Lend Me Your Ear: Rhetorical Constructions of Deafness

Chapter 5 The Coming Out of Deaf Culture: Repeating, Reversing, Revising Rhetorics

142 Deafness as Pathology belt. What I do intend is to illustrate just how pervasively-and often implicitly , subversively; and deeply-the paradigm of that syllogism runs throughout the field of audiology, saturating the apprentice in ways that leave her little chance to think about how or how much she is, in fact, being saturated. I might say the same-and perform the same kind ofanalysis with this same syllogism as my center-on the history of rhetoric and rhetoric textbooks. It is worth repeating here once more: the will to speech commands rhetoric as much as it does audiolo~ 31. See respectively Bess and Humes, Audiology; Katz, Handbook ofClinical Audiology ; Newby and Popelka, Audiology; and Newby, Audiology. 32. Scheetz, Orientation to Deafness, p. 255. 33. Kuhn, Structure ofScientific Revolution, p. 23. 34. Ibid., p. 24. 35. Scheetz, Orientation to Deafness, p. 255. 36. Farrell, "Knowledge, Consensus, and Rhetorical Theory," p. 11. 37. See the chapter epigraphs as well as Katz, Handbook ofClinicalAudiology, and Scheetz, Orientation to Deafness, most profoundly among the textbooks I analyze , for the perspective that to be human is to engage the acoustics oforality. 38. I dwell more critically on trends in deaf education in chapter 2. 39. Scheetz, Orientation to Deafness, pp. 50,137-38,145,175,146,175,214. 40. Ong, Orality and Literacy, pp. 69, 72. 41. Oliver, Politics ofDisablement, p. x. 42. As befits this particular scene, the word"infant" derives from the Latin infans (by way of the Old French enfant), which literally means "unable to speak." 43. Laura, 2 October 1997. 44. Gwen, 13 March 1996. 45. Helen, 2 October 1997. 46. Stone, The Disabled State, pp. 104-7. 47. Gwen, 13 March 1996. 48. In another research project in progress, "Women, Authority, Deafness," I dwell on the nature ofthe female authority ofthe audiologist (and sign language interpreters , deaf educators, and deafwomen professionals as well). 49. These comments were made by audiology students Stacy, Laura, Amy, Laura, Kate, and Helen (all interviewed 2 October 1997). Diagnosing Deafness 143 50. The "feminine" and "authoritative" qualities audiologists have discussed in interviews include having good listening skills, "people" skills, and interactive skills; paying attention to "gut" feelings; trusting the patient over the textbook; being flexible; using "backdoor" types of authority; adapting self to the patient ; borrowing authority from one's "master"; meshing all forms of authority to create one's own; giving up authority in order to gain it; adopting a confident persona (regardless of one's actual feelings); working well on a team; being able to "read" relationships; avoiding confrontation; desiring to help others; and not requiring one-or the-answer for a given problem. In addition , these female audiologists also spoke candidly of the threats to their authority , many ofwhich they claimed were related to their sex. 51. Aristotle, On Rhetoric 2.1.5; translated in Bizzell and Herzberg, The Rhetorical Tradition, p. 161. 52. For a provocative critique of science as master-myth, see Donna Haraway's Simians, Cyborgs, and W0men, especially chapters 8 and 9: ''A Cyborg Manifesto " and "Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege ofPartial Perspective." 53. Gross, Rhetoric ofScience, p. 11. 54. Stacy, 2 October 1997. 55. For a discussion ofthe rhetoric ofscience as it exists in "taxonomic language," see Gross, Rhetoric ofScience, pp. 33-53. 56. Scheetz, Orientation to Deafness, p. 47. 57. Gwen, 13 March 1996. 58. Kate, 2 October 1997. 59. These long-standing classifications-mild, moderate, severe, profound-mirror with remarkable faithfulness the classifications for mental retardation so popular in the 1940s and 1950s (just as audiology was developing as a field). So, too, the audiogram looks much like a map drawn of intellectual capabilities in order to assess one's degree ofretardation; normalcy is the baseline here as well. These similarities seem far from coincidental. 60. Newby and Popelka, Audiology, p. 454. 61. Bess and Humes, Audiology, p. 259. 62. Newby and Popelka, Audiology, pp. 455-56. 63. The academic discourse on "the cyborg" and "the body and/in technology" has begun to flow freely from numerous academic presses. While this scholarship is exciting, meaningful, nuanced, and even fascinating, it oddly-time and time again-neglects the "obvious" cyborg, that ofthe disabled body. See, e.g., Hables-Gray, The Cyborg Handbook; Wilson and Laennec, Bodily Discursions; 144 Deafness as Pathology Terry and Urla, Deviant Bodies; Terry and Calvert, Processed Lives; Balsamo, Technologies o/the Gendered Body...