It’s been out for a while now, but I just got around to reading Charlotte Allen’s piece on Deaf culture, “Identity Politics Gone Wild” (April 2 Weekly Standard). It is a lengthy article, but it throws into high relief many of the machinations of identity politics discussed here in more traditionally politicized contexts. In fact, regular readers of this site will find much that is familiar in the piece, a few excerpts from which I think are worth highlighting and commenting on briefly:
Deaf activists have followed in the footsteps of racial activists, redefining themselves not as people with auditory handicaps but as members of a linguistic minority that had been oppressed and marginalized by the speaking majority because they used sign language to communicate instead of speech. Just as black activists a generation ago began calling themselves Black with a capital B, deaf activists began calling themselves Deaf with a capital D. The National Association of the Deaf, a leading deaf-rights advocacy group based in Washington, sternly reprimands those hapless souls who use the genteel term “hearing-impaired” to refer to the deaf: “Deaf and hard of hearing people believe that there is nothing wrong with them, and that their culture, language, and community are just as fulfilling as the ones experienced by the mainstream society.”
In 1994 deaf activist M.J. Bienvenu, a onetime administrator at Gallaudet [University] told New York Times magazine writer Andrew Solomon that deafness was “no more a disability than being Japanese would be.” Deaf activists are not unique in their efforts to redefine themselves as merely different from–and victimized by–the mainstream. Over the past few years, advocates for the autistic and even the chronically obese have argued that society ought to regard them as members of discriminated-against minority groups rather than as people with physiological problems.
[…]
Central to the fashioning of Deaf (in contrast to deaf) identity politics is the privileged status of American Sign Language. Although ASL is sometimes described by deaf activists as “the language of the deaf” and the third most-used language in the United States after English and Spanish, a 2006 article published in Sign Language Studies by three researchers at Gallaudet contends that the latter proposition is almost certainly untrue (and always was, in immigrant-filled America) and the first proposition may be dubious as well.
[…]
The fact that ASL use was officially discouraged for many decades in deaf schools has made it an ideal underdog “victim” issue around which deaf activists could build their vision of Deaf culture. It is now possible to major as an undergraduate and obtain a graduate degree in Deaf Studies, a field in which the courses, imbued these days with postmodernist denunciations of capitalism and patriarchy, teach the students that the deaf are a “colonized minority” (the language comes from the course catalogue at Fernandes’s alma mater, the University of Iowa). Fluency in ASL–along with the appropriate ideological disdain for the hearing majority (“hearies” in Deaf lingo)–is the chief marker of how Deaf one actually is. The most fluent ASL users of all, of course, are the fewer than 5 percent of deaf people who are children of deaf adults (CODAs, they call themselves) and thus have likely been exposed to ASL since birth, attended state deaf schools where they honed their skills, and gone to Gallaudet for college. These multigenerationally deaf people sometimes refer to themselves as True Deaf (hence the language in Ramirez’s blog) or Deaf of Deaf and are at the apex of the Deaf social pyramid. Later learners, the Muggles of Deafness who may use ASL more haltingly or with “accents” that betray their non-native status, or who (worst of all, in the eyes of many Deaf activists) combine signing with voiced speech, rank somewhat lower. If deaf people are indeed an oppressed minority, they are the only oppressed minority with its own hereditary aristocracy.
This last bit—while pointed—is a bit misleading: in Black culture, for instance, there has long been a hierarchy based on relative “blackness” (a reaction to “passing” under racial blood laws, and to a mythology of “Blackness” that finds its purest “authenticity” in direct ties to African descent) —though most contemporary Black activists or identity politicians don’t adopt or accept that part of the “authenticity” narrative, which today has largely been marginalized or footnoted and replaced by the more useful adherence to particular policy aims.
Or, to put it another way, the social constructionists have won the battle for contingency over the essentialists and today control the deliminating narrative, which privileges an identity tied to political party over an identity tied strictly to hue (though adopters of the narrative continue to think of it as adopting a “black identity”). This allows for “inauthentic” blackness to be a condition of adopting certain political positions—just as in an earlier day, “inauthentic” (or, at least, less authentic) blackness could be tied to the lightness of the skin or the knap of the hair.
What makes Deaf culture such an instructive case study for identity politics is its relative nascency: we can watch the mechanisms at play almost in real-time.
Today, the movement is committed to hierarchy based on genealogy—but one can envision the day when the narrative is forced to adjust itself and drop this particular essentialist move, because as Allen points out:
[…] many deaf and hard-of-hearing young people do not care to think of themselves as victims and are increasingly availing themselves of mainstream educational opportunities made accessible to them by anti-discrimination laws. (Indeed, several states are considering shutting down their now-poorly subscribed residential deaf schools, which alarms the activists who view the schools as incubators of Deaf culture.) This new generation has also grown up with technological innovation–whether cochlear implants or vastly improved hearing aids or an array of text-based computer interfaces–that blur the lines between the deaf and hearing worlds. They are simply voting with their feet not to join, or else to abandon quickly, what they must perceive as a bizarre, obsolete, and self-marginalizing [Deaf activist culture].
Which means that for “Deaf” culture to survive—for it to work as an identity narrative with its own specific political aims—it is going to have to adjust itself to win over those deaf persons whose resistance threatens to either marginalize the identity group by way of assimilation, or else take over the narrative and de-radicalize it.
Such is the nature of identity politics that it can be combated by a significant exodus from the ranks by those unhappy with the current orthodoxy. Which is why those invested in identity politics are so quick to use shame and intimidation to try to keep “their” people in line—banishing heretics, be they inauthentic blacks (Uncle Toms), gay conservatives (hypocrites in need of “outing”), or those whose deafness is coupled with a desire to communicate effectively with the non deaf.
Damn Alcoholics Anonymous ought to stop trying to convert my fellow Drunk Culturists!
If you want to see the struggle between Deaf Culture and Mainstream Culture in hair-pullingly stark terms, rent a copy of the documentary “Sound and Fury” sometime. Two brothers: one wants a cochlear implant for his infant son. The other’s school-age daughter asks for one, which he ultimately refuses because he fears she will leave the Deaf Culture.
The wife and I were literally shouting at our television before the end.
Oh lord! I don’t need to read an article about this. My sister is deaf. She’s done a lot of enormously stupid things in her life because she simply doesn’t credit anything a hearing person might say to her as being anything other than something designed to get her to surrender her deafness. (I’m talking about telling her things like, “Gee, maybe it’s NOT such a good idea to be texting on your Blackberry while you’re trying to drive.”) I honestly believe that identity politics as responsible for a lot of the crappy things in her life, and by extension, my nephew’s life as well, poor kid.
Is it just me or do these “identity politic groups” seem to resemble cults? They have the unique language/words (CODAs), a belief in special worth because of belonging, an emphasis on what separates – a fetish on maintaining that spearateness (deaf parents who don’t want their children to hear or want to have them made deaf), heretics and apostates (you aren’t deaf acting enough) and all the rest.
It’s just really wierd and really creepy. It’s like making a fetish about belonging to a people that are blue-eyed and blond and that somehow makes you superior.
Meet the ultimate endpoint of deaf identity politics, Ridor.
TAKE THAT, HEARIES!
Defining yourself by your disabilities is pretty lame, IMNSHO.
That said, “What’re ya gonna do?”
You want to be Deaf (with a capital D), hey knock yourself out. But I’m still gonna put my hand to my ear and go “WHAT??” just to fuck with you.
That’s a given. It’s my NATURE to be an insensitive jerk, and I wouldn’t want to be untrue to my nature, y’know?
Phonocentrism? At the Superbowl?
I just Googled Deaf, Deaf rights and Deaf culture and every damn site was written in English. The oppression is omnipresent.
Apologies – let me try that again:
Phonocentrism? At the Superbowl?
“Did you hear about Bob?”
“What?”
“He had corneal transplants.”
“Traitor!”
Where’s alphie?
He’s long overdue to hop in and tell those uppity deaf folks who succeed despite the entrenched grievance culture that they’re hurting the movement by succeeding.
Buncha Phoneys.
Still more about the hearies:
TW: hear66, no kidding.
“I SAID, DID YOU HEAR ABOUT BOB?”
In the land of the Deaf, the one-handed man is mute…
Trying to figure out a way to work Garrett Morris and “News for the Deaf” into this one, and then McGehee essentially steals my thunder.
Just as an aside, from the description of tonight’s “Law & Order” I saw on Comcast’s guide – an ear surgeon is murdered after testifying in a case involving an infant getting a cochlear implant – I’m guessing tonight’s show revolves around this very issue.
I’ve kept an eye on stories about it, and Gallaudet University sounds like an utter nuthouse… ahem, no pun intended on the word “sound.”
And “hearies”? What, is that supposed to be like “honkies”? C’mon, try harder, you little wannabe radicals.
Why can’t there be an Identity group for irritable drunks with small penises? Wait…
Hey Fellas! I’M IRISH!
Wow – so I am a bad guy to yet another group… a “hearie”, a “breeder”, etc. I don’t have room on this page for all the epithets that could be applied to my military status.
Somehow I’ll manage to get by – even with all the disapproval aimed at me and mine. Heh.
So since we are all unique, we should each be able to have our own widdle identity “group”, right?
But then who else would be able to even understand “us”, including anything “we” say?
Any bets on what will be the outcome if anyone allows Faux Liberals [social constructionists, essentiallists, identity controllists of any kind] to “help” them?
My money will be on: total ruination of one’s free thought and the impossibility of communication itself. But then you will certainly be at the apex of Deafness – “Once you go deaf”.
Sounds like a plan?
I used to be an interpreter. One of the best things about it was that my signing was so good that many deaf people I spoke with automatically considered me to be deaf as well and would get surprised when they found out I was hearing.
I didn’t notice what you said, but then again I couldn’t afford to to to Galludet so I joined the Marines instead. I did know plenty of parents who denied their kid was deaf, and that was frightening. The girl I dated for many years (who I met as an interpreter) was pig headed in that she didn’t care she was deaf and was damned well going to do whatever she felt like. Of course, later in life that “whatever” didn’t include me.
So I’m guessing that in Deaf chat rooms, the greeting “A/S/L?” has a completely different meaning.
I suspect he eloped, with cynn.
Bonus material:
Freebie: Deaf Republican? How Could He?
I found this interesting :
Furthermore, after at least three decades of ASL ascendancy in deaf schools, the English literacy of deaf people–essential for success in the hearing job world–remains distressingly low, with half of deaf 17-year-olds still reading at the fourth-grade level or below.
A result, of course, of ASL having little resemblance to the SPOKEN language, thus making it more difficult for the DEAF to understand written English.
I’ve been told to fuck off in a few different languages, but never with signs.
Theory: As families have gotten smaller, the need to “belong” has not, so people create tribes for themselves. Not a whole lot different than the dynamic that creates street gangs, really.
Mind you, I don’t think this is an entirely bad impulse, but I think that like everything else, there are people who follow it to an extreme.
Trekkies, for example.
What? No h/t?
Happy Passover.
I can show you that sign, Fabio. It’s one I happen to be familiar with.
Speak for yourself. I feel the need to create a heirarchial order here.
1. Irish gifts to the world
2. Almost all other Irishmen
3. Lost My Cookies
This was a problem with many of the kids I worked with, even the really smart ones. The totally deaf usually were the worst while those who here hard of hearing fared much better.
The funny thing was my ex was one of those incredibly brilliant people but always had a hard time writing “An Hour” and instead would always write “A Hour” because in her world, the rule was A for words that start with a vowel and AN for all others. She couldn’t hear the silent H so it meant nothing to her.
Then she left me.
Bitch.
(and yes, I got the rule backwards. Sue me)
Same basic strategy as with the “two languages” tactic in the case of Hispanics from Mexico and south: they then need an annointed “translator” to mediate the balkanization.
Last year I watched with growing mystification the local DC news coverage of the brouhaha at Galludet surrounding the new University president. It appeared that the students considered her NOT DEAF ENOUGH to hold the position. The surprising thing (to me, at least) was that the news reporters appeared to consider this to be a perfectly valid reason for her ouster.
Man, this is really disturbing.
With the rise of cochlear implants and technical aids, what is Russell Simmons going to do? I mean that whole “Deaf Jam” franchise must be shot to shit by now.
But, the difference is Spanish speaks CAN write (and read) “a” language; Spanish. ASL doesn’t have a written version.
I think it’s just an interesting dilemma. Where does “reading” fit into the agenda of those at Gallaudet? ASL diehards want it to be the lingua franca of the deaf community, at the expense of those which are more easily “translated” into written English.
I first heard (no pun intended) about this “Deaf” identity politics thing several years ago. Saw this piece on the tube back in the early ‘90s about this deaf couple that had a young daughter (2 or 3 years old) who was also deaf, but the doctors discovered that her situation was such that an implant would have given her pretty much normal hearing.
However, the parents refused to allow the procedure to be performed, because then their daughter would no longer be “Deaf”. I don’t know how the case turned out, but my wife and I were both flabbergasted.
Guess I now have another epithet that can be added to the list that applies to me. First it was “whitey” (or cracker/honky/etc), then “gringo”, “breeder”, whatever terms Asians use (although you can bet your ass they have them), and now “hearie”.
I did take a look around this “Ridor’s” web site, and while he may be deaf (or “Deaf”, whatever), he’s also a leftie. In other words, deaf or not, he is not very bright.
I think it’s more than belonging to a group, Robert. Its not like being in Kiwanis or Rotary or Lions, or being a member of a church or something like that. Those activities are part of your life; these appear to be demanding that they become your entire life, that you become subsumed by this group and its identification and surrender your individualism for the group identity. This is bad when others on the outside do this (racist! sexist! homophobe! etc!) but it is perfectly fine when the group does it to itself?
Very, very disturbing.
Hey, I heard that!
Nope, no lawsuit. Now the Iranians get to take some more hostages. Its only fair.
tw: about39
Cave Bear: I think you’re remembering “Sound and Fury” (see comment #2, above). Terrifically frustrating, though I do feel obliged to thank and compliment the families for allowing us to see a not-very-pleasant side of their lives.
Does it really get dropped, or does it only get picky?
The congruence of the political identity that almost always displaces the genealogical, with the ideology that currently works socially as a “good genes” signifier, doesn’t seem accidental to me. Remember the left’s ‘04 election rhetoric, which was almost wholly eugenic, “I don’t fuck Republicans” and “Newt’s jealous ‘cause no interns will blow him” for men and “female impersonator” rhetoric for all successful rightish female political figures (except Malkin, who’s…special), and [etc].
What gets dropped from these apparently de-essentialized identities during their seeming transformation to political identities isn’t the essence, which is still used as a disqualifying standard (when convenient), but the low-status carriers of that essence, who were always meant to be excluded anyway. Remember, the rhetorical enemy of our all-rich all-white left punditry isn’t (outwardly) a dark Other, but (metonymically, at least) white trash.
Hey! I’m Irish and I dont have a small…oops (mumbles). Well, at least I’m not irritable (damn, got me there too.) Well I defintely don’t drink (damn liver disease(reason for the irritablity?))(mumbles some more). I need a drink.
tw: single21, what’s it trying to say here?
I thought you should have titled this post Mos Deaf.
Oh, and later, the parents try to claim that the little girl made the decision herself.
Deafness is a disability. It means there are certain jobs you simply cannot do, just as with being blind.
I knew one stone deaf woman who knew no sign language; she functioned just fine in the hearing world, except you had to tap her on the shoulder to get her attention if you were out of her line of sight. As you might guess, deaf activists treated her horribly. Heretic and all that.
Well, it is ostensibly dropped. But because most social constructionist arguments rely on hidden essentialism, it never really gets dropped. It’s just purposely no longer foregrounded, because to foreground it makes it look rather crass.
Although the dynamic might be different with a “disability.”
Don’t we at least need an ethnic slur for these Deaf people if they’re gonna make an identity group?
Hand jobs.
Dan, I am profoundly offended by that epithet. With the white-hot heat of the sun.
Aw, shucks. Thanks, cynn!
Truly, it was funny, but I wouldn’t dare use it in front of my deaf with a little d cousin, who reads lips from 150 feet and can do AmSLang and Ju Jitsu at the same time.
We shall call him “Silent But Deadly.”
Plus, he sends mixed messages.
I _was_ going to be an interpreter, but my first semester of studies I got sick of the attitude. I knew it wasn’t just local, but I didn’t know how widespread it was. Lots of welfare kings and queens where I was.
I like helping people, just not people who treat me like an idiot because I lack a defect they share. I will not mince words – lacking a facility does NOT make you worthless or a bad person or unworthy of love or respect – but it makes you an inferior organism (at least with regards to that facility).
I’m proud of people who have adapted, sickened by those who “game” the system to take advantage of the sympathies of others and then think of themselves as “superior” for having “pulled one over” on the hearies.
Obviously, I didn’t Go That Way.
It’s just like someone who loses a leg but refuses to get a prosthetic, insists that you carry them everywhere, then bitches at you that the ride isn’t smooth enough. You lost my sympathy.
OTOH some of the HI (hearing impaired) crowd were friends of mine, but they looked for ways to hear better and weren’t really part of the “tribe.”
There was also a dude with a birth defect that make walking very hard for him (and clumsy-looking), and he worked his ass off and started a business while in school. Kick ass, man.
McGehee wins the thread.
In The Nurture Assumption, Judith Rich Harris includes the formation of a Deaf culture at Gallaudet as a case study in the process of peer socialization. She describes how the social structure spontaneously rose within the student body despite the opposition of parents and teachers. Clearly the identity politics cues were taken from the larger adult culture, but they manifest themselves in a unique way in the student body. As Jeff says, this is a very interesting case since we can see its development essentially in real time.
[…] almost certainly dwindle (I think an interesting analogy here might be with the deaf culture, the most strident of whom have taken to demonizing cochlear implants, and even created a sliding scale of deaf […]