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

Introduction

Introduction Before we can understand the historically and culturally specific context that underlies how people who are deaf are conceptualized and treated as being disabled and before we can understand the violence, overt and symbolic, that these views and actions have wreaked on those damned by their difference, we must set the scene. We must understand how and why the current Western view of the cosmos came to rely on the conceptual division of humanity into the normal and the pathological, the ablebodied and the disabled. The cultural construction of the concept the disabled did not occur overnight but was formed and transformed by the peculiar cultural conditions associated with the gradual development of capitalist democracies. A society that asserts, on the one hand, that all people are born equal, that all individuals are equal before the law, and that all individuals are free to access the boundless resources of their society and yet, on the other hand, is characterized by enduring structured inequalities—of social class, gender, age, race, ethnicity, and ability—demands very complex ideological practices to ensure that its citizens continue to have faith in progress and in those at the helm. The concept of people who are disabled has been constructed as an integral part of that ideological practice. We seek to unearth the themes that underlie the bewildering variations of history, to discover the conceptual unity in the diversity of cultural practice. Our historical overview, like the book as a whole, centers on the historical transformation of British culture and society. But politicians are the ones bound by the imagined community that is the nation, not intellectuals or, indeed, those entrepreneurs who drove the world headlong into modernity. Thus, attention will and must be drawn also to 3 developments across the English Channel and, later, across the seas into colonies, the Empire, and the New World. First, however, we must map the stage on which the actors in the emerging battle of the sciences developed new cosmologies, new views of the world and humanity’s place in it. These new cosmologies emerged in conjunction with dramatic changes in the way people not only thought about one another but also interacted with one another. They are associated with the breakdown of societies based on communal identities and communal needs and the emergence of individualistic societies focusing on the accumulation of individual wealth. The Feudal Community in the Middle Ages Feudal society in Britain through the first half of the second millennium was made up of communities based on personalized, face-to-face relationships .1 A person’s identity was not individualized but bound to family and community. The responsibilities of master for servant, whether observed or neglected, whether kindly or ruthlessly exploitative, extended across generations and involved far more than payment for immediate services rendered. People were born no more equal than they are today, but the inequalities were assumed inevitable, a normal aspect of society. Without communal associations, a person had no socially sanctioned identity, no honor. To be cast out of the community was a fate worse than death itself. It was the death of self, condemnation to a terrifying individuality , expulsion beyond the boundary of the community—the town, the village, the fief, the monastery—into the wilderness. The feudal lord used the labor of those bound to him to produce tangible products such as food, crafts, and military service. In return, he or occasionally she was expected to provide for the basic personal needs of those who served him or her, to provide housing, assistance with costs for ceremonies associated with life-cycle rituals (birth, marriage, death) and seasonal rituals (harvest, Christmas), and generally to provide support in time of crisis. Some lords were ruthless and cruel in the exercise of their authority and neglectful in the fulfillment of their obligations, but the general form of the relationship was recognized by all. Although families were expected to care for kin whatever their condition , poverty was rife, and many families could not care for those who were unproductive. The fate of people who were crippled, deaf, blind, 4 a historical overview deformed, mentally retarded, or mentally disturbed depended entirely on the circumstances of their kin and of the community into which they were born. Although a crippled weaver might continue as a full and productive member of his or her family and community, a crippled farm laborer might be...