The world of the deaf : how deaf people in France create a community around deafness and challenge conceptions of normality

Abstract

This thesis is based on seven months of fieldwork in Paris and two other French cities. The objective of the study is to examine how deaf people create a community around their deafness and how they challenge what is often thought of as normal. When a child is tested positive for deafness, doctors often advice the parents of the child that the child should be fitted with hearing aids or cochlear implants. Following this, the child learns to develop a capacity to speak through speech therapy. Many deaf people are opposed to this practice of normalization of deaf people to become as much like persons who can hear as possible. Instead, they seek to establish deaf as a positive identity and to be recognized as different, but equal. Through creating spaces that are fully accessible regardless of the ability to hear sounds, deaf people erase the barrier that they often encounter in the majority hearing society. Such spaces can be visually oriented environments where sign language is the language of communication. In this thesis I focus on how these spaces are created and how deaf people challenge conceptions of what is normal. By establishing their visually oriented deaf world, they challenge the way that community is normally formed and the way people usually use their senses to relate to each other and interact with the environment. In addition, through their insistence on visual communication when they encounter people who hear, they challenge hearing peoples idea of what communication is.