Damned for Their Difference: The Cultural Construction of Deaf People as Disabled

Preface

Preface Over the last decade, the public has been growing more aware of the fact that deaf people have been discriminated against and that approaches toward the nature and use of sign languages lie at the heart of these discriminatory processes. The driving force in the cultivation of this growing awareness has been the rebirth of concepts of Deaf Culture, Deaf Pride, and the Deaf Way among signing deaf people throughout the Western world.1 National dictionaries of sign languages have been developed ,2 sign languages have been included in school and university curricula , departments of sign language studies and deaf studies have been set up in universities, and the activities of the World Federation of the Deaf have caught the attention and imagination of governments and the wider public. But little analysis has been done to determine why attitudes and behavior toward deaf people have been so discriminatory, why deaf people have been robbed again and again of their pride in their own sensibilities and languages. What analysis has been done has focused either on the textual and visual imagery of prejudice and discrimination—images in literature, the arts, and the cinema—or on somewhat narrowly focused histories of deaf education. Neither the textual studies nor the histories of deaf education place their analyses in their wider cultural, social, and historical contexts. The textual studies, often pursued in the context of cultural studies, fail to consider how these discriminatory texts about deaf people relate to wider discriminatory discursive processes with respect to ability, gender, race, ethnicity, or social class, and they rarely place their analyses in an historical context. The histories of deaf education similarly fail to place their histories in wider historical contexts to ix understand developments associated with the transformation of deaf education in terms of wider pedagogical and philosophical movements. In stark contrast to, for example, Foucault’s histories of insane asylums, medical clinics, prisons, and sexuality, these histories of deaf education also do not consider their particular case studies of the history of deaf education in relation to the wider conceptual transformations of the societies in which they are set. We will explore the cultural construction of deaf people as “disabled ,” the construction and marginalization of deaf people as a minority group, in both its current and historical dimensions by exercising what C. Wright Mills called a “sociological imagination,” which involves the integrated study of social structure, history, and biography (Mills 1970). We will place significant people and events in their wider cultural contexts, proceeding through the book to examine the orientations toward and the treatment of deaf people, primarily in Britain, in the context of the new philosophy of the seventeenth century; the scientific rationalism and the middle-class thirst for reason through education in the eighteenth century; the “moral therapy” and missionary zeal of the educators of the poor in the first half of the nineteenth century; the professionalism and bureaucratization coupled with imperialism, evolutionism , and eugenicism that dominated the second half of the nineteenth century; eugenicism and the increasing alliances among professionalization, medicalization , and bureaucracy through the wars of the first half of the twentieth century; the rebellious and even revolutionary moves against the restrictions imposed on individuality and creativity through the 1960s and 1970s; the widespread deinstitutionalization through the 1980s; and the multiculturalism as well as the assertion of ethnic rights and identities through the 1990s. The exploration of the concept of disability lays bare the contours of our society because the construction of a pathological population is at the core of the construction of every other person’s “normal” subjectivity , as they define, understand, justify, and console themselves in relation to this embodied other. All peoples evaluate, all categorize, but the question we must ask is Why these categories in this society at this stage x preface of our history? Deafness, lameness, blindness, myopia, autism are only labeled and signaled as disabilities if these conditions run counter to the sensory and physical expectations and demands of the society. In a Deaf community, a hearing person who cannot sign is disabled, handicapped. In a hunter-gatherer society, a myopic person is intensely disabled, more so than by deformity of limb, face, or speech. Depending on the society, to be hairless or hairy, pale or dark, fat or thin might be an intense disability , a barrier to marriage or to effective membership within society. Conditions categorized in...