Deaf Subjects

Front matter

deaf subjects between identities and places brenda jo brueggemann

Deaf Subjects

CULTURAL FRONT General Editor: Michael Bérubé

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: The Deaf Subject Places Herself

American Sign Language and the Academy: The Little Language That Could

Introduction

The Deaf Subject Places Herself

When a thing ceases to be a subject of controversy, it ceases to be a subject of interest.

—William Hazlitt, The Spirit of Controversy

The deaf subject, the subject of “deafness,” is of interest—without cease and with considerable controversy of late. Lately, the deaf subject is also anxious. She is anxious about her identity, anxious about her place, anxious too about her anxiety. Attempting to cope with her anxiety, she tries to remember what some philosophers and great authors have told her about her subjectivity, her anxiety, and the placing and questioning of her very identity. Wittgenstein whispers to her (and she reads his lips) that “the subject does not belong to the world; rather, it is a limit of the world” (70, 5.632). Anxiously, then, she wonders a lot these days about the limits of her subject, the limits of her world. She wonders, for example, about such subject matters as how to define “deaf”; whether “Deaf” (capitalized) is useful anymore;' whether deaf people are an “endangered species;”? what her relationship is with other subjects of difference and/ or disability; how much, if at all, her languages, signed or written, belong to her own hands; who writes her history, and why; what her role and place is in the academy; how technologies—of both communication and biomedicine—are changing the shape of her mouth, her mind, her morphology; and how, as the American deaf subject (particularly as a white American subject), she represents the world of deaf subjects even though she is more unlike the rest of the deaf world than perhaps ever before.

She finds herself placed, then, between on many matters of her identity, and she wonders how she feels about this. She notes how that between space is one of longing, yet also one of belonging, and one, too, of limits. She paces in this anxious between space.

In addressing her anxiety over these and other subjects, Freud seems to want to help her. Freud assures her that her anxiety is okay, perhaps even necessary, though nevertheless potentially neurotic, as well. Anxiety, he signifies to her, is “the defensive behavior of the ego transfigured in a rational light” (166). Defensively, however, she sometimes distrusts the “rational light” as one shined on her subject by hearing behaviors that, it seems, more often than not seek to transfigure her. What she does understand, on both hands, from Freud is how “anxiety is . . . on the one hand an expectation of a trauma, and on the other a repetition of it in a mitigated form” (166-67). The very subject of her deafness has almost always been read—socially, educationally, linguistically, culturally, philosophically—as a trauma, both expected and repeated, both mitigated and amplified in the history of “reason” As a modern deaf subject in an age of considerable controversy and interest over her identity and subjectivity, she has also begun not only to understand but also to make use of Freud’s analysis that “anxiety is the original reaction to helplessness in the trauma and is reproduced later in the danger-situation as a signal for help” (167).

These days, she signals more for help, actively engaging her (former) helplessness and meeting a “danger-situation” more head, and hands, on. Given the menaces she has found herself faced with lately, she is coming now to understand James Baldwin’s engagement with identity (and its politics) as she often dons her own chosen identity:

An identity is questioned only when it is menaced, as when the mighty begin to fall, or when the wretched begin to rise, or when the stranger enters the gates, never, thereafter, to be a stranger. . . . Identity would seem to be the garment with which one covers the nakedness of the self: in which case, it is best that the garment be loose, a little like the robes of the desert, through which one’s nakedness can always be felt, and sometimes, discerned. This trust in one’s nakedness is all that gives one the power to change one’s robes. (“The Devil Finds Work,’ 606-7)

To be sure, she gathers the robes of identity perhaps a little too tightly at the moment, cinching her own waist pseudo-slim, as when the media refrain of “not deaf enough” binds her (both to and against others) in the

2006 protests at Gallaudet University over the selection of a new president. But she is learning more these days about not just her nakedness but also what robes she looks best in, what places she should wear which garment, when and how to change the outfit. She reads more of James Baldwin and nods, knowingly, when he tells her that “an identity would seem to be arrived at by the way in which the person faces and uses his experience” (“No Name in the Street”). She's facing, and placing, her experience these days, anxiously and defensively shaping her identity, transfiguring her own rational light.

But still: she is not always sure who her audience is. She often feels caught between potential and real audiences—deaf, hard-of-hearing, and hearing alike. And this too is a considerable source of anxiety, since it is hard to shape one’s subject and self without some sense of one’s audience. On the one hand, she knows that what her hand offers, what she writes, will be read by other deaf subjects. She addresses them, then, calls them forth as subjects too. Yet, because her subject—that of deaf identity, anxiety, and place—is also a subject of language, community, “reason,” voice, experience, resistance, otherness, power, and more, she also understands that she will invariably invoke other audiences. Perhaps at times defensively but always carefully and rhetorically, she seeks, then, to actively engage and directly address (not just invoke) more than (and less than) other deaf subjects. She wants, yes, to be heard. Yet, she realizes that she will also have to teach them how to listen.

Deaf but deftly then, shell need to change the subject some; she'll need new metaphors.

A Commonplace Book of the Deaf Subject

These essays constitute my commonplace book on “the deaf subject; particularly the modern deaf subject since the turn of the 19th century— the subject that has more often than not found itself between. In Greek rhetoric and education, the topoi were the “topics of invention” that later became, in Roman education, the locus communis (“commonplaces”) for discovering the best means for one’s argument. The topoi were templates and heuristics for inventing what one might say about a subject. Later, around the 15th century and primarily in England, commonplace books (also known as “commonplaces”) were used by readers, writers, students—both famous and common—as collections, much like a modern scrapbook, for remembering pithy sayings or aphorisms, key concepts, facts, or events that one had learned, read, encountered. The practice of commonplace books dates back to the 5th century b.c.e. and the Sophist Protagoras (Anderson). Francis Bacon kept one, Thomas Jefferson kept two (one legal and one literary), John Locke wrote a book about how to keep a commonplace book, and Virginia Woolf references them in her own “Hours in a Library”:

[L]et us take down one of those old notebooks which we have all, at one time or another, had a passion for beginning. Most of the pages are blank, it is true; but at the beginning we shall find a certain number very beautifully covered with a strikingly legible hand-writing. Here we have written down the names of great writers in their order of merit; here we have copied out fine passages from the classics; here are lists of books to be read; and here, most interesting of all, lists of books that have actually been read, as the reader testifies with some youthful vanity by a dash of red ink. (25)

Like any commonplace collection, mine is not complete. There is surely some telling vanity in dashes of my own (metaphoric) red ink. There are also surely blank pages—places where I’ve left off or let go or still don't know what to write or just grew weary, even wary, of my subject. I only gesture toward cochlear implants in passing over other matters of technology and anxiety, for example. This is not because I believe that cochlear implants are undeserving of a place in my book or that they are not connected to, or manifested from, the betweenness issues of identity, anxiety, and place that concern my deaf subject everywhere. They are. But implanting rhetoric—the rhetoric of the cochlear implant—is perhaps a topic worthy of its own commonplace book. What’s more, the big smoke of the cochlear implant often obscures many smaller fires long burning or newly lit around the deaf subject and her technology. I also do not take on, directly, the subject of the 2006 protests at Gallaudet University regarding the selection of Gallaudet’s ninth president, even though I had a place, an identity, and considerable anxiety, too, in those events. The aftermath of those protests is still not sufficiently “after, and lava flows hot in the cracks that produced those volcanic events. It is still too hot to get in between those cracks.

I open this volume with an essay that cracks a common place for my own deaf identity while also offering a larger theory of “betweenity”

applied to the modern deaf subject. In five movements, this chapter offers a rhetorical analysis of four significant commonplaces for deaf people's identities and the field of “Deaf Studies” at the turn of the new century. First, I interrogate anxious efforts to separate and distinguish “deaf” and “disabled” and to uncouple the fraternal twins “deaf” and “Deaf? Second, I meet up with the new deaf cyborg, equipped with cochlear implants, digital hearing aids, and multiple forms of technologically savvy communication options such as video relay systems, e-mail, the Internet, and text-capable pagers. Third, I examine the radically changing nature of American Sign Language as it undergoes both shift and standardization, goes ever more global, and also comes significantly into the hands of (mostly hearing) students here in America who are eager to learn it as a “foreign” language. And, in my fourth commonplace, I trace Derrida to consider the relationship between writing (and) deafness. I end this chapter in a fifth movement, marking out a new epistemological and ontological between space, positing a place I call the “think-eye” space.

The second chapter illustrates the betweenity power and potential of American Sign Language (ASL) in the academy, wedged as it is between traditional letter-bound views of language and literature and a wave of 21st-century students who now actively engage in—and seek out—visual ways of learning. In this chapter, my use of the powerful little “I think I can” blue engine story helps place modern “deafness” in the institutional framework of larger academic language learning. I map the intricate and considerable—but also exciting—challenges and arguments that face the development of American Sign Language programs in the contemporary academy.

The third chapter also places modern deaf identity and language in the institutional framework of the production and reception of “literature” In 1910, George Veditz, then president of the National Association of the Deaf, capitalized on the technology of film to produce the “Sign Masters Series” featuring ten nationally known “master signers” in an effort to “preserve and advance” the tradition of American Sign Language, which he claimed we must “possess and jealously guard.” Almost one hundred years later, supported by a grant from the Battelle Endowment for Technology and Human Affairs (BETHA) at Ohio State University, we used new digital media technologies to re-enact the “Sign Master Series”—to digitally remaster the potential that exists in the creation, production, publication, and reception of sign language “literature.” Based largely on issues, elements, and challenges for the creative production and critical reception of ASL literature that were discussed during a historic three-hour forum with seven ASL author-performers and seven ASL literature critics, this chapter argues for a rhetorical approach and a digital future for American Sign Language literature.

In the fourth chapter, I offer a critical summary of the purpose, events, and key points of a three-day international conference sponsored by the Gallaudet University Press Institute and held November 2004 at Gallaudet University. I also discuss the “Deaf Lives” series I edit for Gallaudet University Press. The centerpiece of this essay pivots around “writing” (as a technology) and all that it has meant and does and can mean for narrating deaf lives. I also imagine how digital media, video, film documentary are all technologies that can increasingly be used to convey deaf life stories. These technologies now, more often than not, move deaf lives into the mainstream (where they are “heard” by more hearing people) while also helping convey deaf lives to other deaf lives; thus, these technologies are, in effect, the between space. Thematically, I also attend to the new commonplaces of deaf subjects in late-20th- and early-21st-century life narratives: diversity within the identity known as “deaf”; further representation of the complex relationship between deaf and hearing people; illustrations of the intertwined, and sometimes knotted, nature of individual and collective identities within “Deaf culture” or “the deaf community”; and anxiety over identity and place in the “deaf world” and as a deaf subject.

From here, I turn back. I also turn increasingly visual as the final three essays step back in time but also look forward in the way they combine visual material with my own words. In the fifth essay, I circle back to the earlier moments of “modern deaf identity,’ the turn of the last century. In this chapter, I also focus on the intersections of gender and deafness (where so little work has yet been done), as I examine the work of Mary and Frances Allen, two sisters who were first teachers but then went deaf in their early twenties and became fairly famous pictorial photographers. The Allen Sisters and their photography are contextualized in five interwoven commonplaces: their own brief biographies; the Deerfield, Massachusetts, arts and crafts community to which they belonged; women and photography at the turn of the 20th century; visual-rhetorical categorizations of the body of their photographic work; and their deafness in relation to their own lives and their location in time, gender, and geographical space.

Other famous deaf women at the turn of the 20th century have also caught my eye. In my sixth chapter, I offer a work of creative nonfiction that explores the world of Mabel Hubbard Bell, Alexander Graham Bell’s deaf wife. Because Mabel Bell (the original “Ma Bell”) was a voluminous letter writer herself, I engage her as a deaf subject by writing postcards to her. Each postcard comes with an image from the Bell family papers that sets up the subject of my post; each post includes lines from Mabel’s own letters. The postcards are both biographical and autobiographical (for I write myself alongside Mabel), critical yet friendly, fictional yet framed everywhere with facts. Although she herself deliberately chose not to associate with other deaf people in her lifetime, Mabel Bell may well be my classic case study, the quintessential “between” subject of modern deaf identity.

Rubbing against the era of Mabel Bell and the Allen Sisters, I end in a very hard between space. In my final essay, I also return to the concept of the commonplace. I come again to the topics of invention for an argument—anxious and awful—about identity. Here deafness is not always easy to see. But it is there in the cracks, gesturing from the shadows, of a dark moment in history. A colleague in Deaf Studies recently told me that my work with subjects like the Allen Sisters, Mabel Hubbard Bell, and the Nazi T-4 program (as it concerned “disability” more largely) might not really be “Deaf Studies” because technically it was work on “oral deaf people” and that he would “put that on the borders of Deaf Studies.” I appreciated his efforts to clarify how he defined the field, yet I admit— even argue—and submit here that these borders are precisely the place of “happening” when it comes to deaf identity, Deaf Studies, Deaf culture. We do not know and cannot know what is inside Deaf culture or deaf identity unless we also know what its borders and boundaries are. What is between matters. The Nazis’ collapsing of so many boundaries with regard to disability and difference (and deafness was included here) makes for a difficult and uncommon, yet necessary, boundary place in which to leave my deaf subject.

Between A Commonplace Book for the Modern Deaf Subject

Perspective, as its inventor remarked, is a beautiful thing. —George Eliot [Mary Ann Evans], Daniel Deronda, 1876

For some time now, I have been imagining a theory of “betweenity,’ especially as it exists in Deaf culture, identity, and language. And because I teach a great deal in the larger umbrella of “Disability Studies” these days, I’ve also been thinking about the expansion of that deaf-betweenity to “disability” in a larger sense.’ (Of course, I’ve also been thinking about the way that deafness itself occupies an interesting “betweenity” in relationship to disability identity.) In any case—whether deaf, disabled, or between—I'm finding that I’m generally more interested in the hot dog than the bun, the cream filling in the Oreo (which, if you've noticed, has been changing a lot lately) than just the twinned chocolate sandwich cookies on the outside. Give me a hyphen any day. To be sure, the words on either side of the hyphen are interesting, too, but what is happening in that hyphen—the moment of magic artistry there in that half-dash—is what really catches my eye.

Between “Deaf” and “deaf” (or, the Names We Call Ourselves)

In disability culture and studies, as well as in Deaf culture and Studies, we often get back to—or maybe, yes, we also get forward to—discussions about what we do and don't want to be called. Deaf culture, in particular, has been around the block with this discussion for a long, long time. I offer three exhibits for consideration:

Exhibit A (from the University of Brighton, United Kingdom; http://staffcentral. brighton.ac.uk/clt/disability/Deaf-html):

Note on terminology:

The term “Deaf” (with a capital D) is the preferred usage of some people who are either born profoundly deaf or who become deaf at a very early age and who regard themselves as belonging to the Deaf community. Like people in many communities, those within the Deaf community are bound together by a feeling of identifying with other Deaf people. People in the Deaf community share, amongst other things, a sense of Deaf pride, traditions, values, lifestyles, humour, folklore, art, theatre, as well as a rich common language.

Exhibit B (from a copyedited essay on interpreters that I received back from the university press editors):

I do not understand the distinctions between use of upper and lower-case D for deafness? Please clarify for my own knowledge and for the general scope of this book.

Exhibit C (from Gina Oliva, author of Alone in the Mainstream: A Deaf Woman Remembers Public Schools, the first book in the new “Deaf Lives” series of autobiography, biography, and documentary at Gallaudet University Press that I edit. This is a memo Gina sent to me after the copyeditors asked her to doublecheck and “clarify” her use of Deaf/deaf in the manuscript):

Subject: deaf vs. Deaf To: brueggemann.1@osu.edu Hi Brenda . . . I took a look at Padden and Humphries and decided it made sense to use Deaf when referring to adults in the Deaf community. If they are oral deaf, I will call them deaf. As for children, I would stick with deaf and hard of hearing children (lower case). This means that the “big D” will appear much in my book, as I say “Deaf adults this” and “Deaf adults that” a lot. I also say “deaf and hard of hearing children” a lot.

Then I looked at “Journey into the Deaf-World” (Lane, Hoffmeister, Bahan) and see that they advocate using Deaf for any child who is deaf and couldn't access info without assistance.

Hmmmmm... .Do you have any opinion about this???? I checked some other books. . . . Wrigley uses Deaf predominantly. Preston does not. I have others I can check . . . but my guess is there is little consensus about this.

As these three exhibits illustrate, where we draw the line in relationships between “deaf” and “Deaf” is a question of common placement.

In Deaf Studies we can explore, and perhaps even expand upon, the definitions of the terms of d/Deaf operations—subtracting, adding, dividing, and multiplying the possibilities—for the key naming terms like “deaf? “Deaf? “hard-of-hearing,” “late deafened,” “hearing-impaired? “has hearing loss,’ “think-hearing,” and, my mother’s personal favorite for me, “has selective hearing” But we can also move further out in the concentric circles by studying, for example, the mapping and meaning of mental proficiency labels alongside audiometric ones and noting their in-common categorizations—“moderate,” “severe,” “profound? Interestingly enough, these IQ labels parallel those assigned to hearing loss by medical practitioners—and both sets of terms came onto the diagnostic screen in our culture at about the same time. Moreover, if you simply rotate the axes of the two bell curves created by either the IQ or the audiometric charts as they plot out “normal,” “moderate,” “severe; and “profound” you would find them folding neatly right on top of each other. Is this parallel only circumstance, or do the angles between these two medical charts make more meaning in their overlay and intersections?

As but one example of a way to further explore this curious commonplace, we might consider that in the Nazis’ national socialist regime during the early 1940s, people with disabilities in psychiatric institutions throughout the German Reich became subject to “euthanasia” at the hands of their own doctors and nurses. (I explore this subject in depth in my final chapter.) My point in telling these troubling facts is that at this time, as well as in other times both past and present, people who were deaf in Germany (taubstumme—deaf and dumb) were often as not collapsed into diagnoses of other mental disabilities as well. I have looked at remaining records from one of these killing centers (which is still, eerily enough, a fully functioning psychiatric institution even today), as well as some records from the T-4 program housed in the German federal archives (Bundesarchiv), and I have, for myself, seen this conflation written on the records of several patients.’

My point is that, in the commonplace book of “deafness,” things are not always clearly or singularly defined, designated, determined as “just”

or “pure” or “only” deafness. And, however much some deaf people may want to resist being labeled “disabled,” the fact remains that they are often labeled as such and that these labels—in all cases—are not always accurate, though they may be, as it were, with consequences. Certainly, deaf people should want to resist the easy conflation of their “condition” with others that coexist in degrees of “moderate,” “severe, and “profound”—realizing the violence that can be (and has been) done with such an overlay. Yet, just as certainly, I suggest that to resist and distance one’s self-identity and group identity from those whose condition has been deemed (for better or worse, for right or wrong) affiliated with hearing loss would also be, in essence, to do further violence to those others with whom “authorities” have placed us (deaf people) in categorical similarity. Who—or what—are deaf people so afraid of when they resist placement in the commonplace of “disability”?

The relationship between “deaf” and “disabled,” between “deafness” and “disability between “Deaf culture” and “Disability culture,” between Deaf Studies and Disability Studies has been the subject of several major conference sessions in recent years. The 2006 Society for Disability Studies conference featured several sessions devoted to these questions of relationship and difference, and a plenary session at a February 2007 symposium held at George Washington University on the development of Disability Studies focused on the dance between Deaf and Disability Studies.

As but one specific example of the current tensions between “deaf” and “disabled,” in March 2007, news in central Ohio (and all throughout the American deaf community) that the Ohio School for the Deaf (OSD) would soon be merging campuses and resources with the Ohio State School for the Blind shocked and troubled many. A March 2007 news story in the Columbus Dispatch featured virulent remarks by Richard Heuber, the president of the Ohio State School for the Deaf’s alumni association. Heubner claimed that “We [deaf alumni of OSD] will start a petition. Rally and protest,” and “We'll fight this to the bitter end to keep them separate” because “Forcing the students to interact will destroy the deaf school’s culture” Heubner concluded to the reporter that “I don’t feel I have a disability. Many deaf people dont; and “If you add another handicap (at the school) . . . they'll have no identity, no self-esteem” (Sebastian, 2007). By September 2007, the state of Ohio had retracted its plans to merge the two schools.

My colleague, the author (and blogger) Steve Kuusisto—who happens to be blind—took up the subject of the “no identity, no self-esteem”

concerns raised by the OSD alumni in a reply on his own “Planet of the Blind” blog as he attempted to “stir the slum gullion with a stick.” Among his stirrings were these that pointed out the swirling stew bits of difference and definition in this issue around the merger of the two state schools and the OSD deaf alumni’s response to it:

The problem isn’t that some deaf activists want to be thought of as a cultural group, a collection of people who have their own language, who are not at all disabled. The problem is that by wanting to disassociate themselves from a historical relationship with disabilities these deafness advocates are overtly contemptuous of other people who would quite likely love to declare themselves no longer disabled but who find themselves genuinely struggling with serious physical and social obstacles. I would love to say that blindness isnt a disability but currently it is certainly a profound employment obstacle and the issues that are associated with this are both economically determined and are additionally rooted in historical attitudes that Mrs. Gandhi would likely recognize.

Contempt for the blind emerges in this instance with the force of a geyser. The reasoning works like this: deaf people are not disabled; to put them into a facility where they would have to share space with people who really are disabled would be demeaning to deaf students. (March 20, 2007; http://kuusisto.typepad.com/planet_of_the_blind/2007/03/in_our_ own_back.html)

This same string of reasoning and the often unnamed fear of how deafness and deaf people are labeled also have us (and them) working (hard, very hard) to contrast “deaf” and “Deaf?” The originary location of the Deaf/deaf divide dates to around 1972, purportedly from coined usage in a seminal Deaf Studies essay by James Woodward, How You Gonna Get to Heaven If You Cant Talk to Jesus? On Depathologizing Deafness. Thus, the definitional divide has been around for more than thirty years. Yet, aside from its usage in presses and publications long familiar with the commonplaces of “deafness,” it must commonly still be footnoted in an academic text in order to explain, yet again, what the distinctions between Big D “Deafness” and little d “deafness” are. Even when the distinctions are used, they are most often used, interestingly enough, in direct relation to each other; one is just as likely to see “d/Deaf” or “D/deaf” written as one is to see just “Deaf” or even “deaf” standing alone in a text that has set up this distinction. Thus, the divisional/definitional terms of “Deaf”

and (or versus) “deaf” more often than not come in tandem as d/Deaf. As such, they are twinned, they are doppelgangers. Mirror mirror on the wall... they whisper and sign back and forth to each other.

The twinning of d/Deaf is perhaps safer that way, since often, when one is pressed, it is hard to determine at any one moment in a text whether the Big D cultural/linguistic arena is where we are or whether we are just in the small d audiological/medical space. And what if we are in both places at the same time? The long-standing and footnoting practice of establishing some kind of border patrol between these terms tries to define and differentiate—apples here, oranges there—but, more often than not, the aliens still wind up looking very much like the natives. And perhaps it is really an avocado that is wanted, anyway? In most cases, for example, deaf students can't enroll in a state residential institution—long deemed the center of American deaf culture and the sanctuary for American Sign Language (ASL) and thus a common place for Big “D” cultural/linguistic Deafness—without offering an audiogram and first being able to claim their little “d” deafness. Until as recently as 2002 and the establishment of Gallaudet University’s new HUGS program (Hearing UnderGraduates), you could not get into the world’s only liberal arts college for deaf and hard-of-hearing students without proof of a (flawed) audiogram: as an undergraduate, you had to be deaf in order to go there and engage in the particular Gallaudet cultural practices that might also then mark you as Deaf. The irony (and anxiety) of placement and identity at Gallaudet is perhaps further magnified by the fact that many, even the majority (58 percent), of Gallaudet’s graduate and professional students are hearing students working on degrees in the fields surrounding the curious state of “deafness.”

Yet, when the question is posed about the differences between “deaf” and “Deaf”—as it was by a recent editor I worked with (see Exhibit B) and, really, by almost every editor I’ve ever had in twenty years of writing about, in, from, around deafness*—most often the answer given is either “language—the use of ASL’ or, even more simple (yet, paradoxically, complex), “attitude” And suddenly, there you are again, in another dark and thick forest without a working compass: “What kind of attitude?” you have to wonder. And then: “Attitude? You want attitude? I'll give you attitude!”