Deaf and Disability Studies: Interdisciplinary Perspectives

Focus on Which (Deaf ) Space?

Focus on Which (Deaf) Space? Identity and Belonging among Deaf Women in New Delhi, India Michele Friedner Keywords Activism; Anthropology; Class; Family; Gender; Identity; Location; Organizations In our increasingly globalized world, identity and belonging often transcend the trappings of place and space. Recent academic writing has stressed the importance of going beyond the local and exploring the emergence of transnational identities and communities (e.g., Appadurai 1993, 2001; Keck and Sikkink 1998). This emphasis on transnational identity has become important to theorizing not only Deaf 1 communities but also Deaf culture, as evidenced by Jan-Kare Breivik’s Deaf Identities in the Making: Local Lives, Transnational Connections, published in 2005. In particular, Breivik contends that Deaf people must be understood beyond familial and 48 Portions of this article appeared in an article titled “Identity Formation and the Black Box of Discourse” in the Centre for Women’s Development Studies’ Indian Journal of Gender Studies, Vol. 15, No. 2, May–August 2008, pp. 365–85, published by Sage Publications. The author wishes to thank the IJGS and Sage for generously permitting her to reprint pieces of the article. The author would like to thank Alison Kafer, Susan Burch, Renu Addlakha, Gillian Hart, and the members of the 2007 spring Geographies of Development seminar for their generous feedback and comments. In addition, and most important, the author would like to thank Nassozi Kiyaga and all the wonderful women of DFDW for their time, patience, and unyielding support. Focus on Which (Deaf) Space? 49 national territorial frameworks. By focusing on the ways that Deaf people across the globe are similar, he identifies his scope as a global one, and he stresses the importance of events such as the Deaf Olympics and World Deaf Congress meetings in creating a transnational deaf community (also see Haualand 2007). Breivik’s work fits nicely within the current canon of Deaf Studies (e.g., Lane, Hoffmeister, and Bahan 1996; Ladd 2003; Padden and Humphries 2006), which privileges a uniform and homogenous Deaf identity unfettered by the trappings of place and space; not coincidentally, the majority (if not all) of this work is situated in the global North and tends to ignore the experiences and life worlds of those residing elsewhere. It seems to me, then, that within this current social, political, and analytical moment, a useful intervention within such a canon is to look at locally situated (Deaf) life worlds and practices to carve out an analytical space for exploring differences; the trick is to do so without fetishizing the local as a space of pure difference (Mohan and Stokke 2000). In this sense, I find Doreen Massey’s work to be particularly productive because she compels us to look at the intermingling and co-constitution of the global and the local: “What we need, it seems to me, is a global sense of the local, a global sense of place” (Massey 1994, 156). Through looking at how these spaces—both the local and the global—are produced through everyday interactions, we can therefore avoid trafficking in sameness and homogeneous identities; there is analytical room for examining difference. In this essay, I use qualitative data collected from fieldwork conducted from 2003 to 2009 at a Deaf women’s organization in New Delhi (the Delhi Foundation of Deaf Women, or DFDW), an annual nationwide conference of Deaf women held in New Delhi, and visits with DFDW-affiliated Deaf women and their families. My goal is to explore how these women position themselves, and are positioned, through creating and traversing multiple spaces, including both the public space of rehabilitation organizations and the domestic space of families and homes. Through exploring themes of family, belonging, and Deaf identity, I attempt to track how meaning is created in two particular spaces, the public and the domestic, and how these spaces overlap. I use the analytic of public and domestic spaces (in the forms of institutions and nongovernmental organizations for the former and the family and natal or marital home for the latter) because this framework remains common both within Deaf Studies (which situates Deaf identity 50 Michele Friedner within public space) and within social science works written on contemporary life in India (a pervasive fragment left over from Nationalist imaginaries ). Part of my argument, however, is that such a rigid binary positioning of public and domestic spheres is limited and does not do justice to the life worlds of the...