Women and Deafness: Double Visions

Introduction

Introduction Skirting the Issues Women and Deafness We began our work on this volume by skirting the issues. As early as 2000 we were having conversations with each other about the absence of published intersectional scholarship in Deaf studies generally. To our knowledge, no single volume of work and even very few articles or essays existed that blended, compared, or complicated what it meant to be deaf and female. Whatever the many and complicated reasons might be, gender studies has typically skirted deafness even as Deaf studies has largely skirted gender. If Deaf studies has typically skirted (gone around) gender, then what would it mean to put a skirt on (feminize) Deaf studies? And if women’s studies had traditionally not given ‘‘voice’’ (a common metaphor used in much feminist theory and women’s studies scholarship) to deafness and Deaf identity, then what would it mean to give ‘‘Deaf eyes’’ to women’s studies? These were the mirrored and twinned questions that generated this volume. Martha Sheridan (1995) took up the double-bound absence of intersections between women’s studies and Deaf studies, between Deaf identities and female identities, in her essay ‘‘Deaf Women Now: Establishing Our Niche.’’ Sheridan discussed issues such as the ‘‘social status of deaf women’’; the biases deaf women likely face with health care and other social services; the strengths of deaf women, including the 1982 formation of a women’s caucus within the National Association of the Deaf (NAD) and an international organization, Deaf Women United (DWU), formed vii viii Introduction in 1985; the lack of research and theory in this intersected area (at the time she found ‘‘only four articles focusing on Deaf women . . . in the professional literature’’ (386); and how it is that ‘‘we can begin to transform the social inequities that Deaf women have endured’’ through various commitments to change. This volume supports the commitment to change that Sheridan expressed . To encourage the intersections of these areas and to gauge how audiences might respond to such an intersection, over the past five years we put together several conference panels that focused on women and, or in relation to, d/Deaf identities, Deaf culture, or communities of deaf people. We skirted the issues first at four conferences: the March 2001 Gender and Disability Studies conference held at Rutgers University, the October 2003 Feminism(s) and Rhetoric(s) conference held at Ohio State University; the June 2003 Society for Disability Studies meeting; and the June 2004 National Women’s Studies Association Conference. Interactions at these four key events—as well as in our own teaching and other academic arenas where we shared our work with historians, rhetoricians, language and literary scholars, and disability studies comrades— convinced us all the more of both the need and the potential for a book that would bring together women and deafness. Our goals are three: first, to make use of and build further a bridge between women’s studies and Deaf studies; second, to engage a wide and diverse audience of both scholars and students in those two fields; and third, to open up new territory for each of these two areas while also encouraging more traffic between them. S B This book places women and deafness in shared but also distinct frames because the two are not always one and the same thing (and we return to this point later). Deaf women—as well as women in relation to deafness —are represented and studied in this volume as blurred but distinguishable identities and experiences operating in complex spheres, sometimes complementary, sometimes conflicting. These complex spheres are political, public, personal, private, domestic, economic, institutional , linguistic, and relational. As an interdisciplinary volume, the Introduction ix contents here represent research and methodological approaches from sociology , ethnography, literary/film studies, history, rhetoric, education, and public health. In reflection of this disciplinary diversity, readers will find that the chapters here employ different citation formats; stylistic choices with text and tone also may vary across the disciplinary presentations . The sites—the spaces and places—for the studies gathered in this particular collection are largely American (with the exception of Plann’s chapter on Spanish deaf education in the last half of the nineteenth century ), and they range from around 1800 to the present day while also locating their subject(s) in many different regional, local, economic, and institutional settings. We set out to explore the intersectionality of identities...