Introduction: How Representation Matters

Marginalized people have long been concerned with how they are depicted. As Dipti Desai notes, dominant representations often reinforce stereotypes that the majority has about a marginalized group and members of a disempowered group can easily internalize dominant representations and see themselves as inferior. Deaf people are no exception, and yet representation of deafness brings with it an intriguing range of complications, from the wide diversity among deaf people to the centrality of questions around communication, which opens up topics of language and power. This special issue offers a glimpse of some exciting current work on deafness and representation in a variety of historical, cultural, and linguistic contexts, adding to our understanding of this rich topic and pointing the way for future scholarship.

In the case of deaf people, dominant representations clearly can reinforce stereotypes that the hearing majority has about them. Back in 1884, the famed hearing inventor Alexander Graham Bell, who had a deaf mother and deaf wife, noted in an address that hearing Americans “rarely see a deaf-mute, and their information concerning them is chiefly derived from books and periodicals,” which cause them to form “incorrect ideas” (43). He pointed to the power of published writing to shape public perceptions, and today we can add film, television, the World Wide Web, and other media texts to the influential representational mix. Since deafness is invisible and many hearing people believe they do not know any deaf people, their perception of them is almost certainly shaped (perhaps unconsciously) through representations they encounter.

Those perceptions can have wide-ranging and at times devastating implications for deaf people. We live in a world in which those who communicate non-normatively are frequently the victims of abuse or violence. Societies sometimes interpret not speaking in a standard way as a signal of a lower intelligence or of not being fully human. These misperceptions, perpetuated by representations that do not authentically engage with deaf experience or responsibly present signed languages and other non-standard communicative modalities as valid, contribute to the common language deprivation among deaf children during the critical years of language acquisition, which can delay language and thinking skills (Humphries et al.) and even lead to later heart disease (“Gallaudet”). Such representations likely play a role in the unemployment of about half of adult deaf Americans under the age of sixty-five,¹ and in some cases can even be fatal, as evidenced by the 2017 killing of Magdiel Sanchez, a deaf Latino who was shot and killed by police in his front yard when he did not respond in expected ways to their verbal commands (Doubek). The broader understanding of marginalized experience that representations of deafness create (or fail to create) can play a role in making the lives of deaf people, in all of our diversity, possible.

Second, and equally important, deaf people can internalize dominant representations of their group and see themselves as inferior. We could give many examples: for instance, if a deaf child who does not speak vocally and does not know any other deaf people sees a prominent representation of a deaf person who speaks, that child’s self-esteem and sense of herself can be immeasurably impacted. Far from being insignificant, representations carry a great deal of relevance.

Small wonder that deaf people have struggled to express their sense of themselves to the public at large. A recognition of the significance of shaping these stories has caused deaf people to seek out and create these opportunities across time and cultural contexts in a range of modalities including published writing, films dating back to the early twentieth century, theatrical productions from Helen Keller’s vaudeville shows to the later productions of the National Theater of the Deaf or Deaf West Theatre, and an immense body of YouTube, TikTok, and Twitter content. Deaf people have turned to representation as a means of empowerment, to be recognized and understood, and to share our individual and collective senses of ourselves more accurately with the general public.

Representation, in short, matters. And yet, “deafness” does not straightforwardly exist as an independently realized quantity in...