Deaf Culture

Deaf culture has become fairly well established in academia and to a lesser degree in mainstream public consciousness. However, Holly Elliot offers a unique perspective on Deaf culture and identity in Teach Me To Love Myself. Elliot begins her narrative by sharing her experience as a bicultural person: someone who had straddled the worlds of the hearing and of the Deaf. Her biculturalism allows Elliot to build bridges instead of barriers, engendering cross-cultural communication.

As such, Teach Me to Love Myself offers a tremendously valuable contribution to the evolving and nuanced discourse on Deaf culture. Elliot had been both hearing and Deaf, but made a conscious decision to “move from the hearing to the Deaf world,” (Kindle Edition). The very notion that Elliot could “move” suggests the notion of the liminal in Deaf identity as well as a conflict between the different worlds in which a Deaf individual resides.

Elliot’s description of moving between the world of the hearing and the world of the Deaf closely resembles what W.E.B. DuBois describes as “double consciousness” (p. 2). Just as blackness had been presented as a disability, so too had Deafness. The pathology model of Deafness enforces a problematic double consciousness; the cultural model of Deafness allows the individual to “merge the double self into a better and truer self,” (DuBois, 1994, p. 2).

Elliot taught herself how to love herself by taking that first crucial step in embracing Deaf culture rather than longing to be counted among the hearing. Once she did so, she ceased to struggle in double consciousness. She reframed Deafness to show that the phonocentric society is guilty of ethnocentrism in more ways than one. Elliot’s book even raises the further question of intersectionality in Deaf culture to show how power and privilege are meted out. In other words, phonocentrism is another form of ethnocentrism.

One of the features of a phonocentric society is hearization. Hearization is the process of privileging one language over another, just as English is privileged over other languages. Instead of learning sign language(s), the phonocentric person expects the Deaf individual to conform to their system of coding and encoding. The process proves detrimental to psychological and social skills development, which is one of the reasons Elliot gravitated towards a career path dedicated to exposing and eradicating hearization in Deaf education.

Of course, Elliot is not alone among children who had been exposed to hearization in their homes and communities and later realize the importance of shifting their perspective to what could be called Deaf ethnocentrism. Humphries & Humphries (2011) note, “Deaf children from hearing parents may, and frequently do, ‘migrate’ to Deaf communities,” (p. 153). Migrating to a Deaf community might temporarily entail extricating oneself from the hearing, as if in a language immersion course.

Plunged into the Deaf culture, Elliot was able for the first time to locate her soul, her true identity that could only be expressed genuinely and authentically through nonverbal means. Her move to the Deaf community, her embracing of Deaf culture and identity, was prompted by an encounter with a Deaf man at a party who described her as someone who was Deaf but “living like a hearing person,” (Kindle Edition).

Moved by the man’s words, which triggered in her a sort of identity crisis, Elliot embarked on a journey of self-discovery. She shares that journey with poignant honesty in Teach Me to Love Myself. Elliot’s journey parallels similar journeys of cultural self-discovery, proceeding through stages like conformity, dissonance, resistance and immersion, introspection, and awareness. Prior to her encounter at the party, Elliot would have been at the conformity stage; the party triggered her dissonance and became a life-changing experience.

She then purposefully immersed herself in Deaf culture in a process of active resistance, removing herself from her past to embrace a new sense of self-empowerment. Elliot then builds the all-important bridge of understanding with her past and her upbringing in the process of introspection that guided her through her journey of self-discovery until she reached the point of peace, of knowing exactly who she was and her role as a bicultural communicator.

The Deaf identity journey is a complex one, with considerable variation in styles and approaches to identity construction, self-concept, and balancing various aspects of the self. For example, balance bicultural Deaf individuals are those who remain culturally fluid, who easily pass between both the Deaf and hearing worlds. Deaf dominant bicultural individuals may be equally as fluid and capable of shifting between their different communities and means of self-expression, but feel most comfortable around Deaf people.

Those who are hearing dominant bicultural Deaf also have the capacity to flow from Deaf culture to the realm of the hearing, but limit their contact with the Deaf community for whatever reason. Then, there are those who can be considered culturally separate Deaf individuals, who intentionally limit their interactions with the Deaf because they have succumbed fully to hearization. The culturally marginal can be considered living on the fringe: they are outcasts to both the hearing and the Deaf worlds.

Perhaps those who struggle the most are those who are culturally isolated and who actually reject the efficacy or value of sign language altogether, thereby cutting themselves off from any social resources or the opportunity for emotional intimacy. Not all isolated people choose to be so; socialization is what led to their lack of language education. They do not know what resources are available, and may not even be aware of the existence of a Deaf culture: which seems unlikely in a world connected via technology (Hoffman & Andrews, 2016).

Elliot remains honest through her journey, showing how “isms” like phonocentrism exist within the Deaf community itself. For example, the author explains both the hidden and overt forms of audism, similar to racism in that there is an unspoken assumption that one group is normative or superior to the other. When Deaf people move through institutions created in the phonocentric culture, they become inculcated into a world in which Deafness is presented as a disability to be overcome; hence the use of the cochlear implant (Humphries & Humprhies, 2011).

A counterculture movement, Deaf culture created social cohesion through rituals and activities, but most importantly through language. Language is one of the defining features of any distinct culture. Deaf culture also entails social networking through physical proximity or virtual; the development of shared goals, ideals, and worldviews, and the active interest in social justice for the Deaf. Elliot clearly exemplifies being a cultural.