Deaf Culture, Identity, and Bicultural Bridges in Elliot's Memoir

Introduction: Elliot's Bicultural Perspective

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 her 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.

Double Consciousness and Deaf Identity

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 liminal quality of 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 of 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 also raises the further question of intersectionality in Deaf culture to show how power and privilege are distributed. In other words, phonocentrism is another form of ethnocentrism.

Hearization and Phonocentrism

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, the phonocentric person expects the Deaf individual to conform to their system of coding and encoding. This process proves detrimental to psychological and social skills development, which is one of the reasons Elliot gravitated toward a career dedicated to exposing and eradicating hearization in Deaf education.

The Journey of Cultural Self-Discovery

Elliot is not alone among children who had been exposed to hearization in their homes and communities and who later came to recognize the importance of shifting their perspective toward 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 world, as if in a language immersion course. Plunged into Deaf culture, Elliot was able for the first time to locate her true identity — one that could only be expressed genuinely and authentically through nonverbal means.

Her move to the Deaf community and her embrace of Deaf culture and identity were 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 subsequently built the all-important bridge of understanding with her past and her upbringing through a process of introspection that guided her journey of self-discovery, until she reached a point of peace — knowing exactly who she was and her role as a bicultural communicator.

References

DuBois, W.E.B. (1994). The Souls of Black Folk. Mineola, NY: Dover Thrift.

Elliott, H. (2009). Teach Me to Love Myself. White River Junction, VT: White River Press. Digital Edition.

Hoffman, D. & Andrews, J.F. (2016). Why Deaf culture matters in Deaf education. Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, 21(4): 426–427.

Humphries, T. & Humphries, J. (2011). Deaf in the time of the cochlea. The Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education, 16(2): 153–163.