[opening slide]
The Tango: Or, What Deaf Studies and Disability Studies Do-Do
Brenda Jo Brueggemann
In American Sign Language, the “do-do” or “what-do?” sign is used to ask of something, someone, yourself, “What are/is we/he/she/it doing?”[1][do-do image slide 2] This sign/concept does not translate simply or well into written English because it is more complex and nuanced than that simple gloss indicates, and in essence, there is no direct correlative construct for its expression in English (much like trying to explain to a nonnative English user why we use the phrase “talk on the telephone”; the colloquial lines just do not connect through.) In the spirit of those dropped connections and half translations, I will outline in this essay some of the things that I think Disability Studies and Deaf Studies do-do.
[slide 3: tango image]The beat that drums throughout my investigation is this: they tango. At least lately, I think, they do-do that. That is, I will suggest that although Disability Studies and Deaf Studies remain different bodies, I find that, especially in the last decade, they have been dancing in exciting, provocative, colorful steps together quite a lot. This interaction is sweaty stuff, yes.
This claim is not to say that they are not different. With two, in a tango, there must be some difference, too. [slide 4: Bragg/Corker]Yet I do not believe the difference is as profound as that claimed by Mairian Corker a decade ago in an article appearing in Disability Studies Quarterly where she offers her own “differing” response to the titular question posed at the 1999 Society for Disability Studies (SDS) annual conference plenary address given by Lois Bragg in remarks Bragg titled “Deaf Studies as a Precursor of Disability Studies?” (Bragg is a Professor of English at Gallaudet University). Following on that address by Bragg, Corker argues that Disability Studies and Deaf Studies “have very little in common in their current conceptualisations and, in some circumstances, are directly competitive” (2). [slide 5: corker’s table]Corker offers a table of “Social Practice in Deaf Studies and Disability Studies” that is worth reproducing both for its historic grounding and for its instructive tango-ability (see table 14.1). Yet even while Corker’s table seems to want to pair these two partners together in a dance in some way, she claims, strikingly, that she believes that what is
striking about Table 1 itself, however, is the social distance between the two disciplines. Indeed, apart from our status within hegemonic discourse, where Deaf and disabled people are viewed as people with impairments, the only point of commonality is that both Deaf Studies and Disability Studies exoticise Deafness as an “essential identity” that epitomizes a “politics of visibility.” (3, emphasis added)
In honor of, and in tango with, Corker’s own thoughts on the relationships between Disability Studies and Deaf Studies, I want now, in 2010, to suggest that Deaf Studies and Disability Studies do-do points of commonality beyond just the “exoticise[ing] [of] Deafness.”[2] Without essentializing (I hope) and with some politicizing (I also hope), and perhaps a bit exotically too, I want to focus in this talk mostly on the dance—on the steps that bind them together and on the key moves where they do differ.
[slide 6: google map caution]A word of navigational caution: my mapping here is not, and cannot be, complete. I suggest that the reader consider this essay with a disclaimer similar to that found at the Google maps and directions source: “These directions are for planning purposes only. You may find that construction projects, traffic, weather, or other events may cause conditions to differ from the map results, and you should plan your route accordingly.”
My consideration of the locations for these two fields of studies (Disability Studies and Deaf Studies) is more about their encounters, close and far, and about their perspectives and placements in various landscapes. What matters most for me in exploring Deaf Studies in relationship to Disability Studies—and vice versa—is not about building binaries, delineating differences, or even articulating boundaries but more about the subtle bodily shifts each makes as, in the dance, first one leads and then the other. I watch most the dance they share on the floors of academic, social, and public halls.
[slide 7] Academic Organizations and Publications—Affiliations and Absences
A study of the location of either Disability Studies or Deaf Studies in relation to major academic organizations, and a plotting of each field’s a [slide 8: MLA] For example, of late, the Modern Language Association (MLA, a powerhouse academic organization with some 12,000 members who teach modern languages and literatures in colleges around the globe) has embraced Disability Studies on many levels. [click point]First, the MLA has fostered—and was essentially the first major academic organization to do so—the formation of a “standing” committee on Disability Issues within the overall MLA governance structure. This committee has been in place since 1995. It meets at MLA headquarters at least annually, has a well-developed charge and scope and advises and develops policy around matters of disability access to the MLA’s convention and resources, and provides leadership on the intellectual integration of both disabled scholars and disability studies as a field. [click]Second, the MLA also initially approved a regular “discussion group” status for the field of Disability Studies within the MLA Convention and then later tendered an even more significant “division” status for Disability Studies within its overall convention and organizational structure. [click]Third, the MLA has supported the present and future of the field with a full-fledged conference on Disability Studies in the University (held at Emory University, March 5–7, 2004) and then published some of the proceedings from that conference in the journal of record for the modern languages, PMLA.[click] Fourth, the MLA published a definitive edited collection, Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities in 2002. [click]And finally, fifth, the MLA has served as a model for many other major academic organizations with regard to both physical and intellectual access of people with disabilities as well as “disability studies.”
[slide 9]Likewise, Disability Studies has small, but vibrant, groups of scholars within organizations such as the American History Association (see the Disability History Association); the National Communication Association (see the organization’s Disability Issues Caucus); and the Conference on College Composition and Communication (see the organization’s Committee on Disability Issues).[3]
[slide 10]Deaf Studies functions much like Disability Studies in these larger academic arenas—through a group of scholars who consistently organize several panels at the organization’s annual convention, through special interest group (SIG) meetings at the convention, and perhaps also through a small list serve, blog, or electronic social space shared by members of the larger organization who also have an interest in either Disability Studies or Deaf Studies (or both). Still, Deaf Studies has arguably not fared so well in these larger academic structures. There is, for example, a British Deaf History Association, but it does not seem to function in relationship to any larger body of historians or scholars of history.[4] There are also other nationally based “deaf history society” organizations such as the Swedish Deaf History Society. An international organization, Deaf History International, also exists and conducts a biennial conference but does not seem to have an anchor with a larger body of historians or academic-based history organizations.
[slide 11] The American Education Research Association (AERA) is, in fact, one of the few organizations that also features a collective body of scholars who might be considered to be doing “Deaf Studies” work, the AERA SIG on Research on the Education of Deaf Persons. AERA also features another SIG on Disability Studies in Education, thereby effectively, if not intentionally, offering Corker’s frame of difference between these two areas of studies.[5] It would be interesting to know whether any AERA scholars belong mutually to both the Disability Studies in Education and Research on Education of Deaf Persons SIGS.
[slide 12]As one important example of the signifying struggles and absence of “Deaf Studies” within larger bodies of scholarly organizations, at least three different attempts to incorporate and institutionalize “Deaf Studies” and/or the study of American Sign Language within the MLA’s structure have failed—for reasons stemming both from the sides of Deaf Studies/ASL Studies members and from the MLA’s structures and strictures.[6] Deaf Studies does sometimes appear in some larger academic fields’ organizational meetings and structures, but when it shows up it is mostly as a pocket of panels on any convention roster or as a SIG with sporadic membership at best; very few examples of organizational structures for Deaf Studies within these larger field-wide entities exist to date.
[slide 13]Even at best, both Deaf Studies and Disability Studies still experience a tenuous kind of “cousin of a distant cousin” status within any given larger academic organization or affiliation. For all the hype about “mainstreaming” from 1975 forward (the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act of 2001and the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975) and reinforced with the Americans with Disabilities Act of 1990, neither Deaf Studies nor Disability Studies swims strong in the mainstream of academic life today. And, as Margaret Price documents in groundbreaking new work about access within and to the academy for scholars (not just students), complete and sensitive access to most academic conferences still remains a considerable barrier for scholars with disabilities (“Access Imagined”).
Yet a recent survey of international English-speaking disability studies programs does indicate that the swimmers are improving their strokes, at least or most especially in the Disability Studies pool. As one major example, in the Summer 2009 issue of Disability Studies Quarterly, Cushing and Smith summarize in the results of their survey in which they “found that the field is expanding at an exponential rate with three key dimensions of growth: independent Disability Studies departments, hybridization with applied disciplines, and integration within the liberal arts.” And likewise, another recent extended analysis and critique of Deaf Studies by Jane Fernandes and Shirley Schultz Myersin the Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education (Fall 2009) marks the shape of that field as “present,” albeit still “emergent,” within overall academic structures in the following numbers and ways:
To date, at least 19 programs in the United States and at least six programs in three countries offer academic credentials in Deaf Studies. . . . As an emergent academic discipline in its own right, Deaf Studies is still developing the relatively greater complexity and variety of theoretical paradigms, tools, and methods of more established disciplines or professionals. It also is just beginning to make connections with interdisciplinary areas of inquiry that draw from those established disciplines and professionals. A few scholars of Deaf Studies in graduate programs in the United States work within established disciplines or professions such as linguistics or education. These scholars do not approach Deaf Studies as a separate academic discipline but as a research focus within their disciplines. (1–2)
Thus, while Cushing and Smith’s survey of Disability Studies programs and degrees extends now to some “36 full Disability Studies degrees (Bachelor, Masters, PhD) . . . and 31 of what we call ‘partial degrees’ (modules, minor, diploma, concentration, certificate),” Deaf Studies apparently has to date nineteen total degree options (with only three at the graduate/master’s level) and, as such, is considerably smaller. But still, in tango, both fields are clearly “emergent” and one might easily enough be able to replace the phrase “Disability Studies” in every instance of “Deaf Studies” in the statement by Fernandes and Myersabove. Likewise, while one might not be able to claim that Deaf Studies is “expanding at an exponential rate,” one could safely enough insert “Deaf Studies” into the “three key dimensions of growth” assigned to Disability Studies by Cushing and Smith.
[slide 14: academic presses]Another illustration of the emergent and shared status of the two fields comes from the number of academic presses who are lately interested in, and actively engaging publication of, books in either or bothof these two fields. [click]Gallaudet University Press, with a longstanding reputation as the academic press for most Deaf Studies work, now also publishes some material that might be seen as also or otherwise in Disability Studies (including this very volume). Gallaudet University Press also finds its fairly exclusive hold on the Deaf Studies market recently rivaled some by other university presses who have taken up Deaf Studies work, for example, Oxford University Press, University of California Press, New York University Press, and University of Minnesota Press have all produced some major Deaf Studies books in the last decade.
[click]Disability Studies does not necessarily have a comparable university press with a similar longstanding record for the publication of manuscripts primarily related to disability studies, although Temple University Press produced for many years a series on “Health, Society, and Policy” (no longer active) that brought out a number of outstanding books that we might think of as key texts in the field (especially in the grounding years of the field). The University of Michigan Press’s “Corporealities: Discourses of Disability” series, edited by David T. Mitchell and Sharon L. Snyder, has perhaps taken the place of Temple University Press’s earlier record; this series has now produced 20 books since 2000. Other academic presses in the United States have also actively engaged disability studies scholarship in the past decade: North Carolina University Press, New York University Press, Oxford University Press, and Harvard University Press, for example. And most recently, Syracuse University Press has entered the scene with the 2009 launch of a new series, “Critical Perspectives on Disability.”
The number of books and articles, largely published by academic presses, in the last decade that have been seeking to define and re-define both fields also illustrates the shared emergent nature of Disability Studies and Deaf Studies. Arguably, there are considerably more publications to date and in the last decade that have been doing this defining work for Disability Studies than is evident for Deaf Studies. A sampling of such key definitional texts in Disability Studies, primarily from the United States and the United Kingdom, over roughly the last decade might be these (organized by publication dates):[slide 15]Davis’s first and second editions of the collection The Disability Studies Reader (Routledge, 1997 and 2006); Linton’s Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity (New York University Press, 1998); Shakespeare’s The Disability Reader (Cassell, 1998); Snyder, Brueggemann, and Garland-Thomson’s Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities (MLA Press, 2002); Barnes, Oliver, and Barton’s collection, Disability Studies Today (Polity Press, 2002); Titchkosky’s Disability, Self, and Society (University of Toronto Press, 2003); DePoy and Gilson’s Rethinking Disability: Principles for Professional and Social Change (Thomson, 2004); Danforth and Gabel’s collection Vital Questions Facing Disability Studies in Education (Peter Lang, 2006); Shakespeare’s Disability Rights and Wrongs (Routledge, 2006); and Siebers’s, Disability Theory (University of Michigan Press, 2009).
[slide 16]From Deaf Studies, the list is less extensive, but the intent is clearly following in the same steps—to establish, invent, and re-invent the field and its work: Bauman’s edited collection, Open Your Eyes: Deaf Studies Talking (University of Minnesota Press, 2008) and Marschark and Spencer’s edited collection, The Oxford Handbook of Deaf Studies, Language, and Education (Oxford University Press, 2003) stand out most recently in this area.
Although there are not that many publications devoted to Deaf Studies at the current time, I would point out that there are also a number of recent major publications about “Deaf culture,” which seem to similarly receive a significant amount of definitional and re-definitional attention on the academic dance floor lately.[7] I would suggest, however, that Deaf Studies and Deaf culture—which also tango—are still not necessarily the same thing. Deaf culture might often be studied by or within—and may even be advanced by—Deaf Studies (because disability culture might often be examined or advanced within Disability Studies). But the “study” (field) is more than the sum of the culture or the documenting and advancing of it. Indeed, I submit that both Deaf Studies and Disability Studies often illustrate the way that Deaf culture and Disability culture have not thrived or been apparent in mainstream culture but, instead, mostly individualized, often metaphoric, deaf or disabled bodies or characteristics have been the focus.[8]