271
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Disabilities in Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

In this probing exploration of what it means to be deaf, Brenda Brueggemann goes beyond any simple notion of identity politics to explore the very nature of identity itself. Looking at a variety of cultural texts, she brings her fascination with borders and between-places to expose and enrich our understanding of how deafness embodies itself in the world, in the visual, and in language.

Taking on the creation of the modern deaf subject, Brueggemann ranges from the intersections of gender and deafness in the work of photographers Mary and Frances Allen at the turn of the last century, to the state of the field of Deaf Studies at the beginning of our new century. She explores the power and potential of American Sign Language—wedged, as she sees it, between letter-bound language and visual ways of learning—and argues for a rhetorical approach and digital future for ASL literature.

The narration of deaf lives through writing becomes a pivot around which to imagine how digital media and documentary can be used to convey deaf life stories. Finally, she expands our notion of diversity within the deaf identity itself, takes on the complex relationship between deaf and hearing people, and offers compelling illustrations of the intertwined, and sometimes knotted, nature of individual and collective identities within Deaf culture.

1

Between

A Commonplace Book for the Modern Deaf Subject

Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing.

—George Eliot [Mary Ann Evans], Daniel Deronda, 1876

For some time now, I have been imagining a theory of “betweenity,” especially as it exists in Deaf culture, identity, and language. And because I teach a great deal in the larger umbrella of “Disability Studies” these days, I’ve also been thinking about the expansion of that deaf-betweenity to “disability” in a larger sense.¹ (Of course, I’ve also been thinking about the way that deafness itself occupies an interesting “betweenity” in relationship to disability identity.) In any case—whether deaf, disabled, or between—I’m finding that I’m generally more interested in the hot dog than the bun, the cream filling in the Oreo (which, if you’ve noticed, has been changing a lot lately) than just the twinned chocolate sandwich cookies on the outside. Give me a hyphen any day. To be sure, the words on either side of the hyphen are interesting, too, but what is happening in that hyphen—the moment of magic artistry there in that half-dash—is what really catches my eye.

Between “Deaf” and “deaf” (or, the Names We Call Ourselves)

In disability culture and studies, as well as in Deaf culture and Studies, we often get back to—or maybe, yes, we also get forward to—discussions about what we do and don’t want to be called. Deaf culture, in particular, has been around the block with this discussion for a long, long time. I offer three exhibits for consideration:

Exhibit A (from the University of Brighton, United Kingdom; http://staff-central.brighton.ac.uk/clt/disability/Deaf.html):

Note on terminology:

The term “Deaf” (with a capital D) is the preferred usage of some people who are either born profoundly deaf or who become deaf at a very early age and who regard themselves as belonging to the Deaf community. Like people in many communities, those within the Deaf community are bound together by a feeling of identifying with other Deaf people. People in the Deaf community share, amongst other things, a sense of Deaf pride, traditions, values, lifestyles, humour, folklore, art, theatre, as well as a rich common language.

Exhibit B (from a copyedited essay on interpreters that I received back from the university press editors):

I do not understand the distinctions between use of upper and lower-case D for deafness? Please clarify for my own knowledge and for the general scope of this book.

Exhibit C (from Gina Oliva, author of Alone in the Mainstream: A Deaf Woman Remembers Public Schools, the first book in the new “Deaf Lives” series of autobiography, biography, and documentary at Gallaudet University Press that I edit. This is a memo Gina sent to me after the copy-editors asked her to doublecheck and “clarify” her use of Deaf/deaf in the manuscript):

Subject: deaf vs. Deaf

To: [email protected]

Hi Brenda … I took a look at Padden and Humphries and decided it made sense to use Deaf when referring to adults in the Deaf community. If they are oral deaf, I will call them deaf. As for children, I would stick with deaf and hard of hearing children (lower case). This means that the “big D” will appear much in my book, as I say “Deaf adults this” and “Deaf adults that” a lot. I also say “deaf and hard of hearing children” a lot.

Then I looked at “Journey into the Deaf-World” (Lane, Hoffmeister, Bahan) and see that they advocate using Deaf for any child who is deaf and couldn’t access info without assistance.

Hmmmmm.… Do you have any opinion about this???? I checked some other books.… Wrigley uses Deaf predominantly. Preston does not. I have others I can check … but my guess is there is little consensus about this.

As these three exhibits illustrate, where we draw the line in relationships between “deaf” and “Deaf” is a question of common placement.

In Deaf Studies we can explore, and perhaps even expand upon, the definitions of the terms of d/Deaf operations—subtracting, adding, dividing, and multiplying the possibilities—for the key naming terms like “deaf,” “Deaf,” “hard-of-hearing,” “late deafened,” “hearing-impaired,” “has hearing loss,” “think-hearing,” and, my mother’s personal favorite for me, “has selective hearing.” But we can also move further out in the concentric circles by studying, for example, the mapping and meaning of mental proficiency labels alongside audiometric ones and noting their in-common categorizations—“moderate,” “severe,” “profound.” Interestingly enough, these IQ labels parallel those assigned to hearing loss by medical practitioners—and both sets of terms came onto the diagnostic screen in our culture at about the same time. Moreover, if you simply rotate the axes of the two bell curves created by either the IQ or the audiometric charts as they plot out “normal,” “moderate,” “severe,” and “profound” you would find them folding neatly right on top of each other. Is this parallel only circumstance, or do the angles between these two medical charts make more meaning in their overlay and intersections?

As but one example of a way to further explore this curious commonplace, we might consider that in the Nazis’ national socialist regime during the early 1940s, people with disabilities in psychiatric institutions throughout the German Reich became subject to “euthanasia” at the hands of their own doctors and nurses. (I explore this subject in depth in my final chapter.) My point in telling these troubling facts is that at this time, as well as in other times both past and present, people who were deaf in Germany (taubstumme—deaf and dumb) were often as not collapsed into diagnoses of other mental disabilities as well. I have looked at remaining records from one of these killing centers (which is still, eerily enough, a fully functioning psychiatric institution even today), as well as some records from the T-4 program housed in the German federal archives (Bundesarchiv), and I have, for myself, seen this conflation written on the records of several patients.²

My point is that, in the commonplace book of “deafness,” things are not always clearly or singularly defined, designated, determined as “just” or “pure” or “only” deafness. And, however much some deaf people may want to resist being labeled “disabled,” the fact remains that they are often labeled as such and that these labels—in all cases—are not always accurate, though they may be, as it were, with consequences. Certainly, deaf people should want to resist the easy conflation of their “condition” with others that coexist in degrees of “moderate,” “severe,” and “profound”—realizing the violence that can be (and has been) done with such an overlay. Yet, just as certainly, I suggest that to resist and distance one’s self-identity and group identity from those whose condition has been deemed (for better or worse, for right or wrong) affiliated with hearing loss would also be, in essence, to do further violence to those others with whom “authorities” have placed us (deaf people) in categorical similarity. Who—or what—are deaf people so afraid of when they resist placement in the commonplace of “disability”?

The relationship between “deaf” and “disabled,” between “deafness” and “disability,” between “Deaf culture” and “Disability culture,” between Deaf Studies and Disability Studies has been the subject of several major conference sessions in recent years. The 2006 Society for Disability Studies conference featured several sessions devoted to these questions of relationship and difference, and a plenary session at a February 2007 symposium held at George Washington University on the development of Disability Studies focused on the dance between Deaf and Disability Studies.

As but one specific example of the current tensions between “deaf” and “disabled,” in March 2007, news in central Ohio (and all throughout the American deaf community) that the Ohio School for the Deaf (OSD) would soon be merging campuses and resources with the Ohio State School for the Blind shocked and troubled many. A March 2007 news story in the Columbus Dispatch featured virulent remarks by Richard Heuber, the president of the Ohio State School for the Deaf’s alumni association. Heubner claimed that “We [deaf alumni of OSD] will start a petition. Rally and protest,” and “We’ll fight this to the bitter end to keep them separate” because “Forcing the students to interact will destroy the deaf school’s culture.” Heubner concluded to the reporter that “I don’t feel I have a disability. Many deaf people don’t,” and “If you add another handicap (at the school) … they’ll have no identity, no self-esteem” (Sebastian, 2007). By September 2007, the state of Ohio had retracted its plans to merge the two schools.

My colleague, the author (and blogger) Steve Kuusisto—who happens to be blind—took up the subject of the “no identity, no self-esteem” concerns raised by the OSD alumni in a reply on his own “Planet of the Blind” blog as he attempted to “stir the slum gullion with a stick.” Among his stirrings were these that pointed out the swirling stew bits of difference and definition in this issue around the merger of the two state schools and the OSD deaf alumni’s response to it:

The problem isn’t that some deaf activists want to be thought of as a cultural group, a collection of people who have their own language, who are not at all disabled. The problem is that by wanting to disassociate themselves from a historical relationship with disabilities these deafness advocates are overtly contemptuous of other people who would quite likely love to declare themselves no longer disabled but who find themselves genuinely struggling with serious physical and social obstacles. I would love to say that blindness isn’t a disability but currently it is certainly a profound employment obstacle and the issues that are associated with this are both economically determined and are additionally rooted in historical attitudes that Mrs. Gandhi would likely recognize.

Contempt for the blind emerges in this instance with the force of a geyser. The reasoning works like this: deaf people are not disabled; to put them into a facility where they would have to share space with people who really are disabled would be demeaning to deaf students. (March 20, 2007; http://kuusisto.typepad.com/planet_of_the_blind/2007/03/in_our_ own_back.html)

This same string of reasoning and the often unnamed fear of how deafness and deaf people are labeled also have us (and them) working (hard, very hard) to contrast “deaf” and “Deaf.” The originary location of the Deaf/deaf divide dates to around 1972, purportedly from coined usage in a seminal Deaf Studies essay by James Woodward, How You Gonna Get to Heaven If You Can’t Talk to Jesus? On Depathologizing Deafness. Thus, the definitional divide has been around for more than thirty years. Yet, aside from its usage in presses and publications long familiar with the commonplaces of “deafness,” it must commonly still be footnoted in an academic text in order to explain, yet again, what the distinctions between Big D “Deafness” and little d “deafness” are. Even when the distinctions are used, they are most often used, interestingly enough, in direct relation to each other; one is just as likely to see “d/Deaf” or “D/deaf” written as one is to see just “Deaf” or even “deaf” standing alone in a text that has set up this distinction. Thus, the divisional/definitional terms of “Deaf” and (or versus) “deaf” more often than not come in tandem as d/Deaf. As such, they are twinned, they are doppelgangers. Mirror mirror on the wall … they whisper and sign back and forth to each other.

The twinning of d/Deaf is perhaps safer that way, since often, when one is pressed, it is hard to determine at any one moment in a text whether the Big D cultural/linguistic arena is where we are or whether we are just in the small d audiological/medical space. And what if we are in both places at the same time? The long-standing and footnoting practice of establishing some kind of border patrol between these terms tries to define and differentiate—apples here, oranges there—but, more often than not, the aliens still wind up looking very much like the natives. And perhaps it is really an avocado that is wanted, anyway? In most cases, for example, deaf students can’t enroll in a state residential institution—long deemed the center of American deaf culture and the sanctuary for American Sign Language (ASL) and thus a common place for Big “D” cultural/linguistic Deafness—without offering an audiogram and first being able to claim their little “d” deafness. Until as recently as 2002 and the establishment of Gallaudet University’s new HUGS program (Hearing Under-Graduates), you could not get into the world’s only liberal arts college for deaf and hard-of-hearing students without proof of a (flawed) audiogram: as an undergraduate, you had to be deaf in order to go there and engage in the particular Gallaudet cultural practices that might also then mark you as Deaf. The irony (and anxiety) of placement and identity at Gallaudet is perhaps further magnified by the fact that many, even the majority (58 percent), of Gallaudet’s graduate and professional students are hearing students working on degrees in the fields surrounding the curious state of “deafness.”

Yet, when the question is posed about the differences between “deaf” and “Deaf”—as it was by a recent editor I worked with (see Exhibit B) and, really, by almost every editor I’ve ever had in twenty years of writing about, in, from, around deafness³—most often the answer given is either “language—the use of ASL” or, even more simple (yet, paradoxically, complex), “attitude.” And suddenly, there you are again, in another dark and thick forest without a working compass: “What kind of attitude?” you have to wonder. And then: “Attitude? You want attitude? I’ll give you attitude!”

And what does it mean, anyway, to locate the choice position within the capital D? Is this not also an attitude of assault and an oppression—a dominance of one way of thinking (epistemology) and being (ontology) over another? This think-between space between “deaf” and “Deaf” is a rock and a hard place for Deaf Studies. I wonder what happens, then, if we work to squeeze (more) in there? What if we don’t “draw the line” on, around, through, or under where someone is (and isn’t) “culturally deaf” or not? What if we stop footnoting and explaining and educating them—meaning largely hearing people—again and again and again? For almost thirty years now, we’ve learned to chant, from almost rote memorization, when we explain the “difference” between little d and big D deafness. But they never seem to hear a word of any of this, and so we go on footnoting and explaining and educating about the distinctions between “Deaf” and “deaf.” If a (deaf) tree falls in the (hearing) forest, does anyone then really “hear” it?

Can we create a new geometry, a new space for “deaf” (and, thus, “Deaf,” as well) to be in and for those trees to fall in? To answer such questions might be to enter more into questions of perspective. How, for example, might we follow both the dynamic flow and the static stance of terms like “deaf” while, along the way, working also to understand our culture’s long-standing cure-based obsessions with definitive causes and effects where deafness matters? What were—and are—the circumstances that create “deaf” or “Deaf” to begin with (and in continuance)? Whose testimony counts—and when and where and why and how—when it comes to authorizing d/Deaf identity or the “condition” of “deafness”?

What I am suggesting with these questions is that we might begin in Deaf Studies to push beyond the mere recitation of the “d/Deaf” pledge in our footnotes and to explore instead all the rhetorical situations that arise from the d/D distinctions, that bring the distinctions to bear, and that, most important, keep shifting them like an identity kaleidoscope in our own hands.

The (Deaf) Cyborg Space

Within the deaf kaleidoscope is the fragmented but also contained— and beautiful—image of the ever-shifting deaf cyborg. The seamed and seeming boundaries between “cure” and “control” in constructing the deaf cyborg body is a potent commonplace, especially for late-20th- and early-21st-century Deaf Studies. Obviously, this seamed space might be illustrated in the controversy over cochlear implants and the deaf cyborg who, borrowing on the cultural critic Donna Haraway’s terms, becomes the “hybrid of machine and organism,” the creation of “a creature of social reality as well as a creature of fiction” that has already “change[d] what counts as [deaf people’s] experience in the late twentieth century” (149).

What Haraway’s cyborg myth foretells is that deaf people and the deaf-world won’t likely disappear, implanted as alien others. This is, instead, likely to be a tale of “transgressed boundaries, potent fusions,” as Haraway’s cyborg myth suggests: the boundaries might change, cracks may well appear, life will likely occur in the between spaces, and yet the fusion will likely remain potent. At Gallaudet University, for example, officials have begun counting the number of their students who arrive now with cochlear implants, and, for each of the past years that they have been counting, the number has virtually doubled itself each year. In effect, the cochlear implant seems to be squaring itself as the technology advances and the next generation of young deaf and hard-of-hearing people comes of counting age. Even at Kendall School, the demonstration elementary school on the Gallaudet campus, education about the implant (for those who have them as well as for those who don’t) takes the form of several children’s books and a Barbie-like doll, “C.I. Joe” (who also happens to be African American). And at hearing-dominated state universities like my own (Ohio State University), the cochlear implant makes headlines as one of the major Friday feature stories in the campus newspaper—and this at a university that records only two students with cochlear implants (among the 54,000 enrolled here). Likewise, memoirs by authors with new cochlear implants have also now begun to crop up, like the new season of dandelions on the lawn of deafness (Chorost; Swiller; Thompson).

In Deaf Studies we might begin to rethink the potent fusions in the between spaces created by cochlear implants—between then (the past) and now (the present), as well as between now (the present) and then (the future). Tough, opportunistic, interesting, and sometimes even beautiful things grow in the cracks of structures seemingly well established and impenetrable; the cochlear implant cyborg might just be such a crack-dweller. It will take far more than an implant to make deaf identity (whatever it might be) go away. Like dandelions on the hearing lawn, deaf people greet the cultivated green with sunny color and tenacious bearing season after season, generation upon generation. Hearing aids have never pulled the rug entirely out from under deafness; eugenicists couldn’t, either (although they are tugging very hard again); and oral-focused educators mostly just continue to sweep things under the rug so that the house looks very tidy on the surface.

This is not to suggest that we should not worry. We should. We need only glance over our shoulders at the specter of those doctors during the Nazi era who had themselves (and important others) convinced that living a life with a disability was a life simply not worth living. Under such a...