Deaf Subjects: Between Identities and Places Book Description.
Forthcoming from New York University Press.
These essays comprise my commonplace book on "the deaf subject," particularly the modern deaf subject since the turn of the 19th century-the subject that has more often than not found itself between. I open with an essay that cracks a common place for my own deaf identity while it also offers a larger theory of "betweenity" applied to the modern deaf subject. "Between: A Commonplace Book for the Modern Deaf Subject." In five movements, this chapter offers a rhetorical analysis of four significant commonplaces for deaf people's identities and the field of "Deaf Studies" at the turn of the new century. First, I interrogate anxious efforts to separate and distinguish "deaf" from "disabled" and to uncouple the fraternal twins, "deaf" and "Deaf." Second, I meet up with the new deaf cyborg, equipped with cochlear implants, digital hearing aids, and multiple forms of technologically savvy communication options such as video relay systems, email, the internet, and text-capable pagers. Third, I examine the radically changing nature of American Sign language as it undergoes both shift and standardization, goes ever more global, and also comes significantly into the hands of (mostly hearing) students here in America who are eager to learn it as a "foreign" language. And in my fourth commonplace, I trace Derrida to consider the relationship between writing (and) deafness. I end this chapter in a fifth movement, marking out a new epistemological and ontological between space, positing a place I call the "think-eye" space.
The second chapter illustrates the betweenity power and potential of American Sign Language (ASL) in the academy, wedged as it is between traditional letter-bound views of language and literature and a wave of 21st century students who now actively engage in-and seek out-visual ways of learning. In "ASL and the Academy: The Little Language that Could" my use of the powerful little "I think I can" blue engine story, helps places modern "deafness" in the institutional framework of larger academic language learning. I map the intricate and considerable-but also exciting-challenges and arguments facing the development of American Sign Language programs in the contemporary academy.
The third chapter, "Approaching American Sign Language Literature: Rhetorically and Digitally," also places modern deaf identity and language in the institutional framework of the production and reception of "literature." In 1910, George Veditz, then President of the National Association of the Deaf, capitalized on the technology of film to produce the "Sign Master Series" featuring ten nationally known "master signers" in an effort to 'preserve and advance" the tradition of American Sign language which he claimed we must "possess and jealously guard." Almost 100 years later, supported by a grant from the Battelle Endowment for Technology and Human Affairs (BETHA) at Ohio State University, we used new digital media technologies to re-enact the "Sign Master Series"-to digitally re-master the potential that is now possible in the creation, production, publication, and reception of sign language "literature." Based largely on issues, elements, and challenges for the creative production and critical reception of ASL literature that were discussed during a historical three-hour forum with seven ASL author-performers and seven ASL literature critics, this chapter argues for a rhetorical approach and digital future for American Sign Language literature.
In "Narrating Deaf Lives: Placing Deaf Autobiography, Biography, and Documentary," the fourth chapter, I offer a critical summary of the purpose, events, and key points of a three-day international conference held November 2004 at Gallaudet University (sponsored by the Gallaudet University Press Institute) and the "Deaf Lives" series I edit for Gallaudet University Press. The centerpiece of this essay pivots around "writing" (as a technology) and all that it has, does, and can mean for narrating deaf lives while I also imagine how digital media, video, film documentary are all technologies that can increasingly be used to convey deaf life stories. These technologies now, more often than not, move deaf lives into the mainstream (where they are "heard" by more hearing people) while they also help convey deaf lives to other deaf lives; thus, these technologies are, in effect, the between space. Thematically, I also attend to the new commonplaces of deaf subjects in late 20th and early 21st century life narratives: diversity within the identity known as "deaf"; further representation of the complex relationship between deaf and hearing people; illustrations of the intertwined, and sometimes knotted, nature of individual and collective identities within "Deaf culture" or "the deaf community"; and anxiety over identity and place in "deaf world" and as a deaf subject.
From here, I turn back. I also turn increasingly visual as the final three essays step back in time but also forward in the way they combine visual material with my own words. In the fifth essay, "Deaf Eyes: The Allen Sisters Pictorial Photography, 1885-1920," I circle back to the earlier moments of "modern deaf identity," the turn of the last century. In "Deaf Eyes" I also focus on the intersections of gender and deafness (where so little work has yet been done), as I examine the work of Mary and Frances Allen, two sisters who were first teachers but then went deaf in their early 20s and became fairly famous pictorial photographers. The Allen Sisters and their photography are contextualized in five interwoven commonplaces: their own brief biographies; the Deerfield, Mass. arts and crafts community they belonged to; women and photography at the turn of the 20th century; visual-rhetorical categorizations of the body of their photographic work; and their deafness in relation to their own lives and their location in time, gender, and geographical space.
Other famous deaf women at the turn of the 20th century have also caught my eye. In my sixth chapter, "Posting Mabel," I offer a work of creative non-fiction that explores the world of Mabel Hubbard Bell, Alexander Graham Bell's deaf wife. Because Mabel Bell (the original "Ma Bell") was a vociferous letter-writer herself, I engage her as a deaf subject by writing postcards to her. Each postcard comes with an image from the Bell Family papers that sets up the subject of my post; each post includes lines from Mabel's own letters. The postcards are both biographical and autobiographical (for I write myself alongside Mabel), critical yet friendly, fictional yet framed everywhere with facts. Although she herself deliberately chose not to associate with other deaf people in her lifetime, Mabel Bell may well be my classic case study, the quintessential "between" subject of modern deaf identity.
Rubbing against the era of Mabel Bell and the Allen Sisters, I end in a very hard, between space. In my final essay, I also return to the concept of the commonplace. In "Economics, Euthanasia, Eugenics: Rhetorical Commonplaces of Disability in the Nazi T-4 Program" I come again to the topics of invention for an argument--anxious and awful--about identity. Here deafness is not always easy to see. But it is there in the cracks, gesturing from the shadows, of this dark moment in history. A colleague in Deaf studies recently told me that my work with subjects like the Allen Sisters, Mabel Hubbard Bell, and the Nazi T-4 program (as it concerned "disability" more largely) might not really be "Deaf Studies" because technically it was work on "oral deaf people" and that he would "put that on the borders of Deaf Studies." I appreciated his efforts to clarify how he defined the field, yet I admit-even argue-and submit here that these borders are precisely the place of "happening" when it comes to deaf identity, Deaf Studies, Deaf culture. We do not know and can not know what is inside Deaf culture or deaf identity unless we also know what its borders and boundaries are. What is between matters. The Nazi's collapsing of so many boundaries with regards to disability and difference (and deafness was included here) makes for a difficult and uncommon, yet necessary, boundary place to leave my deaf subject in.