X-Subject:      making and unmaking the deaf
Newsgroups: bit.listserv.deaf-l
Date:         Wed, 11 Nov 1992 18:26:59 EST
Reply-To:     Personal Ideologies Discussion List <BELIEF-L@BROWNVM.BITNET>
Comments:     Resent-From: "Stephen J. Kotchen" <CASK@CATCC>
Comments:     Originally-From: "John N. Davis" <YYJDAVIS@UVVM.UVIC.CA>
Comments:     Warning -- original Sender: tag was BELIEF-L@BROWNVM
From:         "Stephen J. Kotchen" <CASK@CATCC.BITNET>
Subject:      making and unmaking the deaf

   I accidently read BELIEF-L and look at this posted and I though
why not send this to Deaf-L. Any of you netter can have your comment
on this BELIEF-L's posted.

--Stephen Kotchen
--------------------------- Original Message ---------------------------
As discussion of the "Sadistic Pervert" and related matters
continues, I thought it might be interesting to see what
people had to say about Exodus 4:ll, Mark 7:31-37, and the
following recent book and book review (which I have edited
somewhat to reduce it to a postable size.)

ld>                       The Nation
ld>                      July 6, 1992
ld>               Vol. 255 ; No. 1 ; Pg. 26
ld>
ld>   The Mask of Benevolence: Disabling the Deaf Community
ld>                    by  Harlan Lane
ld>              reviewed by  Lennard J. Davis
ld>
ld>     The fact that I cannot write this review in American Sign
ld>  Language (A.S.L.) tellingly reveals the complex imbalances
ld>  in power facing Deaf Americans. Although many early-deafened
ld>  people speak A.S.L., their language is not widely known nor
ld>  is it even accepted as a legitimate language by most of the
ld>  hearing world. On the other hand, any deaf person in this
ld>  nation is expected to read and speak English. Harlan Lane, in
ld>  this impassioned and daring indictment of the hearing
ld>  establishment, demonstrates the legitimacy of sign as a
ld>  language and urges us to see the Deaf not as a stigmatized,
ld>  medicalized, disabled population but as a linguistic subgroup
ld>  within a dominant majority. Lane shows how the history of
ld>  spurning the natural language of the Deaf in favor of a
ld>  variety of other communication schemes will always leave
ld>  Deaf people with an inferior education and a dubious social
ld>  status.
ld>
ld>     A current MacArthur Fellow and University Distinguished
ld>  Professor of psychology at Northeastern University, Lane,
ld>  himself hearing, has written extensively on the history of
ld>  the Deaf, including such works as When the Mind Hears and
ld>  The Wild Boy of Aveyron. In The Mask of Benevolence, he
ld>  moves from history to the current moment. This book is a
ld>  strong polemic criticizing every aspect of the way the Deaf
ld>  community is treated and educated by the hearing or, as he
ld>  calls it, the "audist" world. Lane's attack is political as
ld>  well as academic. Using Michel Foucault's work, he describes
ld>  the way deafness has been constructed as a deviance, an
ld>  object of surveillance and punishment achieved through
ld>  rituals of control. Borrowing from the analysis of Edward
ld>  Said, Lane sees the Deaf community as colonized by the
ld>  imperial forces of the hearing majority.
ld>
ld>                        ...
ld>
ld>     Much of the  controversy  that Lane publicizes surrounds
ld>  the teaching of language. Although the bulk of work by Deaf
ld>  and hearing linguists indicates that the earlier a child
ld>  acquires language the better, and that deaf children can
ld>  learn signing much earlier than they can learn to speak
ld>  orally, the overwhelming effort in deaf education has been
ld>  to avoid A.S.L. The educators favor teaching English, either
ld>  signed versions of English syntax or spoken English, because
ld>  they feel the child must grow up in a world that speaks only
ld>  the national language. But Lane shows that this system of
ld>  teaching is a complete failure, with only 4 percent of deaf
ld>  graduates able to read complex subject matter. Despite the
ld>  banning of A.S.L. in much of deaf education, the fact is that
ld>  the students who do best are the 10 percent of deaf children
ld>  born to deaf parents--that is, those who learned A.S.L. from
ld>  infancy.
ld>
ld>     Lane would like the hearing establishment to think of the
ld>  Deaf as a bilingual community. Experts in education now widely
ld>  accept the idea that linguistic subgroups like Hispanics will
ld>  do better if their native language is initially taught in
ld>  school along with English. Lane argues, logically, that the
ld>  Deaf should be taught first in sign language with the goal of
ld>  eventually learning English as a second language. He sees the
ld>  reluctance to teach bilingually as a sign of ethnocentrism,
ld>  pointing out that in the past "residential schools for deaf
ld>  children meted out severe punishment for using A.S.L., and
ld>  in federal boarding schools for Indians, children were beaten
ld>  for using American Indian languages."
ld>
ld>     Lane helps us to realize the especially complex social and
ld>  cultural positioning of the Deaf. Although a deaf child and a
ld>  Hispanic child can be compared, there are crucial differences,
ld>  since 90 percent of deaf children are born to hearing parents.
ld>  Lane says that being Deaf is like being gay, in this sense,
ld>  since "most members of the minority do not share their minority
ld>  identity with their parents and cannot develop it at home." And
ld>  he points out that being deaf is not really comparable to being
ld>  disabled since the Deaf, unlike the disabled, willingly segregate
ld>  themselves into residential schools, and later Deaf communities
ld>  and marriages, to share their own language and culture.
ld>
ld>     In addition to being colonized, deafness is medicalized in
ld>  a Foucauldian "ritual of power." There is a chilling similarity
ld>  between Foucault's vision of the panoptic penitentiary and a
ld>  deaf child's session at the audiologist: ...
ld>
ld>     Lane sees this ritual as another form of courtroom sentencing
ld>  that "exists largely to perpetuate a certain social order."
ld>
ld>     Even more disturbing in the process of medicalizing deafness
ld>  is the rush to implant in deaf children electronic cochlear
ld>  devices--bionic ears, in effect. These devices have not,
ld>  according to Lane, been sufficiently tested by the Food and
ld>  Drug Administration, nor do they produce much more than vague
ld>  sounds in the ears of deaf children. Nonetheless, these devices
ld>  are imposed on the deaf by distraught hearing parents and
ld>  desperate educators of the deaf, together with patent-owning
ld>  companies.  ...  According to Lane, a child's ability to hear
ld>  and speak are minimally improved, if at all, by this difficult
ld>  procedure.  Indeed, many teenagers who had cochlear implants
ld>  when they were younger refuse to use the devices when they
ld>  reach an age of independence because they feel empowered to
ld>  choose Deaf culture as a way of life rather than as a medical
ld>  infirmity that requires prosthesis.
ld>
ld>     When the Deaf leader Jean-Francois Mercurio opened the
ld>  International Conference on Sign Language in July 1990, he did
ld>  so by smashing a hearing aid with a sledgehammer, recognizing
ld>  that the technology of "audism" had become the symbolic chains
ld>  of the Deaf. Amplifying this point of view, Lane argues that
ld>  Deaf people should take control of their lives instead of
ld>  remaining subjects of the audist establishment. He advocates
ld>  going back to the nineteenth-century practice of having the
ld>  Deaf teach the Deaf, as Helen Keller was taught by a blind
ld>  teacher.  Deaf psychologists and linguists should be the ones
ld>  to devise tests for deaf children, if such tests are even
ld>  necessary.
ld>
ld>     Certainly, one can legitimately argue with Lane that as
ld>  much as the Deaf may value A.S.L. and play down the role of
ld>  speech, they do have to function in a world with a majority
ld>  of hearing people.  One may recall an example, albeit
ld>  fictional, from the movie Children of a Lesser God, in which
ld>  Marlee Matlin plays a young woman who refuses to learn to
ld>  speak, but who is then paradoxically dependent on her hearing
ld>  companion. In an imagined world of Deaf power, with A.S.L.
ld>  as the first language and written English as a second, what
ld>  would be the role of speech? Granted that speech should not
ld>  be the final goal of deaf education, but there are many
ld>  circumstances when writing notes is an awkward and
ld>  disempowering way of dealing with a dominant hearing culture.
ld>
ld>     Having grown up hearing in a Deaf family myself, I found
ld>  Lane's book an exciting breakthrough. As a child, I had never
ld>  thought of deafness in a positive light, but believed as my
ld>  parents and I were told that it was a "handicap." By theorizing
ld>  Deafness, Lane provides substantial academic and philosophical
ld>  justifications for the political activity surrounding the
ld>  Gallaudet College uprising.  I read this book with the same
ld>  thrill of recognition I felt when first reading other
ld>  theorists of oppression in the realm of class, nation, race
ld>  and gender. And like other movements that have sought rights
ld>  through separation--black, feminist and lesbian--the Deaf
ld>  will have to wrestle with the extent that their separation
ld>  will remove them from centers of power in the process of
ld>  empowering them. Nevertheless, progressives will have to add
ld>  Deafness to that familiar list, when they understand that in
ld>  addition to the many screaming injustices the dominant culture
ld>  has perpetrated, there is another silent yet articulate one
ld>  in its very midst.

--------------------------------------
John N. Davis  <yyjdavis@uvvm.uvic.ca>
Comments: Gated by NETNEWS@AUVM.AMERICAN.EDU