It has been a long time since I’ve posted on DeafDC. Too long, in fact. My excuse is that I’ve been writing other stuff, namely a dissertation that has to be defended this term, but also a brief piece on the UK Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill for Bionews co-written with some superb academic colleagues – geneticists Anna Middleton and Rachel Belk. (Unfortunately, the link now goes to the Bionews archives so you’ll have to enter the authors’ names to locate the actual article). So I’ll borrow a page from Jane Austen and ask your forgiveness, Dear Readers.
A few weeks ago, I was chatting with a Hearing friend about an event we had recently attended that was full of other Hearing people. At some point, my Hearing friend mentioned that there were no Deaf people at this event. I looked at my friend, and said, “But I was there!”
And this friend, in all sincerity, remarked, “Well, I think of you as Hearing.”
And I’m absolutely sure no disrespect was intended, but this little comment really took me aback.
Part of it has to do with the way that the terms Hearing and Deaf are used in the signing Deaf community – they are typically used as dyads representing the only possible positions one can adopt.
One is either affiliated with Hearing culture or Deaf culture. As much as I like Descartes, I’m not enamored of this Cartesian tendency towards insisting that things must be placed in one of two categories.
Part of this stems from my own ethnic background – I identify as having both European and Arab heritage. Being told that I must pick one or the other just feels deeply wrong to me, and I’ve never been able to get past this moral intuition.
In addition to the ‘What are you?” questions I got as a child living in a very White community in northern Orange County, California, I was also admonished by family members not to reveal my Arab roots during the 1973 OAPEC oil embargo, and later during the Iranian hostage crisis in the early 1980s. (Yes, I know that Iranians are not Arabs, but this was not common knowledge in southern California in the 1970s and 1980s, since people frequently tended to conflate Arab with Middle Eastern.)
The upshot of not revealing my heritage was that people made false assumptions about my heritage based on my olive skin, brown hair and brown eyes.
In southern California, this meant that most people assumed I was part Mexican-American. Having two grandfathers and other relatives who were conversant in Spanish did nothing to dispel this; having best friends from elementary school to high school who were fluent in Spanish contributed to these perceptions; and last but not least, having relatives of Arab descent living in Mexico and Chile reinforced this even further.
As it happens, I had enough hearing as a child to hear racist remarks about Mexicans – more than a few of them were directed at me. The remarks about Arabs usually were not aimed my way, but were also made in my presence. Both made me squirm, though for different reasons.
When I look back on this, I think about the importance of being able to name who you are and being able to stand up for those you love - who may or may not fall into different categories than your own.
As a child, I hadn’t yet learned to do that.
I like to think that I’m better at this now.
When I was assigned to the category of Hearing, something in me railed against being falsely labeled yet again. It is not because I despise Hearing people – there are many Hearing people in my life I love dearly and for whom I would go to the ends of the earth.
The reason my stomach lurched was because it seemed to dismiss a big part of who I am and all that I have done to fight for my own communication access – starting in college with the first ADA claim that I filed with the Justice Department and continuing through today.
(An aside - I think the last claim I filed on a national level was in 2007 dealing with violations of FCC emergency captioning, or maybe it was a TSA complaint related to air travel? I forget. You get my point – advocating for communication access is part and parcel of my very being.)
I didn’t do these things as a Hearing person – a Hearing person would have no reason to fight for her own communication access in a world designed to meet the needs of Hearing people.
Just to mix things up a bit, for the past few years, I’ve had an ongoing dialogue with several Deaf of Deaf friends, who tell me that I am Deaf and that I should just accept this.
I resist this definition for a different reason – I was mainstreamed, I still use my residual hearing and my voice, and English is my first language.
Having said all that, I deeply cherish the signing Deaf community and the friends I have made within it. I continue to work everyday on improving my ASL, and am honored to be included in this community. I owe much to this community, and I do what I can to reciprocate. Somehow, making the claim that I am Deaf feels false to me – I don’t want to be a Deaf wannabe and I fear that claiming community membership might appear inauthentic in some way.
So what’s left?
I’m not fully at ease calling myself ‘a person with hearing loss’, because I am a philosopher by training, and believe that to be a person with hearing loss means that one must feel she has lost something. Yet I haven’t lost anything – or not that I can recall. (For those of you who like philosophy, I’m thinking about the distinction between privation and deprivation here).
I could always fall back on ‘hard of hearing’ and in the past I’ve made an argument for reclaiming this slightly pejorative term vis-à-vis ‘queer’ or ‘gimp’. Some days I like this idea; other days I’m less enamored of it. In recent years, I’ve had a number of Deaf people tell me that calling oneself ‘hard-of-hearing’ is akin to being an Uncle Tom. (I can’t help but savor the irony of a family connection that traces back to the woman who coined that term).
So far, I haven’t been persuaded by this argument. I think it rests on how one defines hard-of-hearing. My preliminary research indicates that the historical record of this term provides some evidence for defining a hard of hearing person as one who shifts between the Hearing and Deaf worlds. As I see it, this is not unlike being part Arab-American and part European-American and embracing both.
These days I’m not so sure how to label myself.
But two things resonate for me.
First: it seems to be a central tenet of human dignity to allow people the freedom to make their own claims about their identities. Anything less seems to encroach on basic human liberty.
And second:
I’m not Hearing.
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Don’t you think that the term, “hard of hearing” is demeaning itself? I’m waiting for someone to come up with a clever alternative to this horrible label.
Even if there’s a better label, is that the one you’d be happy with? It really doesn’t matter what it says. I personally believe that if you examine the meaning of “Deaf” into many different pieces, you lose the essence of being. It s a lot about the deaf-being than the definition of being deaf. You fight for communication access, you thrive to learn the language fluently, you deeply care about social justice of the deaf (and other cultures as well), and you enjoy your membership of this community. What is wrong with embracing the term, “deaf”? What will take you to fully accept your identity as a deaf woman, never mind that you may hear the phone, talk perfectly, and can traverse both worlds well?
I’m an untrained philosopher, thus the questions!
Hi Dee - Great questions! I can see how some might think that hard of hearing is a demeaning term. I’m not sure that I accept this, that’s all.
And I think that the question you ask about embracing the term “deaf” isn’t quite the question I was trying to puzzle out an answer to.
I do like the notion of deaf-being, though. Can you say a little more about this?
I think the whole ID thing rests solely on access, there would be no need to ally yourself with another culture or community if you had this, being deaf isolates so you are pretty much thrown into the ID thing against your will really, you make the best of that (Deaf people are good, bad or indifferent too), or you stay where you are and fight your access corner, which is a solitary occupation these days. The deaf community can start as a refuge, then end up a prison and you can’t go anywhere else, or, the total lack of access and integration means you can’t leave. You can’t be cultural, just by being deaf or learning ASL, that’s the reality, albeit you CAN fool most of the people most of the time, including yourself.. Once hearing always hearing…. in thre mindset,so why fight it ?
You bring up very, very good points. Much of what you say is what I’ve been thinking of at times. Good luck with your dissertation! I hope to see you soon, and I think you’d enjoy meeting Fr. Joseph at my church - he has a PhD in ethics and systemathic theology. Say hi to Tashi for me!
You raise great questions. I think many of us are sorting that out for ourselves, because there are so many out there who are like you.
I don’t know. Maybe we’ll just have to come up with a new label.
No more labels please, we spend half our lives fighting the concept as it is ! Labels are OK for jars, leave them there….
It would be nice, but that’s not realistic. It is part of human nature to categorize. We can create a label that’s encompassing.
You are like Siddhartha, incessantly searching for the answer. You will eventually find an answer under your nose.
How much hearing loss do you have? Can you answer and
talk on the phone? If you answer “yes” to the latter,
I would call you “hard-of-hearing.” No one in the deaf-hard-of-hearing community considers HH as a dehumanised
term. (Yes, a people in the Middle East would regard
it as one of the most unpreferred gene and should you
marry to a deaf person, you would be looked down at as a gentile before 1919.)
Senso Comune (my personal definition):
Decibels of deafness are widely varying in degrees.
My personal definition of deaf people and hard-of-hearing people is that whereas the former cannot answer the phone, unaided, some of the latter can answer and talk on the phone. Very matter-of-factly, some of the latter cannot talk on the phone. They are
the ones whom I would move into the Deaf category.
Albeit varying labels at home — ranging from
totally deaf (mother); severely deaf (father);
moderately deaf (sister); profoundly deaf (myself),
all of us identify ourselves as Deaf when in public.
It would be quite taxing to use an adverb to modify
the adjective, “deaf,” n’est-ce pas?
NAD serves deaf people of varying deciBels. AGBell
used to call its organisation “AGB Assocaition for
the Deaf” for more than 75 years. Recently, it has
changed to AGBADHH. Why? Because some hard-of-hearing people object to being labelled as “deaf”.
Hello Jean - Your comment about Siddhartha made me laugh out loud (in a very kind way) because my very first philosophy professor told me the same thing two decades ago…
Thanks for the gentle reminder and your other thoughtful comments. A question for you - can you explain the comment about gentiles and 1919? At first I thought this was an oblique reference to the Balfour Declaration, but that was 1917 and doesn’t quite fit your meaning.
I bring this up solely for the sake of curiosity, not to start an argument…
You say one who is technically hard of hearing but cannot use the phone would be considered deaf. Howver, what about the reverse? I know some people with 90-95 db hearing losses who just happen to hear very well with hearing aids and use the phone. Would they be considered hard of hearing because they can use the telephone?
I’d also like to add that I’ve been skimming comments, and I apologize if I’ve missed something in your reply that would lead me to the answer.
Way to bring up an issue. I’m currently taking a course at Gallaudet under Deaf Studies and am fascinated with the concept of disability studies. The course itself is titled “Enforcing Normalcy” and it’s interesting to see the shift of ideas from finger-pointing to individuals/groups as disability to a social construction of it’s-not-just-us/me-you-know…In fact, disability studies likely to dispute and defend itself by stating, “well this is a highway concept: what you label upon will ultimately backtrack and find ya in the end”. :D MM had it right as she said that labels belong in jars, not on humans (or the animal kingdom really). No one should dictate who is and what one acts upon…it’s just a social decision made by a small-minded, yet large group of people who solely believe oneself is better because of whatever ideas. Case in point: Hitler and the Holocaust tragedy.
As for identifying yourself Deaf/Hearing…I’m in that same boat myself since I mainstreamed growing up and speak really well, even though I’ve decided to try a different road now and thoroughly enjoy my experience socially here at Gally. Anyways, just do what you feel makes you happy, because in the end, in America and this freedom to decide…no reason to resist this privilege.
Iranian are Arab? Even though they speak Farsi and not Arabic. Most deaf people know sign language regardless of ethnic or racial groups they are in. For HOH, it is hard to identify with a group since HOh try to hard to be like hearing people (perfect spoken speech).
Marylanders - You’ve missed my point. I did not make the claim that Iranians are Arab - I actually state the opposite! I point out that Iranians are NOT Arab in my blog, remarking that many people in the US (still) conflate the term Middle Eastern with Arab.
I see no need for categories, the hierarchy of deafness causes too many problems now. I think this ‘need’ to get a label is a knee-jerk to beingisolated and feeling you aren’t part of things, a ‘label’ gives you some sort of ID. So what ?
What you tend to see is an image that born-deaf, sign using, deaf school, and cultural deaf people are at the top of the ‘tree’, and the rest viewed as wannabees or aspiring to that. The only ID I carry around is me as an individual. I don’t let deafness dictate who I am, or let others do it. It would appear that America is emulating the class system the UK was well-known for ! Take it from us here in the UK, it isn’t nice… you won’t like what it does. it creates envy, and an elite. Are deaf people just poking fun at the system ? pretending to invent categories to wind them up and confuse them ? because few deaf I know pay any attention to them !
[…] Whats in a Name? Whats in a Name? By , Teresa Blankmeyer Burke on Sun 24 Feb 2008 | Email This Post It has been a long time since Ive posted on DeafDC. Too long, in fact. My excuse is that Ive been writing other stuff, namely a dissertation that has to be defended this term, but also a brief piece on the UK Human Fertilisation and Embryology Bill for Bionews co-written with some superb academic colleagues geneticists Anna Middleton and Rachel Belk. So Ill borrow a page from Jane Austen and ask you […]