understanding deaf culture in search of deafhood

The first section of Understanding Deaf Culture initiates a Deaf counter-narrative to medical and social welfare models of deafness, beginning in 5000 BC and continuing to the present day. These invitations support one of the book's key tenets: that the Deaf experience can 'initiate new discourses' and create coalitions across academic disciplines, especially among theorists engaged in Post Colonial Studies, anthropology, minority, feminist and disability discourses. For Deaf readers, Ladd suggests entering directly into the conversation he facilitates with the research participants in chapters 8-9. Ladd directs 'lay people' to chapters 1 and 11 for an introduction of contemporary Deaf culture and issues. The text itself is a weighty tome-11 chapters framed by a glossary and an introduction, further reading and appendices-but works as an invitation to explore the 'Deaf-centred 'spaces'' that disrupt deaf discourses. His study provides a preliminary guide map for tracing Deafhood: the self-actualizing collective process of 'deafness becoming.' By attempting to 'write Deaf people 'larger',' he defensively builds the terrain for Deafness outside of a disability model, aligning Deaf communities instead with colonized peoples and linguistic minorities. Founded upon the anthropomorphic denial of sign language's validity, Ladd argues that Oralism's goal to 'wipe out' deafness persists through lures of technological miracles which seek to pathologize deafness. Engaged with and seeking a cross-cultural alliance with multilingual and multicultural studies, Ladd contests medical and social discourses of deafness to expose an Oralist Hegemony that functions as a totalizing and totalitarian bio-power. Paddy Ladd's Understanding Deaf Culture: In Search of Deafhood delivers far more than a critical foundation for Deaf culture and epistemology. Cardinale, University of California, Riverside

Understanding Deaf Culture: In Search of Deafhood.

Understanding deaf culture in search of deafhood