In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Deaf people were regarded and labeled as “dumb” or “deaf and dumb.” The majority—hearing people—treated them as such and often discriminated against them socially and economically, ignoring them as if they did not exist. Because of this treatment towards Deaf people in the earlier centuries, personal stories written and told by the Deaf are limited. Only recently has the hearing world provided opportunities for the Deaf to tell their personal stories through social media, blogs, other online sources, and published journal articles and books. However, Brueggemann (2007) argues that “deaf lives and writing—placed together, particularly in relation to deaf people’s own life stories—have not been common and perhaps not even condoned.” Thus, this presentation analyzes three questions: 1) According to both Disability and Deaf Studies, how does society’s attitudes about disability reveal its most basic assumptions and ideologies? 2) How can hearing people encourage the Deaf to document and publish their personal stories? And 3) How can those in academia learn to embrace and include the language of the Deaf into academia?
About the presenterDolphia Butler
Dolphia Butler, M.A., is the daughter of two Deaf parents who reside in New Orleans, Louisiana. She is a full-time doctoral candidate at Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland. Her dissertation will be on the use of Multimodality to improve the writing skills of Deaf adults. Her areas of interest include Composition; Contemporary Rhetoric; Classical Rhetoric; Technical Editing; Disability Studies; Deaf Studies; Caribbean Literature; African American Literature; African Literature.