Disability Studies Quarterly
Fall 2004, Volume 24, No. 4
<www.dsq-sds.org>
Copyright 2004 by the Society
for Disability Studies


BOOK & FILM REVIEWS

Paddy Ladd. Understanding Deaf Culture: In Search of Deafhood. Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2003. 8 x 5.75. xxii, 502 pgs. 17 photographs. Paperback 1-85359-545-4.

Reviewed by Cara L. Cardinale, University of California, Riverside


Paddy Ladd's Understanding Deaf Culture: In Search of Deafhood delivers far more than a critical foundation for Deaf culture and epistemology. 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. 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. 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. His study provides a preliminary guide map for tracing Deafhood: the self-actualizing collective process of "deafness becoming."

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. Ladd directs "lay people" to chapters 1 and 11 for an introduction of contemporary Deaf culture and issues. For Deaf readers, Ladd suggests entering directly into the conversation he facilitates with the research participants in chapters 8-9. 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.

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. Ladd charts a trajectory fractured by the Milan Conference of 1880, when Oralist propositions banished the Deaf and their sign languages from the intellectual, social, and political life of the Western world. The persistence of this cultural isolation, he contends, points to the real cost of "curing" the Deaf; namely, the creation of a diasporic community of deaf adults often afraid to be "discovered" signing after years of ritualized humiliation for speaking "like savages."

Perhaps the most powerful work Ladd does is ethnographic, complementing his counter narrative with the "voices" of Deaf informants. Using a participant-observer approach, Ladd conducted interviews in BSL (British Sign Language) with students and faculty from the Center for Deaf Studies at the University of Bristol (where he is currently a lecturer and MSc coordinator), his local Deaf Club, and select members from the national Deaf community. His long-term study argues that while the primary goal of the Deaf residential school experience under Oralism is to construct deafness as abnormality, education among deaf peers is crucial for the development of Deaf communal identity.

One of the key interventions Ladd makes in Deaf/Cultural Studies is the development of a refined research terminology that places notions of "insider" anthropology in dialogue with post-colonial understandings of subalternhood. By categorizing "monolingual Deaf" as "subaltern Deaf" and "bilingual Deaf" as "subaltern élite," he suggests a new ethnographic methodology through his own status as subaltern researcher. While his immediate goal is to distinguish Deaf-centered research from deafness research, these distinctions allow for "degrees of oppositionality" within minority cultures that could serve as useful models for scholars seeking a nuanced discussion of resistance.

In this discussion, Ladd calls attention to his own "strategic" essentializing and to the limitations of his text; however, he does so not to foreclose critique, but to encourage further critical dialogue. His book, then, is offered as a prolegomenon, not only as the first of three volumes of work by Ladd on Deafhood, but from workers in other fields. Future projects include Conversations in Deafhood, which will provide a DVD of informants' "untranslated work."

Ultimately, Ladd's book takes a bold risk by asserting that the goals of Deaf Studies are not always in tandem with those of Disability Studies. He suggests that the central issue of Disability discourse is contention over forced exclusion while Deaf discourse rejects forced inclusion. Understanding Deaf Culture is a necessary library addition not only for critics in these burgeoning fields, but for all scholars engaged with models of qualitative research.