124 2010 by The Modern Language Association of America P

Addressing Deafness:
From Hearing Loss to Deaf Gain
KRISTEN HARMON
Whatever the cause, it is certainly the case that adult deaf- mutes are some-
times hampered by the instinctive prejudices of hearing persons with whom
they desire to have business or social relations. Many persons have the idea
they are dangerous, morose, ill- tempered, et cetera. . . . [A deaf- mute] is
sometimes looked upon as a sort of monstrosity, to be stared at and avoided.
. . . In fact fallacies concerning the deaf and dumb are so common as to touch
us all and to suggest the advisability of seriously examining the fundamen-
tal ideas we hold concerning them.
Alexander Graham Bell, 1884
I just read that deaf mute is an offensive term, writes one poster to the
Internet discussion forum Answerbag. I did not know this until now, and I
have no idea what the non- offensive term would be, do you? Answers fol-
low, ranging from an observation that the term deaf- mute is widely used in
newspaper accounts to a diatribe against pussy- footing around with care-
fully worded names to, fnally, the authoritative- sounding suggestion, In
modern use, deaf mute has acquired negative connotations. It is advisable to
avoid it in favor of other terms such as profoundly deaf. Thanks, that was
a great answer! :), responds the original poster, who then presumably uses
this term to the chagrin of many deaf people this person will encounter.
Deaf- mute, like deaf and dumb, calls up images of raggedy, squinty- eyed
boys and men, sooty from the Victorian era, while profoundly deaf, at least
The author is professor of English at Gallaudet University.
KRISTEN HARMON
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125
for mealso deaf and mostly profoundly socalls up the image of a
woebegone child wearing body- style hearing aids dripping with cords, an
artifact of the 1960s and 1970s. Dusty relics these particular terms may
be, but the persistence of the problem with naming, describing, and self-
identifcation has implications for both sides of the hearing line: What
do I call you? What do I call myself? Whoand whatare we in relation
to each other?
1
Extraction of quantifying urges (How much do you really
hear?) and the shifting imbalances of the hearing- deaf frame of reference
prove diffcult for the ostensibly collaborative processes inherent in usage
and bias- free language. How can a deaf person simply not be deaf? Do
the modifying adjectives mildly or partiallyas opposed to profoundly
ameliorate, pacify, the requirements of a hearing bias?
Given the wide- ranging connotations of terms related to deafness and
deaf people, what is an enterprising writer, like the original poster to
Answerbag, to do? The Modern Language Association advises, Careful
writers do not use language that implies unsubstantiated or irrelevant
generalizations about such personal qualities as age, birth or family sta-
tus, disability, economic class, ethnicity, political or religious beliefs, race,
sex, or sexual orientation (MLA Style Manual 82). Internet searches on
suggestions for bias- free language related to deafness provide a range of
mostly people- frst answers: a hearing- impaired or hearing- disabled person,
a person with deafness, a person who cant speak or hear, a late- deafened person,
a speech- handicapped person, and so on.
This carousel of nomenclature circles up and down and around fun-
damental ideas regarding sensory integration and the physical body: deaf
is deaf and as a substantiated generalization based on where one fts in
a spectrum of sensory difference is always defned in relation to hear-
ing, a much more powerful partner in that binary. To use one descriptive
term over another is to sanction a particular ideology, with the end result
that hearing status is often used in print as shorthand for an imaginary
personal and social biography. Dont we all know what a profoundly deaf
persons life must be like?
The nature of this bias, intended and unintended, has been well de-
scribed in print with the discussion of phonocentrism (Bauman, Lis-
tening; Nelson) and audism (Humphries). Audism is that system of
advantage based on hearing ability whereby the privilege allotted to
hearing people can be made visible and thus recognized (Bauman, Aud-
ism 241). Further, many widely used abstractions, even some perceived
to be bias- free, are complicated or deconstructed by renaming efforts
made by deaf people themselves and by intracommunity reclamation of
stigmatized language.
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ADDRESSING DEAFNESS: FROM HEARING LOSS TO DEAF GAIN
Contemporary efforts at renaming are meant to avoid impairment
language and also to make key distinctions, because deaf people are not
an undifferentiated mass. Importantly, usage of these terms affrms the
centrality of language, signed or spoken, in a deaf persons life in ways
that terms like profoundly deaf cannot. What is at stake is the prerogative
for describing and claiming which language and social grouping is most
important for a particular deaf individual. There are exceptions to each
category named below and overlap between categories, but many if not
most deaf people describe themselves in relation to signed or spoken lan-
guage communities.
Primary affliations to sign languagebased communities are described
through such constructions as Deaf, to describe users of American Sign
Language who are also members of the Deaf- World, a sociolinguistic
community;
2
hard of hearing, to describe a range of behaviors related to
speech, sign language, and the use of hearing technology; and oral deaf, to
describe those who have not learned sign language or who choose not to,
relying primarily on lipreading, speech, and other communication tech-
nologies. These terms are perhaps less descriptive than they used to be as
the postDeaf President Now movement of 1988 and the postAmericans
with Disabilities Act generation comes of age.
3
Recently, d/Deaf, a somewhat unsatisfactory coinage, has been used as
an inclusive term describing all deaf individualsyet also recognizing the
signifcant social and linguistic differences among deaf peopleand as a
description of the spectrum of identifcation with Deaf communities. The
term is based on sign language fuency and other factors. Finally, theres
the simple deaf, which is often used in print to refer to oral deaf people or
to the fact of sensory difference. It is largely descriptive of social, politi-
cal, and biological categories and processes and distinct from the jarring
emphasis on the fattening and aggregating technicalities of hearing loss,
as seen in profoundly deaf.
In answer to those who would focus, with obsessive shortsightedness,
on the sheer profundity of loss, some Deaf activists are advocating for the
reclamation of the term DEAF- MUTE or MUTE- DEAF.
4
As the Deaf
activist and ASL poet Ella Mae Lentz noted on a video log (and this is a
loose transliteration of a section of her argument):
Ive always preached to people never to use the phrase deaf mute . . .
but in the last one or two years, Ive been analyzing Deafhood . . . we
need to look again at that phrase. . . . The sign DEAF, if you examine
what it means, it means no hearing, no speech, that hearing and speech
are put aside. Weve been signing DEAF- MUTE, but spelling out only
D- E- A- F [not mute]. When confronted with the reversal of a term, op-
KRISTEN HARMON
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127
pressors are made powerless; they cant use the word to hurt anymore.
. . . DEAF- MUTES are the reason why ASL has continued to be strong;
without DEAF- MUTES, ASL would either diminish or disappear.
5
She concludes the video log by noting that this reclamation is an intra-
community concern; deaf- mute is not to be used by those who reiterate
the pejorative elements.
Lentz and others (Bahan) who have raised the possibility of DEAF-
MUTE as a reclaimed term emphasize signed language as a key adapta-
tion to a deaf- mute and thus visually- oriented state of being; speech is put
aside as a diminished or irrelevant technology. To reclaim DEAF- MUTE
is to refute medicopedagogy and the valorization of speech at all costs. To
claim DEAF- MUTE is also to assert a unique sensory, linguistic, physi-
ological identityand a particular historyas a people of the eye.
6
The notion of mute is complex but ultimately revealing. Some Deaf
and hard- of- hearing people do speak but also identify primarily with
the signing, Deaf, community. Some who also speak choose not to use
their voices in various social situations but especially in fraught hearing-
deaf situations, when it is imperative that communication be unbroken.
(An airline gate change, announced only through auditory means, and a
diffcult- to- lip- read, mustachioed, and harried desk clerk come to mind.)
Armed with pen and paper, a deaf- mute presence ensures, ironically, ac-
cess in a way that a deaf- speaking presence does not consistently provide
(But you talk! Why do you want me to write down everything Im say-
ing?). After all, for many d/Deaf people, speech functions largely as a
one- way technology; return communication is not consistent and cannot
always be relied on without additional means and strategies.
When d/Deaf persons do not choose to use a clear, intelligible, speak-
ing voice in order to get the access they demand for participation in the
(hearing) public sphere, the ways in which hearing and speech are imper-
fect bases for essentializing descriptive identity categories are revealed.
Deafness and, for that matter, muteness are conditional and contextual.
After all, a hearing and nonsigning person becomes effectively deaf and
mute in a Deaf gathering; the space is flled with American Sign Lan-
guage, expressive faces, hands, bodies, linguistic motion. In this context,
the term DEAF- MUTE or MUTE- DEAF resists the clinical and stig-
matized weight of socially reductive suffxes (like -ness) and medicalized
terms (like mute). Viewed through a visual modality, profound deafness is
diminished, made over into a common physiological factor, one that has
signifcant implications for the development of a visually oriented mind
and state of being in the world (see Corina and Singleton).
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ADDRESSING DEAFNESS: FROM HEARING LOSS TO DEAF GAIN
In a related effort to dismantle the pathologizing binaries enclosing a
Deaf person in a hearing world, some scholars have expressed dissatisfac-
tion with both the word and sign for deaf. In casual conversation and in
print (see Obasi), students and scholars have tried to conceive of a term
that would place the emphasis on visuality and shared language rather
than on hearing or speaking status. They have proposed, as alternative
terms for Deaf people, signing people, people of the eye, and ASL- PERSON
(or, in En glish, ASLians or ASL- ers). The construct ASL- PERSON
goes beyond disability as the reception and construction of that differ-
ence (Davis 50), in that ability is no longer the contested site; language
use and access are. To some, this suggestion might feel like yet another
semantic exercise about perception and self- identifcation, but beyond
breath and water there is little more that is fundamental to being human
than communication.
The original poster to Answerbag and others like the poster are now
awkwardly navigating terminology in this context. Intra- and intercom-
munity usage is always in fux. In addition to the current discussion, the
primary affliations in relation to and fundamental ideas about d/Deaf
communities will continue to change as the postDeaf President Now and
post- ADA generation comes of age and redefnes the virtual and physical
social spaces for deaf and Deaf people. Furthermore, affliation is made all
the more complex with other primary identifcations not mentioned here:
those related to gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, disability, and so on.
In the meantime, the Gallaudet scholars Dirksen Bauman and Joseph
Murray have proposed the construct Deaf gain as the opposing pair to hear-
ing loss; in addition to upsetting the usual assumptions contained in the
notion of loss, this phrase is used to describe the advantages . . . of biodi-
versity that Deaf people havenamely, increased spatial cognition, speed
of generating mental images, peripheral vision, and tactile acuity (Deaf
Gain). The Visual Language, Visual Learning Center (VL
2
), a National
Science Foundationfunded Science of Learning Center on the campus
of Gallaudet University, is researching some of those physiological and
neurological changes. Clearly, we have moved beyond profoundly deaf into
considering the ways in which languages, communities, and individuals
come into contact; we are now living beyond the suffx, in postdeafness.
NOTES
This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation Science
of Learning Center: Visual Language and Visual Learningfunding grant
# SBE- 0541953 to VL
2
at Gallaudet University.
KRISTEN HARMON
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129
1. The hearing line, for Christopher Krentz, is a conscious echo of W. E. B.
DuBoiss color line and as such is the invisible boundary separating deaf and hear-
ing people . . . [where] the meanings of deafness and its conceptual opposite, hear-
ingness, [are] at least as unstable as other identity categories (2).
2. According to Lane, Bahan, and Hoffmeister, When we refer to the DEAF-
WORLD in the U.S., we are concerned with a group (an estimated million people)
possessing a unique language and culture. . . . Deaf people in the U.S. use the sign
DEAF- WORLD to refer to those relationships among themselves, to the social net-
work they have set up, and not to any notion of geographical location (ix, 5).
3. The Deaf President Now movement took place on the campus of Gallaudet
University. After a brief student- and- alumni protest, a deaf president was installed at
the worlds only institution of higher education for deaf people.
4. The use of all capital letters indicates that this term is a gloss of a sign in
American Sign Language.
5. In signing DEAF, the signer places a fnger on the ear and then on the mouth,
or vice versa. Lentz makes parallels with the GLBT communitys reclamation of
queer and dyke. Paddy Ladd, a British Deaf studies scholar, developed the term Deaf-
hood to begin the process of defning the existential state of Deaf being in the world.
. . . Deafhood is not seen as a fnite state but as a process by which Deaf individuals
come to actualise their Deaf identity (xviii).
6. In 1910, George Veditz, president of the National Association of the Deaf,
argued that deaf people could never abandon sign language: they are facing not a
theory but a condition, for they are frst, last, and all time the people of the eye (qtd.
in Baynton 10).
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ADDRESSING DEAFNESS: FROM HEARING LOSS TO DEAF GAIN
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