Lennard wrote:
May I
>ask you please to document your assertions about my opinions from my
>written work or drop them as spurious.
Certainly, I'll give you one example and of course I welcome a response
from you and others. I seriously question your analysis of Deafness (the
capitalization is intentional here and I will henceforth put SD (small d)
and BD (big D) in parentheses after the terms for those people using
voice-recognition software)in relation to disability.
In 'Enforcing normalcy' you state (p. 77) that 'In the case of the Deaf
(BD), the issue of language presents itself as a defining structure of
consciousness in quite a different way from the issues surrounding other
disabilities. Unlike blindness or physical impairment, deafness (SD) is in
some sense an invisible disability. Only when the Deaf (BD) person begins
to engage in language does the disability become visible. The deaf (SD) can
be thought of as a population whose different ability is the necessary use
of a language system that does not require oral/aural communication. Within
a nation, they represent a linguistic minority. There are certainly other
disabilities that involve a difficulty or inability to communicate
(aphasia, autism), but none of these impairments imply the necessity for
another language. While the blind have Braille, Braille is not a language,
but merely a way of transcribing whatever language the blind person may
know. No one would claim that the blind have a language other than that of
their mother tongue. As such, the deaf (SD) can be thought of as a group
defined by language difference.'
In this extract, you view language and communication in reductionist terms.
There is a huge body of work (e.g. Deborah Tannen) that points to
fundamental differences between men and women in situated language practice
in spite of the fact that those studied used the same language, and there
is other work that questions notions of 'inarticulateness', asserting that
it is 'not a disability but an invitation to listen in a new way.' Taking
this perspective, we could say that those with autism or aphasia, or those
who are blind also demonstrate fundamental differences from people who do
not have these impairments and this would seem to be of importance to your
argument about the enforcement of 'normalcy'. In other words, it is the
normalising claims of hegemony that delineate disability from both normalcy
and Deafness (BD). However, you go on to say 'it is precisely this focusing
on the dysfunctionality of the deaf (SD) that constitutes privileging of
the oral/aural system of communication ... the actual dysfunctionality of
the Deaf (BD) is to have another language system ... But unlike other
people with disabilities, also ostracised if not ghettoized, the Deaf (BD)
have a community, a history, a culture ... this level of social
organisation, community and resistance has not generally been achieved by
other physically impaired peoples.' (p. 78). This is part of an argument
that attempts to define 'the Deaf' (BD) in terms of a language, a nation,
ethnicity and a race, for example.
Quite apart from the inconsistencies of terminology (some of which may jar
because I write from a British perspective), your analysis attempts to
align Deaf (BD) people with a different set of principles/characteristics
to those you ascribe to disabled people with communication impairments, who
are viewed from within the confines of the medical model of disability.
Deafness (BD)is then viewed, in Locke's terms, as a 'real' essence, that
also marks it as different from disability. Why then has your subsequent
work, particularly your Disability Reader sought to include Deafness (BD)
under the title 'disability' and why, in this work, is there no development
of ideas about the social contexts in which deaf (SD) people communicate?
Further, unless of course deafness (SD)is conflated with Deafness (BD),
which it is in the quote from 'Enforcing Normalcy' I can find no evidence
in contemporary literature that Deaf (BD) identity is pathologised - on the
contrary it is exoticised - but there are frequent references to being deaf
(SD) as deviance, sickness and so on in the Deaf (BD) Studies literature
Paul Abberley (1999: 695), a respected disabled academic writes of your
Reader: 'Here, as elsewhere in the volume, the material is skewed towards
the consideration of deafness and this matters, not as Davis suggests in
his introduction because it involves the omission of other impairments, but
because the specificity of the oppression of deaf people distinguishes them
from the generality of disabled people to such a degree that some argue
that their situation is better conceived as that of an oppressed linguistic
grouping than in terms of disability. Such issues as integrated schooling
raise different issues for deaf people, and promote different solutions.
Section 2 'the politics of disability' contains three excellent papers,
although only one deals with the political activity of disabled people and,
again, it is the deaf community.' (He uses SD throughout)
I include this comment because it shows, I think, that I am not alone in my
concerns that the Deaf (BD) agenda is gaining an increasingly high profile
in Disability Studies, and many disabled people (on the evidence of this
years' SDS) are acutely worried about this. I have absolutely no problem
with the way that sign language users wish to frame themselves, nor with
the idea that there are a number of frames within which deafness can be
located. But it is important to ask whether sign language users themselves
are happy with being incorporated under the disability banner that they
seem to pathologise. It may be legitimate to consider intersectional
accounts of Deafness (BD) and disability in the same way that we consider
the intersection of disability with gender, race and so on. But to do so in
a way that reduces 'other' disabled people to our impairments by
privileging the Deaf ideal and by suggestions that Deaf Studies is a
'precursor' to Disability Studies (not your suggestion, I know) seems to be
setting an agenda that is not disabled people's.
Best wishes
Mairian
Mairian Corker
Senior Research Fellow in Deaf and Disability Studies
Department of Education Studies
University of Central Lancashire
Preston PR1 2HE
Fax +44 [0]870 0553967
email: [log in to unmask]
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