Deafhood

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Deafhood is a term coined by Dr. Paddy Ladd in his book "Understanding Deaf Culture: In Search of Deafhood". This term conveys an affirmation and positive acceptance of being deaf. It contrasts to deafness, which regards deaf people in terms of hearing loss - an undesirable medical condition. Deaf persons have been treated as human beings minus hearing and trained by the surrounding dominant culture to regard themselves that way, which includes various associated notions around the inability to hear and to speak. It requires them to evaluate and liberate themselves from these internalized inferiority complex resulting from entertaining the notion of deficit. To this process of self-liberation, Ladd writes:

...I found myself and others coining a new label of 'Deafhood.' Deafhood is not, however, a 'static' medical condition like 'deafness.' Instead, it represents a process - the struggle by each Deaf child, Deaf family and Deaf adult to explain to themselves and each other their own existence in the world. In sharing their lives with each other as a community, and enacting those explanations rather than writing books about them, Deaf people are engaged in a daily praxis, a continuing internal and external dialogue. (Ladd, 2003:3)

The concept is empowering for Deaf people. Since the ancient times, deaf people have too often been considered incapable of at least abstract thinking, since they lacked speech and consequently language to express thoughts. This notion was reinforced by Apostle St. Paul who said "Faith comes through hearing (Fides ex auditu)" [Letter to the Romans] and repeated by St. Augustine, who wrote that deaf persons by this verdict could not obtain faith and be worthy of sacraments. As a result deaf people were considered uneducable. This tradition of thought got broken, when individual clerics began educating deaf children in the 17th century. Soon afterwards, when educating deaf children received public funding, medicine began to concern increasingly on the inability to hear and on finding a cure for deafness. Already at that time, there were two different schools of thought of what would be the best way to educate deaf children: with sign language or without sign language (speaking and lipreading only), manualism vs. oralism. Since sign language was associated with prejudices of inferiority, of being unequal with spoken languages, of lacking abstract vocabulary, and of possessing no grammar, the oral school won control in the education of the deaf everywhere. Through this type of education, deaf children acquire certain negative notions of deafness, of superiority of speaking over signing, of hearing people being smarter, etc., which they needed to disassociate from in their adult lives, when they participate in the Deaf Culture. When William Stokoe and other linguists, showed that American Sign Language is a true language, Deaf people in America became more motivated to seek recognition from mainstream society on the legitimacy of American Deaf culture and their status as a linguistic minority, something that had known for decades already, since the "Golden Age" of Deaf education in America in the 1800's. American Deaf culture was strongly influenced by French Deaf culture, where the famous school for the deaf in Paris was founded in the 1760s.

A self-examination of "what is to mean being Deaf?" within the linguistic and cultural framework follows, which leads to Deafhood. Deafhood is in essence an assertion that being deaf and being different from hearing people has a positive value for mankind and nothing to combat against like a disease.

Deafhood has received a big treatment during the protests at Gallaudet University in May and October of 2006.

[edit] References

• Ladd, Paddy (2003). Understanding Deaf Culture: In Search of Deafhood.
• St.Paul, Letter to the Romans, 10,7
• St.Augustine, Contra Iulianum, 3:10 and Academicus libris tres, 3:3