Interrogating “DEAF-SAME”: Is this for Real?
Temas
Detalles
The editors said it best. Michele Friedner and Annelies Kusters, the editors of It’s A Small World: International Deaf Spaces and Encounters, characterized the collection of chapters as a “needed intervention into understanding how sameness and difference are powerful yet contested categories in deaf worlds” (p. xxvii). The goal of this book is to examine the ways deaf people experience the notion of DEAF-SAME, or sameness based on a shared deaf experience, while negotiating differences based on contextual realities such as race, gender, class, geography, and mobility.
Friedner and Kusters argue that the framing concepts of Deaf culture and identity have become problematic ideologies because they suggest a false sense of deaf universalism. They propose situating deaf lives in the context of lived reality. In this spirit, 23 chapters, organized into five parts, Gatherings, Language, Projects, Networks, and Visions, overlapping at times, interrogate the term DEAF-SAME, as they consider multiple axes of identity in localized and globalized contexts This work joins the recent wave of scholars challenging earlier claims of Deaf Studies scholarship about deaf similitude. The volume attempts to resist dichotomies, challenge monolithism, and question one-dimensional frameworks of deaf ways of being.