The Social Condition of Deaf People

The Story of a Woman and a Hearing Society

Sara Trovato, Anna Folchi, Sara Trovato, Anna Folchi

• Verlag: De Gruyter Mouton
• Jahr: 2022
• ISBN:
  9783110763201
• Auflage: 1
• Thema: Languages & Linguistics
• Thema: Sign Language

This book is about the social condition of Deaf people, told through a Deaf woman's autobiography and a series of essays investigating how hearing societies relate to Deaf people.
Michel Foucault described the powerful one as the beholder who is not seen. This is why a Deaf woman's perspective is important: Minorities that we don't even suspect we have power over observe us in turn. Majorities exert power over minorities by influencing the environment and institutions that simplify or hinder lives: language, mindsets, representations, norms, the use of professional power.
Based on data collected by Eurostat, this volume provides the first discussion of statistics on the condition of Deaf people in a series of European countries, concerning education, labor, gender. This creates a new opportunity to discuss inequalities on the basis of data. The case studies in this volume reconstruct untold moments of great advancement in Deaf history, successful didactics supporting bilingualism, the reasons why Deaf empowerment for and by Deaf people does and does not succeed. A work of empowerment is effective if it acts on a double level: the community to be empowered and society at large, resulting in a transformation of society as a whole. This book provides instruments to work towards such a transformation.

Conclusion

Anna and Sara, a Deaf and hearing woman, wrote this book together, with the intention to cross the lines.

As Virginia Volterra underlined (chapter 11a), Anna has been a bridge between two worlds. She has always been a participant in the hearing world – in work, in research – but coming from a Deaf family, she has been a native signer, she has studied and interpreted Deaf culture, she has been a leader of the Deaf community. Anna loves to share what she discovers in books with Deaf people – and she has presented her findings in dozens of conferences in sign language packed with hundreds of Deaf people.

Anna wanted her story to be written for hearing and Deaf people to be able to read it. Besides Anna’s story, to be found in the “a” chapters, the reader has read in these pages a series of essays, the “b” chapters.

A minimal objective of the essay chapters was to realize a non-discriminatory research. Their most realistic objective was to provide the reader with solutions and reflections on how to improve the participation of Deaf people to as varied institutions as education – from primary school to university and research –, labor market, cultural institutions, and political institutions. The maximal objective of the essay chapters in this book was to contribute to the foundation of a sociology of deafness that might be able to find its place within the broader domain of sociology (chapter 9b) – with the higher standards that sociology proper, as compared to advocacy, adopts.

As far as the first objective, the “minimal” one, non-discriminatory research, is concerned, Kenneth D. Bailey (1978) indicates that research with disadvantaged communities should not 1. exclude such groups from research; 2. reinforce and perpetuate stereotypes; 3. deny heterogeneity within the group; 4. amplify differences between privileged and disadvantaged groups; 5. distort research results; 6. be a research that is conducted approximately. As readers will go through these conclusive pages, they might keep these objectives in mind, as they will justify a series of theoretical choices.

These conclusions will be mostly centered on synthesizing the content of this book along the lines of the second objective, the “most realistic” one: providing solutions and reflections on how to include Deaf people in institutions that belong to them as citizens.

As to the third objective, the “maximal” one, contributing to founding a sociology of deafness – well, the reader that will go through these conclusions will agree that its achievement depends on the success in achieving the second objective.

Let us synthetize, then, the conclusions that can be drawn from this book.

The Deaf condition, quantitatively (chapters 3b 6b 10b 13b)

This is the first publication providing an idea about the aggregated condition of deaf¹ people in a series of European countries and allowing to compare what institutions do and do not achieve for them in each country considered.

Institutions are more or less performant, and one could not hold responsible a non-performing system specifically for its deaf students’ less-than-good results, when hearing students also perform poorly, or for its deaf workers unemployment, when also hearing workers are equally unemployed. As a consequence, deaf and hearing data have been compared within the same educational or labor system, that is, one has to compare deaf and hearing data within each country.

This has led to consider societies somehow as variables, and deaf persons as constants. This is, if any, a move in Montesquieu’s Persian Letters’ style, that is, switching perspectives and considering as strange and new the “obvious” hearing society that everyone is accustomed to. To be more precise, more than a constant, the achievements of deaf persons have been considered as a dependent variable, while societies were observed to vary, in their policies, to determine variations in deaf persons achievements.

Inequalities do exist between deaf and hearing people: they exist in access to higher levels of education, in the choice among educational fields, in the access to professions, especially to the ones that exert social power. But, and this is the most important result of data analyses, the evidence that some European societies have indeed achieved considerable results in education (chapters 3b, 10b) and in labor (chapter 6b) implies that there is no crystallized social injustice against deaf people, but rather, solutions exist that some countries have achieved, others have not.

Another result is that many considerable social cleavages are not to be found between deaf and hearing people, but between men and women, or among people with different educational level, irrespective of whether they are hearing or deaf (chapter 13b). The distinctions between deaf and hearing people split society according to categories that are not always confirmed by social data. In particular, deaf and hearing people share the same condition, even more so than deaf and disabled people do (where “disabled” does not include deaf; chapters 3b, 6b, 9b).

This shows that the attitude which insists uniquely on the contrast between deaf and hearing people is not justified: social injustice is to be found along other distinctive lines: gender, educatio...