Deaf Members and Nonmembers: The Creation of Culture Through Communication Practices
University of Texas at Austin
Texas School for the Deaf
University of Redlands
PRESENT AT, BUT …
Uncomprehending, a young boy wanders through a Civil War battlefield in an 1891 short story by Ambrose Bierce (1891/1971). The boy witnesses, but does not understand, the blood and injuries of the men scattered on the ground. He hears neither the guns nor the shouts exploding around him. He does not know he is an orphan. He watches, but does not know he is in the midst of a war. Thus, Bierce, one of the United States’ most bitter writers, captured the devastating sense of being present at, but not a part of a scene.
The story is fictional, but we hear many autobiographical narratives that converge at the same point. Following are descriptions by deaf people of being present at their families and jobs, but not a part of the interaction taking place.
• A 13-year-old deaf girl wakes up to wander her empty house, wondering first if anyone is home and then, with mounting anxiety, where they all have gone. Later she learns that she was copresent at, but did not understand, a dinner table conversation in which plans had been made for the other family members to go shopping the next morning.
• An 11-year-old girl and her 15-year-old brother surreptitiously ask a teacher dropping by for a home visit what it is their mother is saying.
• A deaf man resolutely shares that he is hiring an interpreter to accompany him to an upcoming family reunion. At previous reunions, once everyone had greeted him, he always spent the ensuing 2 days standing around with no idea of what was going on.
• A deaf college teacher who gets along well with his colleagues turns down invitations to departmental parties. He explains that after everyone has said hello, there is only one person who will have a conversation with him. Because he talks regularly with her he feels guilty taking her away from the party.
This chapter focuses on the importance of full participation in everyday communication to an individual’s identity. Participation is basic to an individual’s sense of well-being, but is also crucial in the development of the individual’s social identity.
The conclusions in this chapter are based on a wide range of materials about the experiences, life stories, and anecdotes of individuals who have experienced life with severe-to-profound hearing loss from an early age,1 and on field observations, ethnographic interviews, unpublished theses and dissertations, and published materials (such as poetry, articles from magazines and newsletters, stories, and autobiographies written by deaf individuals).2 The topic of communication is one that deaf individuals always seem eager to talk about, sometimes for hours at a time.
One might assume that deaf persons who can speak and lipread would naturally be integrated into the hearing society, whereas those who cannot, would be forced to find a community among the signing deaf. We have not found it to be that simple. Although signing is often seen as a last resort by educators and parents who prefer that deaf children rely on speech, it is rare for deaf individuals to communicate orally with ease. Even those who can communicate orally find it difficult and unpleasant to communicate with more than one other person at a time. Integration with hearing children may isolate a deaf child in a crowd. A study of the interaction of 20 high school students who were included as the only deaf students in their respective schools found that none of their fellow students ever had a conversation with them, and they never tried to initiate a conversation with another student. The only communication they experienced all day at school was with the teacher (Raimondo & Maxwell, 1987). Just as the deaf child who lives at home may be isolated with no one with whom to communicate, the deaf child integrated in regular schools may be stranded. A number of deaf adults say they have quit jobs or changed careers in order to work in an environment with at least some deaf co-workers. Although some say they could communicate with hearing co-workers for essentials, and some of these appear to us to have clear speech and lipreading abilities, they were unable to establish relationships with co-workers because, they say, they could not communicate freely.
Of those we studied, more nonmembers of the deaf community than members do seem to have intelligible speech. Not all nonmembers, however, have intelligible speech, and many members of the deaf community do have intelligible speech. Jan is a woman with excellent speech and lip-reading skills. For all practical purposes, she seems to manage very effectively in oral conversations. She was raised among the hearing and did not encounter the deaf community until she decided to go to Gallaudet University. 3 After graduating, she moved back to her home state and began working on another degree at a hearing university. During this time she wondered if she should return to her home town, where there was a small deaf population, or move to an area where a large number of deaf people lived. Eventually, she made the decision to live primarily among the deaf. She moved to a city with a large deaf population, married a fourth-generation deaf man, got a job at a deaf school, and became deeply immersed in the local deaf community. Indeed, the designations of “hard-of-hearing,” “oral deaf,” “deaf,” or “real deaf” have more to do with speaking and interaction with hearing people on the one end, and the use of ASL and visual modalities on the other, than they have to do with hearing level 4
Why would a person who could handle life so well among the hearing choose a life among the deaf? Her answer was she wanted more from life than just “to handle it”: she wanted to live it. Getting by “for all practical purposes” was a far cry from a life of fulfillment. This kind of life was unknown to her until age 18, when she encountered members of the deaf community. For the first time she experienced complete, unencumbered, and unfettered conversations. Although it took her a while to learn to communicate with the deaf, the result was a feeling that the world was open to her. No longer did she have to expend so much energy on the surface of communication, trying so hard simply to read lips and follow conversations. As she became adept at signing, she could lose herself in the deeper aspects of communication. Finally she knew what it was to be fully engaged in real conversation, and as a result, went from “living in part, to living in whole.” Although Jan’s oral abilities were functional for many purposes, they had not given her access to the deeper aspects of communication and significant relationships.
We suggest that although hearing loss can be rated along an audiological continuum, the cultural identities available to individuals with hearing loss cannot. Indeed, cultural identities must be understood as fundamentally different, even dichotomous. Nor do the identities link, in any simple way, to an individual’s oral ability.
THE PRESENT, BUT NOT FULLY
PARTICIPATING, DEAF
The most striking contrast between the narratives of members of the deaf community and individuals with hearing loss who are not members is the solitariness of the latter: The solitary effect that arises from the stories and lives of nonmembers is, in part, created by the experience of feeling isolated from others like themselves. One woman, Vicki, 5 shared:
I was never with hearing-impaired people when I was growing up. And it would have been helpful just to know that I had somebody to share with, like the frustrations, for example. There was another girl, Sandra. She was born deaf and I lost my hearing at 2½. We had the same speech teacher from second through sixth grade. But it wasn’t until years later, even after we both went to the same college, that we had a talk and both of us realized that we were so alienated. We were not allowed to mix with other … we couldn’t mix with each other when we were growing up. You follow me? It was kinda like you have to be with the hearing world. So she and I never had each other growing up or never had each other even in the same classroom. We knew each other, but we were never allowed to mix together, to be friends. We didn’t even have parties together. I think we were deliberately kept apart. After her phone call, we became friends. We became the friends that we never were.
Often the separation from others like one’s self leaves the nonmembers with a feeling of being unique and singled out. Carly put it:
I guess what bothers me most is that I don’t know other people like me. And it’s not that I want to have this little group session with these other people. I just want to know that there are other people out there that exist, because most hard-of- hearing people, well most hard-of-hearing that I know or see, are old. And I don’t relate as well to old people as I do to someone that’s my own age. And Bradyn is the first person that I’ve ever known that has the same, well really not the same, feelings, but at least the same general sense of feelings about things or the same experiences. Like he sails and he uses saran wrap for his hearing aids and I used to do that when I was on a rowing crew and I thought “Wow, someone else does that, too.” And it was just kind of a neat thing. So I don’t want this whole group thing, I just want to know other people. I just don’t feel like there’s anybody else around my age and that makes me feel like I’m the only one.
Later Carly elaborated on feeling set apart:
I’m considered more oral deaf than hard-of-hearing because my hearing is so borderline. Without my hearing aid, I’m deaf. With it, I can hear you. With my hearing aids on, I’m a hearing person, and I can fit into the hearing world except … I don’t know … there are little things that separate me. I’m in a sorority and they have this thing called Spring Carnival where you can buy pies to throw at your friends. If you get pies in the face, it means you’re well-liked but no one has ever done that to me and I know that people would love to buy me one. I found out the reason why they don’t get me is that they are trying to protect me. Someone spread it around that I shouldn’t get hit with the pies because it could ruin my hearing aids. That really made me mad. It may sound dumb to somebody else, but I wanted the pies, because not getting them is one of those little things that separates me and makes me feel like I am not part of things.
For these deaf individuals, the self is situated on the outside or, the margin, of the scene. Although they have access to the large sense of culture, as evidenced from their knowledge about shopping and education, they lack involvement in the everyday give and take of communicative life. They are left out not because someone has rejected them deliberately, but because they are not aware of what is happening, who is talking, or what is being said. While taking a college course in communication and culture, a deaf man who is a very competent speaker and lipreader commented he had never understood why people behaved the way they did around him, or had the reactions to him that they did, because he had “never known how to communicate.” He said this in very clear English. He had acquired native-level competency in English and had the ability to speak, yet had no sense of belonging, and little understanding of the relational dimension of communication. A nonmember self is situated outside the communication, periodically interjecting something but excluded from the center. Such a self is continually mystified about other people and about his or her identity. As Carly said, they are often not part of things and they seldom know why not.
As isolated as such individuals may feel among the hearing, they may be just as isolated among the deaf. The nonmember tends to be viewed as deaf by the hearing, and as “not really deaf” by the deaf community. When someone with a nonmember background begins to attend a school for the deaf, or appear at deaf community social events, deaf community members may reject her or him, or shake their heads and say that the person will never fit in. The person who speaks may be ridiculed for doing so. With young people, especially, the teenage demand for conformity or rejection can be quite harsh. Good English skills may also be ridiculed. The individual may be considered to be a hearie, someone who is deaf on the outside but hearing on the inside. This response to the nonmember can be heartbreaking and very disconcerting. Nonmembers often grow up with the idea that they can always seek refuge in the deaf community and can always learn to sign if they have trouble in the hearing world. Finding that to be false sometimes causes enormous pain.
THE PROBLEM OF GROUPS
Due to the common experience of discomfort in communicating in groups, many nonmembers are disinclined to participate in gatherings. Numerous stories of being “the only one” weave a thread of solitariness through the texture of the lives of the nonmembers that is elaborated by common tales of difficulty in contending with groups. Several shared the sentiments expressed by Jinny:
I hate really large groups—any group larger than 7 or 8 or so. If the group is larger than 10, just forget it, because it’s just too much conversation, because everyone talks at the same time. In a perfect world, only one person would talk at a time, but usually everyone has something to say, and I’m trying to lipread right and left. Especially if we’re sitting at a square table, I can’t do it. But if we’re sitting at a round table, I have a better opportunity. Like last night I went to the library and we were sitting around a table playing a card game and it was only a few of us so it was okay, and they all knew that I just need to lipread, and so they were willing to do that and that’s fine. But in a larger group, it’s not as easy to accommodate, and so I don’t like large groups, and I haven’t been going to parties. I haven’t gone to parties in a long time, because it’s just too much. It’s too draining to keep up with everything. Most parties are dark, so I can’t really see, and half the people have been drinking or something, so they are slurring their words. Anyway, with the noise and the confusion, I mean, ugh … it’s just too much tension. I could never be a waitress just because of the fact that there’s too much noise. But I get along great with people. I love people. I love talking. I love to talk, but I prefer to talk to people in small little conversational groups or just one on one.
Eric said of his social life:
Well, I’m working on it. I go to A. G. Bell.6 I mean, I can’t have a perfect life. Nobody has a perfect life. But I feel that … I’m very thankful that I’m able to stand on my own two feet. I’ve been overseas three times. I think once you can talk to most people one on one, you can do a lot. So I may not have a great social life in terms of a group situation, I think that’s one of the main differences between deaf culture and mainstreamed people. Deaf culture, they can do a lot of things on a group basis. In my case, I tend to do things one on one. I can have dinner with a very intelligent person. I can talk to the President of the United States. I can do a lot of things one on one. So I tend to avoid group situations unless I go to a basketball game, or a sporting event, or maybe a funny movie.
Vicki complained:
I’m single, so it’s easy for me to get out and meet people, but I find myself staying at home more because … I don’t know if it’s just because I like being home a lot or if I just feel like there isn’t any place to go without feeling I have to put that much more effort into communicating. I want to sign. I want to be able to communicate, but I want to be able to catch up with everybody so I have to find one person who will tell me what they [the deaf] are talking about in ASL, because I’m not able to sign with them and I lipread really well. I’m in the SHHH7 group, but I’m not really active as far as doing things with them. I just attend the meetings out of courtesy. The oral deaf 8 adult group doesn’t really get together socially. We tried to get a group of people together last summer, but nobody really responded to where they wanted to meet.
When SHHH does meet, every member works to gain full access to the interaction, and the group accommodates this goal. This can result in sign language interpreters, auditory loops, various microphones and receivers, and much repeating. Such meetings do not have the quality of social interaction; they are more like business meetings in which turns are formally regulated. One of the ironies of attempts by oral deaf individuals and hard-of-hearing individuals to socialize is precisely that they find it so difficult to understand each other. It may be worth the effort, but it is a huge effort.
The preference for the individual over the group is evident in Cory’s explanation of why he occasionally seeks out the deaf:
I don’t need deaf culture. I just want to make new friends, meet new people. The deaf culture just doesn’t fit any of the requirements I have other than socializing. But in some sense, I’m pretty much of a loner. I have friends … but I’m not like some people I know who say, “Oh, I’m friends with everybody.” I’m never lonely. I’m not the type of person who needs people, who needs to be active. It makes no difference to me. I could bury myself in a book easily. And I don’t use the phone, so I don’t have any phone friends, and I have trouble with group conversation so that really cuts it down.
In addition to the image he paints of being a loner, Cory’s description of his social needs as “just” one of many requirements plays a part in the perception of the individual orientation of the nonmembers. Although he says he wants to make new friends and meet new people, he diminishes them and his need of them. He reduces both to an aspect of his life that he relegates, through his use of the qualifying “just,” to a relatively low priority. Later, when he says, “It’s not a support group I’m looking for, just a close group of friends and family,” he again uses “just” to downplay his social needs. Rather than thinking of these groups in social terms, Cory, like many other nonmembers, tends to think of these groups in instrumental terms, as sources of support.
Mary also frames deaf community groups instrumentally: “It’s not like [I want] a support group, it’s not a rally, it’s not like a coalition for me, I don’t align myself up with those people.” Mary describes her distance from the deaf using terms that better describe her own participation among groups of nonmembers. To her they are primarily practical groups, either for support or political purposes, and her membership is based on these instrumental concerns. Because the practical purposes of the group are more salient than the relationships within them, groups of nonmembers tend to be aggregations of individuals temporarily united for a specific cause. They tend to be limited to task forces and advice and information sharing, and not to forming extended social communities. Any affiliation tends to be for the usefulness of the meetings; not for the social membership.
Nowhere to Belong
Some nonmembers do find a sense of place (although limited) in these functional groups, but others report feeling that they have nowhere to belong. Carly said:
[If you’re deaf] you can go to the Deaf Action Center or a Deaf Community Center and there’s all these deaf people, but there’s no hard-of-hearing community. How do you find hard-of-hearing people? I feel like I’m caught between two different worlds and I don’t fit into either one of them completely because I’m not deaf. With my hearing aids I know what it’s like to be hearing. Without them, I know what it’s like to be deaf. So I can be sympathetic. I know what the problems are, facing deaf people, but at the same time, I’m a hearing person with my hearing aid, and so I know all the benefits or whatever that go with that, and it’s just … I just don’t fit in with either one.
Whereas Carly describes her feeling of belonging nowhere as being caught between worlds, another deaf individual says the experience of adults who become deaf after language development (sometimes called ALDAs9) is like having no country: They lack both expertise in ASL and the experiences of growing up deaf. Many feel like outsiders in both hearing and deaf communities. Another ALDA says:
Actually, I have never felt completely comfortable with either hearing or deaf; I always seem to be somewhere in the middle, sort of like the man without a country.
Casey makes a different distinction: “I am deaf but not Deaf, Hearing but not hearing,” reflecting a common practice of using capital letters to designate culture and lowercase letters to designate audiological status. Mary wishes for “more categories, not just deaf and hearing. What happens when you fall in between?” A magazine article explained:
Becoming late-deafened means living in a paradoxical … situation. Late-deafened adults are culturally hearing, but audiologically deaf. They grew up in the hearing world, have hearing spouses and friends, and functioned as hearing people but now they are deaf. The hearing world views them as deaf; the Deaf world views them as hearing. Their formerly secure identities have dissolved. Where do they belong? (Lavation & Holmes, 1991, pp. 11–12).
Sometimes the uneasiness of having no place to belong or no group identity to share results in a sense that life is not worth living. The authors have been involved as interpreters in four cases in which deaf students were placed in psychiatric hospitals after threatening suicide when their sense of belonging was jeopardized. In each of these cases students were at a crossroads in their education and were told they would need to go to special schools or colleges for the deaf only. None of these teens felt they belonged among the deaf. Their place, they insisted, was with the hearing, even though they were unable to communicate effectively. The prospect of being cast with the deaf was devastating enough that all four had to be placed under psychiatric supervision to protect them from hurting themselves. For these teens, isolation among the hearing was preferable to the isolation they anticipated among the deaf. They had the larger sense of belonging with the hearing world, but no sense of belonging in social communication with anyone. When assigned to an environment that would actually support their need to connect with other people, they lost all hope. They saw this move as condemnatory. Their selves were situated in the abstract in a place they could not truly enter—the hearing world. Thus, they had no place.
The emphasis placed on just getting communication access can rob the individual of the opportunity to communicate other aspects of social identity. The individual’s deafness, or inability to speak and hear clearly, becomes the social identity of the individual. A deaf person among the hearing experiences exceptionality and avoids groups. For some, this avoidance is acceptable and even maybe a source of pride, but more commonly it denotes isolation. In our studies, the deaf individuals most competent in oral language are ironically most isolated. Most avoid group activities, most are involved in functional rather than organic groups, and most feel between worlds. Most selves are precariously situated: present at but never in the center of communication.
THE COMMUNITY OF THE DEAF
The isolation of the non-signing deaf is in sharp contrast to the celebration of community by members of the deaf community. The group identity of deaf community members stands out as a major characteristic. For members, deaf is fundamentally and constitutionally a group identity. Nonmembers tend to focus on their isolation, whereas members tend to focus on the importance of communication to their communal experience. Nonmembers tend to tell their own personal feelings; deaf community members tend to tell illustrative stories, some about themselves and some about others. Nonmembers tend to describe how things are—“the way it is.” Deaf community members often tell historical stories, and of radical changes between the past and the present. Members select a Miss Deaf America, are entertained by Deaf Comedy Club performers, bowl in Deaf Leagues, party together, and occasionally establish church congregations. Members share information through gossip networks and help each other out with advice and information about every aspect of living. Although there are newsletters and organization magazines aimed at both nonmembers and members, members have a glossy national magazine called Deaf Life. The only web pages found for nonmembers were institutional, yet there are more than 30 web pages maintained by individuals aimed at members. Members of the deaf community are very aware of the importance of communication in mundane interaction. They tend to celebrate it—many are willing to talk about communication endlessly. A deaf community leader gave this illustration of the importance of community:
The deaf have a craving to be together. I want to tell you a story that I think will help you understand clearly this very situation. I heard this story while I was in college and that was some time ago. In those days, the deaf boys and girls drove or took the train to Washington, DC.10 There were no planes then. Students returning to Gallaudet from California passed through Arizona. There were a few deaf people who lived in Arizona who always knew when that train was passing through from California. One of them would drive a great distance … 150 miles to that train station just to talk [sign] through the windows with the people on the train. Some people got off, but it was a real hurry. They were rushed, they had maybe 30 minutes at the most and then they would get back on the train and leave. So to go there would, for a while, fill that guy’s need or craving. Now we have a smaller world and things are different, but regardless, I think all deaf people still have that craving to be together.
This same story was also told to the first author by deaf Arizonans 20 years ago. To further emphasize his point that the deaf love to get together with one another, the same man explained that “deaf senior citizens flock to conventions not primarily for the information they can gain from workshops but more importantly for what happens in the halls between sessions where people stand around and gab.11 At one such meeting of senior citizens, people were exchanging hugs, catching up, reminiscing, making plans, swapping jokes, and getting acquainted. There was the feeling of a reunion, more than the feeling of a conference, with much celebration of being together—the communion of a community. When describing gatherings, deaf members tend to talk about all the communication going on. Reunions of deaf school classes are typically described as “more like family reunions than class reunions.” We have seen this level of emotion in gatherings such as a reunion of the class of 1938 of a school for the deaf, regular supper clubs that have been meeting for 20 years, monthly women’s card groups, weekly bowling leagues, and summer softball leagues. Such closeness is also exhibited at weddings, funerals, baby showers, other special occasions, and routine get-togethers. Deaf community members take cruises and bus trips together, attend deaf conventions, establish deaf churches, and so on. In all these what is striking is the sense of celebration at getting together with other deaf people for communication.
An older member of the deaf community was asked why, at deaf events, did deaf people meeting her insist not only on paying attention to the finger-spelling of her first name, but demand to know her last name as well. “It’s an unusual last name. Nobody will ever remember it. My first name is usually enough. Hearing people never care about my last name.” His reply illustrates the value communication has for the deaf:
Yes, I think it is different. You hearing people have so many possible contacts that you don’t value them all very much. But the deaf world is much smaller. Deaf people assume that they will meet again, so it is important to pay attention when being introduced in order to remember that person the next time. Deaf people assume there will be a next time. I don’t think hearing people think that way.
This celebration of communication persists even during major community splits over politics or personalities. There are factions, rivalries, and animosities. In public forums such as political meetings and in private conversations and incidents, there is as much mudslinging, fighting, and general stretching and straining of the ties that bind as one could find in any group of people. Members will say of someone else, so-and-so “is not “real deaf”; nevertheless, they tend to welcome the spectrum into the celebration and to make sure that all are accommodated. During one period of political agitation, the decision was made to stop hiring interpreters for meetings of a task force; the message was intended to be directed at hearing people that they should communicate in ASL or “butt out.” After one such meeting the plan was abandoned because many deaf individuals could not follow the ASL discussion without interpreters. Grumbling about the need for interpreters disappeared without a trace.
Deaf community members are situated within their community, and revel in the freedom to communicate with other participants in that community, and attend to communication needs of other members. They are present at and part of the scene, and tend to see being part of the scene as central to their identity. They urge others to make this identity possible for all deaf children.
Deafness as Territory
Many of the community members talk about their community as a tangible entity. For example, Chris said of another “He is not from ASL”—as if ASL were a physical location. Patricia, in talking about her feelings about Gallaudet, said, “It’s deaf to its deepest core and deaf is in the air.” Louise said she was going back to Gallaudet for a master’s degree, even though she thought the program in her city was better and she and her husband were happy there. At Gallaudet, she said, “They teach me” (rather than the interpreter).
For many hearing people who enjoy associating with the deaf, attending a deaf community function is like traveling to another country, where everything is the same, yet different. It is more than being outnumbered by the deaf. The hearing are often outnumbered by the deaf in schools for the deaf, but even when administrators are deaf, the structure of the schools and practices is based on the hearing world. Accommodations are made for the deaf, but schools for the deaf are not deaf worlds.
A sense of the deaf world prevails sometimes when the event is designed and carried out by the deaf, possibly with special accommodations for the hearing. A deaf event is organized around eye contact, sound, language, pace, rhythm, agenda, physical setup, jokes, and atmosphere, all contributing to the sense of a different world, a deaf world. People sometimes use the phrase “the deaf way” to capture this sense. The first international conference to celebrate deaf cultures the world over was called Deaf Way. Interestingly, in cities with large deaf populations, deaf individuals report that they tend to live in the same areas of town (although not concentrated in the same neighborhood).
Deaf members situate themselves within communication, within a mass of deaf individuals. They take on identities as native communicators. They take control and reach out in all directions. It is not too strong to say many deaf members experience the language of signs and the community of the deaf as a homeland.
The deaf sense of community is strengthened and enlarged by the connection to past and future generations of the deaf. This is significant because almost all deaf individuals are born to normally hearing parents. This connection to past and future generations is cultural, not genetic. Deaf poet Ella Lentz addressed hearing parents, “He may be your son, but he is my child.” The diachronic connection is caught by a stand-up comic/poet, Ken Glickman:
Deaf or Something?
Someday, someplace, somebody
Will, to my face, scream
You deaf or something?
And, I will pause momentarily—
With profound thanks
To all the Deafies12 that came before me …
And with great camaraderie
For all the Deafies that will come after me …
—and I will then say nothing …
Except to say …
Something.
In Habits of the Heart, a book about the discourses and values in modern U.S. life, the authors say a geographic community “almost always has a history and so is also a community of memory, defined in part by its past and its memory of the past” (Bellah, Madsen, Sullivan, Swidler, & Tipton 1985, p. 333). The deaf have a collective history that provides current and future generations a sense of grounding and place so that each new generation feels part of an extended community. There are books that chronicle the history of the deaf (e.g., Gannon, 1981) and stories passed down from one generation to the next, creating folklore (Rutherford, 1993).
There is also a sense of living history born of younger generations that are in touch with older generations. At a high school reunion we videotaped, a class of deaf alumni shared their school memories with younger students and added these taped memories to the official school archives. They talked about old rules such as when boys and girls were not allowed to play outside at the same time. They talked about educational methodology that has waxed and waned, and their experiences with these changing trends. They talked about specific individuals and how those people shaped their lives. Thus, older deaf people become ancestors who pass on their stories, and this sharing between generations becomes a part of the ties that bind the deaf into a community.
Patricia’s story illustrates the role history plays in sustaining a sense of connection to an extended community:
I moved around a lot to different communities and I would see people and say hello and try to get to know them and I’d see them signing in ASL, and we were able to join because we had the important key. We had good communication and all this other stuff. We could converse in ASL and we had deaf history inside of us.
At another high school, a student heard stories about the old days from a groundsman and proposed a story for the school journal. The whole school buzzed about the days when the boys and girls in the high school used different stairways and the students farmed the grounds to produce some of their own food.
Recently, there has been a movement to reclaim the history of deaf education to show the prominent leadership roles of deaf individuals. In schools for the deaf around the United States, “Gallaudet Day,” in early December, has been a day of assembly programs and other celebrations of the story of Alice Cogswell, a deaf child whose parents commissioned Thomas Gallaudet to teach her. In recent years, most schools have celebrated the day as Gallaudet and Clerc Day. Laurent Clerc was an experienced deaf teacher who came from France to work with and teach Gallaudet. There is currently an attempt to raise funds for a monument to him at the original school in Connecticut. This sense of history is important for local communities, and national and international history.
The sense of history among the deaf community is matched by a sense of the future. In 1912, John W. Jones went on record saying “There is no danger of sign language disappearing. It will live long after you and I are dead. If we were all to die tonight, a hundred years from now it would still be alive and serving the deaf” (reprinted in Garretson, 1991). In 1913, another visionary deaf leader made a film of sign language to preserve its beauty for future generations of the deaf. The entire 1993 issue of A Deaf American Monograph (Garretson, 1993) is devoted to hopes for the deaf community of the 21st century.
At a conference to determine legislative priorities for an upcoming session of a state government, one deaf leader announced, “the issues decided today are for the future of our deaf children” while another advised the delegates, “to predict the future is to invent it. That’s what you are doing now, you are controlling your destiny.”
In these public arenas, as well as in more private exchanges, the deaf community is extended into the future. A deaf woman quits her clerical job so she can work as a houseparent at a school for the deaf and make a difference in the next generation. Another volunteers her time to raise money for a retirement village for the deaf; deaf couples adopt deaf children partly because it is a way to provide for the future of the deaf community. It is not uncommon to hope that one’s children are deaf, partly as a way to affect the future of deaf people. Young deaf college graduates who work at a school for the deaf are conscious of the possibility of making life better for deaf children because of what they have learned from their own experiences.
The point is not whether these motivations are indeed this simple but that people express this consciousness of the future as a factor in explaining their own lives. Such connections to the past and to the future nourish in the deaf a sense of having roots in a broad and expansive community. Thus deaf members situate themselves in time to create a sense of continuity and connection with those who preceded them and those who will come after. Although there is little familial continuity, the deaf create an historical continuity with deaf forbears and deaf descendants. They create a place for themselves between the past and the future. They are not only present at the scene; they create the scene.
Deafness as Ethos
The sense of belonging to a community larger than the immediate is also seen in the international bonds of the deaf. Patricia shared her feelings of connection to the deaf around the world in her thoughts about what she learned at the first international conference to celebrate deaf cultures the world over, called Deaf Way:
At Deaf Way, I found that things are the same all over the world. There is a tendency to cherish deafness and their sign language, ASL, or whatever it may be. There’s a lot of deaf people all over the world worrying that the hearing people are changing our language. And we all cherish our different deaf cultures. It’s interesting that it’s the same issues all around the world.
Thus many deaf members feel part of a larger world and take an interest in the deaf in other parts of the world. From the global to the local sphere, there exists generally in the deaf community a feeling of belonging. Many members project a belief that certain attitudes and ways of being are quintessentially deaf and are shared by other deaf people around the world. In sharp contrast to the isolated identity of nonmembers; for members, a deaf identity is a communal identity.
When asked to talk about the central thing about the deaf community, members over and over again respond, “communication, clear communication” or “real communication.” In clear communication lies the possibility of relationship. The longing for relationship draws the deaf to each other to form the basis for a community. Through “real” communication they are able to achieve deep relationships that create a rich vitality within this community. Members tell many stories of the contrast between the isolation of deaf individuals in the hearing world, even their own families, and the fabric of relationships within the deaf community. Recalling the tragic scene at his mother’s deathbed, LaVesque (1994) wrote:
It was obvious that we had very little time left, so we tried to say all the things we had in our hearts. I talked and lipread her. Toward the end, she wanted to tell me something. I didn’t understand and asked her to repeat it. Twice more I asked her to repeat, then finally I gave her a piece of paper. She was only able to write the letter O or maybe C, before her eyes closed and the deep sleep of coma overtook her.
In the weeks and months before my mother’s death, we spent many hours going over issues and preparing for her death. It was done verbally, not comfortably, but adequately.
My mother made sure I had the finest oral education around. She was proud of my speaking ability, and impressed by my less-than-perfect lipreading. But we never had a real conversation. Oh, I knew she loved me. I knew she was proud of me. But I’ll never know her last words to me … the frustration of our final moments together will haunt me. If she had learned sign language, she would have been able to tell me clearly whatever it was that was so important to her.
That moment was a painful one. It made me think of all the other things she might have told me over the years, but she didn’t.
This longing to know and be known by a parent, the regret that such a relationship was never possible, is expressed by many members of the deaf community. Many talk about feeling closer to people at their school for the deaf than to their families, because at school they could communicate. The alienation from families may be related to the need for many children to board at central schools far from their homes. We frequently encounter day students whose communication with parents is also severely restricted.
COMMUNICATION AND RELATIONSHIPS
Many members claim that life in its fullest sense did not begin for them until they were able to partake of real communication. Many believe that communication is the basis of close relationships among the deaf. Whether it happens at 6, 12, or 25, people often tell essentially the same story: a story of finding oneself in the middle of other deaf people for the first time—deaf people who are signing—and suddenly realizing that they are home. Seventeen-year-old Melanie was taken to board at her residential school for the deaf when she was 6:
One day my parents drove me here and then they got in the car to leave without me. I cried and cried, but they went away. I didn’t know. … Then I looked around and I saw other kids—like me—for the first time! My eyes drank it in, and I started to experience communication. I saw a girl—she was Black—and I didn’t know what to think. I’d never seen anyone with Black skin before, and I was a little bit scared. But I looked at the other kids, the ones with skin like mine, and they seemed perfectly comfortable, so I was, too. We could all communicate.
Then one day I got on the school bus for a long ride, and as I was staring out the window, who do I see but my parents! I cried and cried and they were so happy to see me. I spoke some words for them and they were so happy because that made it worth it to have me so far away from home. But no, they never learned to sign or communicate. Clear communication was something I found at school.
The Language of Signs: Freedom or Limitation?
Nonmembers who are not members of a deaf community, like most hearing people, see the language of signs as a burden and a limitation. They often are proud of never signing. Or they are embarrassed to sign in front of hearing people. They may be grateful to parents and therapists who helped them to “go the oral route.” One 19-year-old said she was so grateful that her mother had fought to keep her in public school, because if she had been sent to the deaf school, she would have learned to sign and become “handicapped.” But others talk about finding signs in themselves the way a sculptor might talk of finding a statue in marble. Signs were forbidden in most schools—even in dormitories after school hours until the 1970s. Many feel that the new policies of tolerance are like the end of slavery. In the words of a man in his 60s:
[Today] the deaf are free. The shackles are unleashed and we can step into the fresh air and breathe again. We are like withered people who have come back to life.
To members, the biggest difference between the deaf and the hearing is signs. Many members feel they can be themselves only by using ASL. Many say this is the only way they can express their true selves. Others are comfortable and feel “like themselves” using oral English, but they still say they cherish ASL as their true language. Contrast this view with that of nonmembers and hearing people: For them the biggest difference between the hearing and the deaf is hearing loss. For Cheryl Heppner (1992), life for a deaf person among the hearing is “Life as a Spectator Sport” while life among the deaf allows one to be “a participant in all possible parts” of life (p. 189). She tells about driving home after only a week at Gallaudet College. In the supermarket at home, she experienced an epiphany about her life before Gallaudet:
I walked inside the store, as I had twice a week for the past year, and suddenly, for the first time, I felt frightened. The din was unbelievable. And everywhere I looked I was surrounded by people saying things I couldn’t understand. It was such a complete change from the past week that I could barely handle it. This was the world I’d grown up in, but suddenly I felt like a foreigner coming to it for the first time. I was so shocked by the depth of my feeling that I clung to my cart for several minutes before my hands stopped shaking (Heppner, 1992, p. 137).
The language of signs is the key to clear communication and the key to the deaf individual’s ability to enter into the center of a scene. Without clear communication, the scene is busy and confusing. The deaf individual must watch and guess what is going on and must manage the scene through conscious effort. With clear communication, the deaf individual has the luxury that all cultural members have—the luxury of taking communication for granted. Only then can one lose oneself in communication; that is, only when communication is transparent can one focus on meanings, feelings, relationships, and free interaction. The sublime irony is that the visibility associated with sign that so many people fear is actually the mechanism that makes it possible for communication to be transparent. Only when communication is transparent can one participate in “all possible parts” of life. Only then can one move from a spectator role to a central role in a scene. Members believe this transparency is possible only with signs.
Emotional Release or Repression?
Stories like the ones presented here are common. People tell such stories passionately, ruefully, or angrily. Many of the life experiences that elicited weeping surprised the tellers and the listeners, because they seemed so trivial—routine encounters with clerks at store counters, for example. But it is exactly the ordinary aspects of such routine encounters that make it extraordinary for deaf individuals. The emotional relief of discovering that there are places where one can enter freely into relationships often makes way for joy. Niemenen (1990, pp. 218–219) said, “I’ve never been able to laugh anywhere except in the deaf world.”
In sharing these findings with hearing audiences, we have found it difficult to convey and explain this emotionality. One man responded, “That’s nothing new. Lots of people have trouble communicating with their parents.” Other hearing people tell us the same thing. It is as if these hearing people are picturing an Oprah show about the problem of having one’s motives and needs misunderstood (Carbaugh, 1996). These deaf individuals are light years short of worrying about misunderstanding of motives or emotional needs. They are not even at the first level of exchanging mundane information in their own homes.
Picture again the girl wandering from room to room to see if anyone is home and wondering where everyone has gone. Picture the 6-year-old left in a strange place because no one has the ability to communicate what is happening to her. She has no way of knowing if she will ever see her family again or why she is being abandoned. Picture another girl—14 this time—looking for the half-eaten lemon she left on the table. She says to her father, “Where’s my lemon?” She speaks and she signs several times, but her father cannot understand even this rudimentary message. The mother is sought. After 10 minutes, they all understand that the lemon was mistakenly discarded. A little later they sit down to dinner. Mother, father, and younger brother chat a bit. Daughter eats. The two kids exchange a gaze to laugh at the amount of food on father’s plate. This is the only message exchanged with daughter.
In contrast, the next day the daughter sits in the library at her school for the deaf, discussing her crushes on movie stars, gossiping about friends, and engaging in word play with a friend. The second scene involves sign language. The second scene fully and freely involves the girl. In the second scene she is immersed in the communication, and it can be transparent.
For members, life among the hearing is restricted to surfaces, to watching as spectators, whereas life among the deaf is a full participatory experience, with the full range of social identities available. What makes the difference is access to real communication, that is, conversation. Nonmembers, like hearing people, tend to look at life among the deaf as restricted and constricted. But for members, the converse is true: Life among the deaf is wide open, bursting, full of possibilities. A tremendous emotional release is associated with the ability to have normal, full, and real conversations, and members have had that experience only among the deaf. Created is a deep sense of community in the deaf who find in their togetherness what they cannot find alone. Perhaps most important, life among the deaf, by offering access to communication, offers access to the self. As Jan said:
It wasn’t until I went to Gallaudet that I met signing deaf people. To me, it was like coming home. For the first time in my life, I felt like I really belonged. When I found the deaf, I found me.
This chapter focuses on the importance that being able to participate fully in everyday interaction has on one’s sense of well-being. The focus has been on people who are deaf, and the impact on their social and cultural identity of participating (or not) in everyday communication. Underlying our discussion has been the theory that communication practices create culture and cultural identity, and we demonstrate this process through the experiences of deaf individuals.
Culture can be seen as a constructed reality that is inherited and built from symbols that shape our actions, identities, thoughts, and sentiments. Symbolic forms are independent of, but gain their meaningfulness through, social sharing. Communication is a creative process of building and reaffirming relationship through symbols. Culture essentially becomes our communicative activities and refers primarily to the products of the arts and language. Our constitutive relations as human beings are linguistic. Vygotsky, Mead, and Cassirer all stress the reciprocity of learning from social interaction and constituting social identity through communication.
Much of our folk knowledge about culture stresses the notion of inheritance. We expect culture to be handed down from adults to their children as a legacy. But, if this were all that actually happened, culture would be static or degraded over time, and an individual’s role would be minimal. Inheritance is only part of the story, however, because individuals continuously engage in interaction that builds their own identities and reconstitutes the overall culture. Agar (1996) highlighted the necessary duality of language and culture by coining the blended term, languaculture. Each single practice is part of the larger expressive system in which one lives. Thus there is a “large, ‘super-sense’ of the cultural community” (Carbaugh, 1996, p. 15) that is presumed to extend across time and person and is not tied to particular moments. This is a set of thoughts, images, and expectations carried in the mind. The symbols of identity then cycle to identify human agents in particular communicative practices.
Because identity is interactively constituted, interactants’ ascription of an identity to an individual is significant. If one ascribes an identity to an individual, one is making interpretations according to one’s understanding of the ascribed identity. Such ascribed identities may, in fact, not fit and thus problematize identity for such individuals. There are many individuals whom others would place as part of an ethnic system, for example, but who are not part of that system, because they were raised outside it and are not part of an ethnic community of practice (Hanks, 1996). They may not share at all in the larger sense of the ethnic community or in specific communication practices of the community; they may even be excluded by those who do. Nevertheless, because of others’ expectations they are forced, in some ways, to define themselves through or in contrast to this ethnic community.
Cultural pragmatics is the study of “particular communicative practices-in-use” and the interpretation of “the symbols, forms, and meanings that comprise them” (Carbaugh, 1996, p. 14). One key concept in the study of particular communicative practices-in-use is that they are always situated in particular contexts. Thus the method of study is a form of thick description (Geertz, 1977). Although there may be a larger sense of the extended culture and a larger sense of the abstracted self, the self never actually acts except in particular situations with particular others. Social identity is, in Carbaugh’s (1996) term immanent in individual, situated communication practices.
Social identities are immanent; they are taken for granted because they implicate other identities and social structures. Most communication is not strategic or deliberative but automatic, and the social implications of the communication are also automatic. These implications are on two levels. On one level they enact the notion of cultural agent that obtains in a society. For U.S. citizens, cultural agency is related to individuality, equality, rights, and so on. The deaf are cultural agents within their societies. The issues of identity for deaf individuals are at the level of social identities, especially the aspect of social identity made operational through conversation. The study of deaf individuals, whose participation in conversation cannot be taken for granted, casts light on the importance of conversation to this process of social identification.
SUMMARY
Full participation in everyday, routine, “taken-for-granted” communication is not always an option for non-signing deaf persons who function within a hearing world, but it is for signing deaf persons who function within the deaf community. This real communication and participation is made possible through the language of signs. The emotional release and belonging that comes with discovery of the deaf community is a sharp contrast to the loneliness that many deaf people feel among the hearing. The key feature of the deaf community membership identity is immersion in communication within relationships.
The observing, but not participating, deaf do not create or experience a cultural community. They even have trouble getting together in functional, limited groups. Although they have much in common with one another, their affiliation is practical and occasional. In contrast, the signing deaf create a cultural community. It is a community with a perceived territory, history, global ethos, and language. Most significant for the theory of cultural pragmatics, it is a community that is perceived by its members and created through communication (Philipsen, 1989). Members have a sense of the practices and symbols of identity in the community. They have a sense of belonging and recognition. Unlike self-help groups, hobbyists, or other kinds of partial affiliations, the sense shared by deaf community members “create [s] a large, ‘super-sense’ of the cultural community” (Car-baugh 1996, p. 15). This supersense comes from the fullness of free communication through sign language. Each single practice is part of the larger expressive system in which one lives.
The different experiences presented in this chapter demonstrate that a deaf identity can lie in a larger community that is only partially accessible to the deaf individual and where communication is never transparent. Thus deaf nonmembers certainly have the cultural identity of Americans. In social interaction, their enactment of identity is often limited to their disability. Identity can also be located in a larger community that is fully accessible to the deaf individual, where communication is transparent, and where a full range of social identities is available to the deaf individual. They also illustrate the importance of the freedom to mix aspects of identity rather than forcing individuals into only two profiles.
What is striking about the identification of the deaf community is that there is a shared identity of deafness—and especially of a signing, “real deaf” identity. Within that identity, there are different social identities enacted. The members can accentuate different identities and affiliations. Future research in the deaf community can identify scenes in which actors identify agents-in-scenes as different and differentially important. That is, we can focus on when the communal identity is accentuated and when other social identities are emphasized. Our research has focused on explication of the communal identity. We are beginning to understand how blind we have been to what deaf people have been telling us all these years. They long for the freedom to be themselves and to be able to enact different social identities. Life without full access to communicative interaction can result in life lived as an observer, while unimpeded access can result in life lived as a participant. For all of us, as humans, this is an important difference.
REFERENCES
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Bryce, J. (1996). Retrospective accounts of deaf adults and their implications for current education of the deaf. Unpublished master’s thesis, University of Texas, Austin.
Carbaugh, D. (1996). Situating selves. Albany: State University of New York Press.
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Garretson, M. (Ed.). (1993). Deafness: 1993–2013 (A Deaf American monograph, Vol. 43). Silver Spring, MD: National Association of the Deaf.
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1The senior author has conducted field research in deaf communities for 25 years. The other two authors also have many years of professional experience and field research with deaf individuals. All have participated in the deaf community and have conducted in-depth interviews with deaf individuals and those associated with, and related to, deaf adults and children. Two authors have worked as sign language interpreters and teachers in schools for the deaf and in the community; the other author is an audiologist.
2Observations and interviews include both prominent and politically active deaf individuals, and those more obscure and/or unemployed. They include deaf friends as well as deaf strangers. The majority of individuals involved are active to some extent in the deaf community in different regions of the United States. They were located through informal contacts in the deaf community and through social, religious, and professional activities. Twenty individuals were approached because they had significant hearing loss but did not identify themselves as part of a deaf community. In some cases, these individuals were encountered during attendance at social or educational functions with the deaf community members, or through their college or graduate studies in deaf education. In other cases, they were identified through informal contacts, through a support group for hearing-impaired individuals, or through audiological services.
Most of the identity narratives in this chapter were collected by the second author as part of her dissertation study of what it means to be deaf (Poeppelmeyer, 1995). Poeppelmeyer interviewed 16 deaf individuals who considered themselves members of the deaf community, and 11 who did not. Twenty interviews were conducted by Jennifer Bryce (1996) from deaf adults involved in deaf education.
The interviews (from 1 to 3 hours) were audio- or videotaped and transcribed. Other materials came from field observations, interviews, unpublished theses and dissertations, and published materials (i.e., poetry, magazine articles, newsletters, stories, and autobiographies written by deaf individuals).
The material in this study includes English and American Sign Language (ASL). The portions used here are presented as English narratives, with no attempt to represent the qualities of the consultants’ speech, which varies greatly in intelligibility, or original ASL. Because this study is not about the language but about meaning, an attempt was made to present stories as seamlessly as possible. Except where otherwise indicated, the long narratives are taken from Poeppelmeyer (1995).
3Gallaudet University, located in Washington, DC, was established in 1864 to provide postsecondary education for the deaf.
4Padden and Humphries (1988) pointed out that, from the deaf perspective, a person a little bit hard-of-hearing is one who can interact with hearing people a little bit, and one who is very hard-of-hearing can interact with hearing people easily. This is the opposite of how hearing people use these terms. The issue is interaction with hearing people rather than audiological abilities
5All names are pseudonyms.
6The Alexander Graham Bell Association promotes the reliance on speech and hearing by those with hearing loss. It has a subsection for “Oral Deaf Adults.”
7Self Help for the Hard of Hearing, a self-help group.
8“Oral deaf” refers to deaf individuals who do not use sign language. It does not necessarily connote highly intelligible speaking and skilled lipreading.
9ALDA is the Association for Late-Deafened Adults and its members are referred to as ALDAs.
10Gallaudet College (now University) is a liberal arts college for the deaf, funded by the federal government, and located in Washington, DC. Until the 1970s, there were no other special programs for deaf students in higher education. Gallaudet, for many, symbolizes a deaf world, where the hearing are few. For many, it symbolizes independence and growing up. For many, and perhaps most importantly, it is where they learn that a deaf life could be a good life.
11The sign used here is usually glossed CHAT. It conveys a sense of talking with ease, abandon, and familiarity, and thus evokes a sense of communion that, for some, implies that the conversation is taking place in ASL, without barriers to communication.
12Defined by Glickman (1993) as “a deaf person who acts and looks like one.”