Women and Deafness: Double Visions

Reading Deaf Women: Editors’ Introduction

Editors’ Introduction The broad theme of this section is the body as a vehicle for cultural manifestation. The essays here explore various corporal characteristics in the expression of Deaf and gendered identity. Brueggemann illustrates the creative, authoritative space offered by deafness for two women during what was an otherwise particularly disadvantaged age for deaf people (the turn of the twentieth century). Forced away from teaching because of their hearing losses, the Allen sisters’ deafness actually became the shaping force that allowed them to maintain—via the double vision of their shared photographic art—a self-sufficient, authorized, and meaningful space in the hearing world. Harmon’s work, like Brueggemann’s, traverses the boundaries between Deaf and hearing worlds, describing negotiated space and the challenge of language barriers. This first-person account offers an exploration of cultural identity that blends the publicprivate , Deaf-hearing, and religious-secular worlds. In contrast, Kelly focuses on Deaf women and language issues. Her essay explores how five Deaf female ASL teachers define terms such as ‘‘gender,’’ ‘‘feminism,’’ ‘‘sex,’’ and ‘‘patriarchy’’ in ASL and English. The results of her study suggest the need to raise ‘‘female consciousness’’ among Deaf women and the significance of incorporating feminist terms into ASL teaching. The ethnographies by Harmon and Kelly both provide first-hand observations on (Deaf/gendered) identity and (Deaf/gendered) language. Employing feminist and film theory, Nelson assesses language and the body from a perspective outside the Deaf community by examining two Hollywood depictions of deaf or mute women. Her critique of ‘‘muteness envy,’’ further extended in her argument to ‘‘linguistic envy,’’ reveals powerful links between idealized silence and sexual control. Films such as 167 168 Part Three The Piano and Children of a Lesser God, she argues, ‘‘are ultimately about the colonial struggle over the envy of language, art, body, voice, and self, as played out on a gendered stage.’’ Burch complements and complicates Nelson’s line of thought here by assessing the rise and continued popularity of American Deaf beauty contests throughout the twentieth century. These competitions primarily emphasized the physicality of women while denying or downplaying their Deaf cultural identity. At the same time, such pageants challenge prevalent notions of ‘‘the perfect body’’ exhibited by mainstream beauty contests. Taken together, the five essays in this section critique literal bodies and ‘‘voices’’ of deaf women, questioning definitions of beauty, success, normalcy, cultural Deafness, and hearing. ‘‘Reading,’’ as a highly visual activity, has additional meaning in the Deaf world, and the chapters in this section demonstrate new interpretations for their fields (history, ethnography, rhetoric, and American studies ) by rereading women’s bodies with a Deaf cultural lens. Through such rereading, a relationship with the audience (the ones who are ‘‘reading’’) plays an important role. How ‘‘Deaf’’ and ‘‘female’’ becomes read in each of these five essays—and the audience/reader’s active role in that reading and shaping of deafness, gender, language, body—is a key process taken up in the chapters of this section. Performance and the role of media also figure prominently in these works, as the connections between (Deaf/ gendered) language and the (Deaf/gendered) body play on various stages and are delivered via various media. Finally, by emphasizing multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary approaches, the authors of these essays also promote methodological models that blur traditional boundaries, double our critical vision, and encourage us to ask new questions about the implications of gender and deafness. Q  C • How do media affect the representation and expression of identity/ies? • What are the relationships among language, identity, and the body that are highlighted in these essays? • How is the relationship and space between the subject of these essays and the self (of the author/scholar writing the essay) negotiated methodologically and stylistically? Editors’ Introduction 169 • What roles do the audiences play in the performance of gender, identity, language, and deafness in these essays? How is deafness or gender performed and also read visually in the spaces and scenes presented by these authors? ...