Like most hearing parents of deaf children, my first close relationship with a deaf person was with my child. Despite a relatively broad cultural education, I knew next to nothing about hearing loss or deaf culture. What little I had absorbed was an incomplete and almost entirely inaccurate patchwork of pop culture snippets – the mother’s horror when her baby doesn’t react to the fire engine’s siren in the film Mr Holland’s Opus (1995); Beethoven’s struggle to hear the first performance of his Ninth Symphony; the lift scene in Jerry Maguire (1996) where the loving boyfriend signs “you complete me” to his partner; Quasimodo’s apparent industrial deafness from the bells of Notre-Dame; and, worst of all, the appalling memory of my university housemate imitating a deaf accent for laughs.
This woman's dilemma is whether or not to put her child under the knife to install a cochlear implant that would allw them to hear. Why is this even a dilemma?
But what I had experienced as a genuinely caring, evidence-based and pragmatic attempt to empower deaf children and give them the widest set of options had been singled out as an example of “audism” by influential deaf and deaf-adjacent critics – a sinister assimilationist model with paternalistic colonial overtones and a complicated history.
Ah. Yes. The nutters...
Not only was it inaccurate (no hearing technology makes hearing easy or natural for deaf people), but it spoke of, at best, a normative desire to correct or fix something that was not in their view broken – only different.
Humans should be born with functional hearing - if they aren't, then it's a defect. Not a sign that they are part of a community with its own culture.
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