188 The Barbara Kannapell quotation (“I believe ‘my language is me . . .’”) comes from her article “Personal awareness and advocacy in the Deaf community,” in Sign Language and the Deaf Community: Essays in Honor of William C. Stokoe, edited by Charlotte Baker and Robbin Battison (1980), pages 106–16.
189 The quotation from Carol Padden and Tom Humphries (“Deaf people’s bodies have been labeled . . .”) comes from Inside Deaf Culture (2005), page 6.
190 Edgar L. Lowell’s “shepherd/wolf” statement is quoted in Beryl Lieff Benderly, Dancing without Music: Deafness in America (1990), page 4.
191 Tom Bertling’s “baby talk” reference appears in A Child Sacrificed to the Deaf Culture (1994), page 84.
192 Beryl Lieff Benderly’s “holy war” comment occurs in Dancing without Music: Deafness in America (1990), page xi.
193 The exhibit History Through Deaf Eyes is described in Jean Lindquist Bergey and Jack R. Gannon, “Creating a national exhibition on deaf life,” Curator 41, no. 2 (June 1998); Douglas Baynton, Jack R. Gannon, and Jean Lindquist Bergey, Through Deaf Eyes: A Photographic History of an American Community (2001); and “Groundbreaking exhibition charts ‘History Through Deaf Eyes,’” USA Today, February 2006.
The quotation from Kristen Harmon (now a professor of English at Gallaudet University) comes from her paper “I thought there would be more Helen Keller: History through Deaf eyes and narratives of representation,” in Signs and Voices: Deaf Culture, Identity, Language, and Arts, edited by Kristin A. Lindgren et al. (2008). It has been slightly condensed. In its entirety, it reads, “A parent of a cochlear-implanted deaf child wrote, ‘Parents need to be given accurate information on all the available options and then be free to make their own decisions. . . . Technology is a miracle and a gift. However, this is a two-sided issue that has created factions as divided and as militant as those in the abortion issue.’ The analogy made between the exhibition and the abortion debate suggests that what is at stake is a potentially aborted child, so to speak, an undeveloped child that the hearing parents try their best to bring to term, with the attendant implications that in doing so, the child will become ‘born again’ into normalcy, into the narratives of completion and bodily integrity. This parent also references the ownership issue when she says that parents should be ‘free’ to make their own decisions, as if the Deaf community were waiting to snatch her deaf child.”
For a discussion of questions raised about the “Through Deaf Eyes” project, which also included a film and companion book, see pages 74–82 of Brenda Jo Brueggemann’s Deaf Subjects: Between Identities and Places (2009).
194 An example of advocacy for the adoption of deaf children by deaf adults can be found in Barbara J. Wheeler, “This child is mine: Deaf parents and their adopted deaf children,” in Deaf World: A Historical Reader and Primary Sourcebook, edited by Lois Bragg (2001). In it, White states that she wrote her dissertation on adopted deaf children in part to create “empirical research to support my position that Deaf adults should be matched with Deaf kids needing adoptive placements.”
195 The quotation about the Moonies is from Edward Dolnick, “Deafness as culture,” Atlantic Monthly, September 1993.
196 Heppner is quoted in Edward Dolnick, “Deafness as culture,” Atlantic Monthly, September 1993.
197 The “four stages of deaf identity” were originally enumerated in Neil S. Glickman, “The development of culturally deaf identities,” in Culturally Affirmative Psychotherapy with Deaf Persons, edited by Neil S. Glickman and M. A. Harvey (1996), as cited in Irene Leigh’s chapter, “Who am I?: Deaf identity issues,” in Signs and Voices: Deaf Culture, Identity, Language, and Arts, edited by Kristin A. Lindgren et al. (2008), pages 25–26.
198 This passage is based on my interviews with Caro Wilson in 2007 and subsequent personal communications.
199 Mary Courtman-Davies is the author of Your Deaf Child’s Speech and Language (1979).
200 Mary Hare School organizational website: http://www.maryhare.org.uk.
201 On June 9, 2011, the Royal National Institute for Deaf People (RNID) changed its name to Action on Hearing Loss. Organizational website: http://www.actiononhearingloss.org.uk.
202 The phrase really not interested in the deaf was coined by Doug Alker, former head of RNID, and serves as the title of a book he published in 2000 about his acrimonious departure from that organization. For more on the controversy, see David Brindle’s article “Blood on the pages: Britain’s leading deaf charity riven by warring factions,” Guardian, July 4, 2000. Alker went on to found the Federation of Deaf People and led the British Deaf Association, which advocates for the British sign language community, until 2007.
203 National Association for the Deaf organizational website: http://www.nad.org.
204 Aaron Rudner is now a linguist and expert in Brazilian sign languages; Joyce Brubaker is currently the Interpreter Preparation Program (IPP) lab coordinator at Front Range Community College in Westminster, Colorado.
205 Alan Barwiolek passed away two years later; see Robert McG. Thomas Jr., “Alan Barwiolek, 43, is dead; an actor, despite deafness,” New York Times, April 20, 1996.
206 Ken Glickman’s website is at http://www.deafology.com. His video, DEAFology 101, can be purchased from Adco Hearing Products of Englewood, Colorado.
207 Bernard Bragg is a cofounder of the National Theatre of the Deaf. His website: http://bernardbragg.com.
208 A list of all contestants in the Miss Deaf America competition can be found at http://www.nad.org/events/biennial-conference/miss-deaf-america-contestants.
209 In September 2008, after thirteen years on the faculty of California State University, Northridge, Genie Gertz was appointed dean of the Center for Deaf Studies at Ohlone College in Fremont, California.
210 Kristen L. Johnson’s dissertation, “Ideology and Practice of Deaf Goodbyes,” earned her a PhD from the UCLA Department of Anthropology in 1994. She is currently affiliated with the English Department at Ohio State University.
211 The accident was reported in the article “Three injured in plane crash at Katama Airfield,” Martha’s Vineyard Times, June 30, 2005.
212 For more information on Bi-Bi education, see Carol LaSasso and Jana Lollis, “Survey of residential and day schools for deaf students in the United States that identify themselves as bilingual-bicultural programs,” Journal of Deaf Studies & Deaf Education 8, no. 1 (January 2003); and The Oxford Handbook of Deaf Studies, Language and Education, edited by Marc Marschark and Patricia Elizabeth Spencer (2003), page 45. A useful resource page for the layperson, “Bilingual bicultural deaf education,” can be found on the Rochester Institute of Technology website, http://library.rit.edu/guides/deaf-studies/education/bilingual-bicultural-deaf-education.html.
213 The quotation from Harlan Lane (“The dilemma is that deaf people want access . . .”) comes from his article “Do deaf people have a disability?,” Sign Language Studies 2, no. 4 (Summer 2002), page 375.
214 This passage is based on my interview with Bridget O’Hara in 2010 and subsequent personal communications. Her name and all others in this passage are pseudonyms. Some other identifying details have been changed.
215 Mondini malformation was originally described in 1791 by the Italian anatomist Carlo Mondini; an English translation appears in “Minor works of Carlo Mondini: The anatomical section of a boy born deaf,”American Journal of Otology 18, no. 3 (March 1997); see also Peter M. Som et al., “Mondini defect: A variant,” American Journal of Roentgenology 129, no. 6 (December 1977).
216 The story of the abuse of Catholic boarding-school students in Wisconsin was originally reported by Laurie Goodstein in “Vatican declined to defrock U.S. priest who abused boys,” New York Times, March 25, 2010; the quotation comes from Goodstein’s follow-up article, “For years, deaf boys tried to tell of priest’s abuse,” New York Times, March 27, 2010.
217 The show about sexual abuse in the Deaf community is Terrylene Sacchetti, In the Now
; it was performed at Deaf Women United and subsequently on a thirty-six-city tour.
218 This passage is based on my interviews with Megan Williams, Michael Shamberg, and Jacob Shamberg in 2008 and subsequent interviews and personal communications. I note in the interests of full disclosure that I employed Jacob to assist me with research for this chapter.
219 Williams is producer and director of the film Tell Me Cuba.
220 California State University, Northridge, is one of only two undergraduate colleges in the country that offers a Deaf studies program.
221 John Tracy Clinic organizational website: http://www.jtc.org.
222 Kirchner was the consultant on deafness for the film Mr. Holland’s Opus. See Heather Young’s 1995 interview with Kirchner at http://www.handsandvoices.org/articles/misc/opus.html.
223 R. Daniel Foster described the TRIPOD program in “Deaf, hearing youngsters teach each other,” Los Angeles Times, May 16, 1991; see also Megan Williams’s article “Once upon a time: A brief history of TRIPOD,” at http://ourcommunityburbank.org/history.html.
224 Klonopin (clonazepam) is a benzodiazepine derivative with anticonvulsant, muscle relaxant, and anxiolytic properties.
225 This passage is based on my interview with Barb and Chris Montan in 2008 and subsequent personal communications.
226 Jeffrey Katzenberg is former CEO ad Michael Eisner is former COO of the Walt Disney Company.
227 For more background on Tripod Captioned Films and film captioning in general, see David J. Fox, “Captions give films a new sound;” Los Angeles Times, July 28, 1993; Glenn Rifkin, “Courting a deaf movie audience with caption devices,” New York Times, November 21, 1993; Gary Moskowitz, “Listening to those who can’t,” Burbank Leader, April 25, 2001; Lynn Smith, “Words can describe it,” Los Angeles Times, May 26, 2002; and Laura Sturza, “Making movies accessible for the hard of hearing,” Burbank Leader, September 21, 2002.
228 The Silent Knights baseball league is described in Dennis McCarthy’s article “Deaf kids get their turn at bat with camp,” Los Angeles Daily News, June 23, 2007.
229 Although the original TRIPOD program ceased operations in 2003, the TRIPOD program concept continues to be implemented at several sites within the Burbank Unified School District.
230 My original source on the debate was Edward Dolnick’s article “Deafness as culture,” Atlantic Monthly, September 1993. Although almost twenty years old now, it still accurately represents the polarization that exists in the d/Deaf community regarding the extent to which education of deaf students should focus on development of oral skills and support of those who seek to cultivate them. More recent writings representing the anti-oralist pole include Humphrey-Dirksen Bauman, “Audism: Exploring the metaphysics of oppression,” Journal of Deaf Studies & Deaf Education 9, no. 2 (Spring 2004); and Paddy Ladd, Understanding Deaf Culture: In Search of Deafhood (2003).
Articles critical of their perspective include two by Jane K. Fernandes and Shirley Shultz Myers: “Inclusive Deaf studies: Barriers and pathways,” Journal of Deaf Studies & Deaf Education 15, no. 1 (Winter 2010); and “Deaf studies: A critique of the predominant U.S. theoretical direction,” Journal of Deaf Studies & Deaf Education 15, no. 1 (Winter 2010). Fernandes is the former provost of Gallaudet University, whose appointment to the presidency of the institution was terminated in response to the 2006 protests; she is now provost and vice chancellor for academic affairs at the University of North Carolina, Asheville. Shirley Shultz Myers is director of the Honors Program and a professor of English at Gallaudet.
231 Total Communication is described in Hearing, Mother Father Deaf, edited by Michele Bishop and Sherry L. Hicks, (2009); and Larry Hawkins and Judy Brawner, “Educating children who are deaf or hard of hearing: Total Communication,” ERIC Digest 559 (1997). Signed Exact English is the subject of Diane Corcoran Nielsen et al., “The importance of morphemic awareness to reading achievement and the potential of signing morphemes to supporting reading development,” Journal of Deaf Studies & Deaf Education 16, no. 3 (Summer 2011). On Simultaneous Communication, see Nicholas Schiavetti et al., “The effects of Simultaneous Communication on production and perception of speech,” Journal of Deaf Studies & Deaf Education 9, no. 3 (June 2004); and Stephanie Tevenal and Miako Villanueva, “Are you getting the message? The effects of SimCom on the message received by deaf, hard of hearing, and hearing students,” Sign Language Studies 9, no. 3 (Spring 2009). For a comparison of ASL grammar and that of spoken languages, see Ronnie B. Wilbur, “What does the study of signed languages tell us about ‘language’?,” Sign Language & Linguistics 9, nos. 1–2 (2006).
232 Interview with Gary Mowl in 1994. Mowl is currently a language arts instructor at the Indiana School for the Deaf, and former head of the North Carolina School for the Deaf.
233 Prof. Bahan is coauthor with Harlan Lane and Robert Hoffmeister of A Journey into the Deaf-World (1996), and a contributor to Carol Neidle et al.’s The Syntax of American Sign Language (1999).
234 The anecdote about Benjamin Bahan is told in the 2007 film Through Deaf Eyes (2007), at 59.19–1.00.24.
235 For a useful resource in this area, see Tom Harrington and Sarah Hamrick, “FAQ: Sign languages of the world by country,” on the Gallaudet University website, http://library.gallaudet.edu/Library/Deaf_Research_Help/Frequently_Asked_Questions_%28FAQs%29/Sign_Language/Sign_Languages_of_the_World_by_Country.html.
236 Interview with Clark Denmark in 1994.
237 These sign languages are discussed in Humphrey-Dirksen Bauman, Open Your Eyes: Deaf Studies Talking (2008), page 16. For more on sign languages generally, see Diane Brentari, editor, Sign Languages (2010).
238 Bengkala is the focus of I Gede Marsaja, Desa Kolok: A Deaf Village and Its Sign Language in Bali, Indonesia (2008). The first report in the medical literature of the strain of deafness prevalent there is S. Winata et al., “Congenital non-syndromal autosomal recessive deafness in Bengkala, an isolated Balinese village,” Journal of Medical Genetics 32 (1995). For a general, accessible discussion of syndromic deafness within endogamous communities, see John Travis, “Genes of silence: Scientists track down a slew of mutated genes that cause deafness,” Science News, January 17, 1998. Additionally, for an opinionated overview of the academic research on the subject, see Annelies Kusters, “Deaf utopias?: Reviewing the sociocultural literature on the world’s ‘Martha’s Vineyard situations,’” Journal of Deaf Studies & Deaf Education 15, no. 1 (January 2010).
239 These complex webs of relations are the subject of Hildred and Clifford Geertz’s oft-cited Kinship in Bali (1975).
240 This passage is based on my interviews with Apryl and Raj Chauhan in 2008 and thereafter, and personal communications.
241 In fact, few hospitals conducted hearing screenings on newborns back in 2000. The US Preventive Services Task Force recommendations issued in October 2001, “Newborn hearing screening: Recommendations and rationale,” concluded that the evidence at the time was “insufficient to recommend for or against routine screening of newborns for hearing loss during the postpartum hospitalization.”
242 For further information on transpositional hearing aids, see Susan Scollie et al., “Multichannel nonlinear frequency compression: A new technology for children with hearing loss,” in A Sound Foundation Through Early Amplification: Proceedings of the Fourth International Conference, edited by R. C. Seewald and J. M. Bamford (2008); and Patricia G. Stelmachowicz et al., “The importance of high-frequency audibility in the speech and language development of children with hearing loss,” Archives of Otolaryngology & Neck Surgery 130, no. 5 (May 2004).
243 Volta originally disclosed the findings of his 1790 experiment to the greater scientific community in a presentation to the Royal Society, “On the electricity excited by the mere contact of conducting substances of different kinds,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society 90 (1800). From the original French: “Je n’ai plus qu’a’ dire un mot sur l’ouie. Ce sens, que j’avois inutilemen
t cherché à exciter avec deux seules lames metalliques, quoique les plus actives entre tous les moteurs d’électricité, savoir, une d’argent, ou d’or, et l’autre de zinc, je suis enfin parvenu à l’affecter avec mon nouvel appareil, compose de 30 ou 40 couples de ces métaux. J’ai introduit, bien avant dans les deux oreilles, deux especes de sondes ou verges métalliques, avec les bouts arrondis; et je les ai fait communiquer immédiatement aux deux extremités de l’appareil. Au moment que le cercle a été insi complété, j’ai requ une secousse dans la tête, quelques moments après, (les communications continuant sans aucune interruption,) j’ai commencé a sentir un son, ou plutôt un bruit, dans les oreilles, que je ne saurois bien définir; c’etoit une espece de craquement à secousse, ou petillement, comme si quelque pâte ou matière tenace bouillonnoit. Ce bruit continua sans relache, et sans augmentation, tout le tems que le cercle fut complet, &c. La sensation désagréable, et que je craignis dangereuse, de la secousse dans le cerveau, a fait que je n’ai pas repété plusieurs fois cette expérience.”
244 Useful general references on the history of cochlear implants include Huw Cooper and Louise Craddock, Cochlear Implants: A Practical Guide (2006); the Deafness Research Foundation’s “Cochlear implant timeline” at http://www.drf.org/cochlear+timeline; and National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders, “Cochlear implants” (last updated March 2011), http://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/hearing/coch.asp. Fan-Gang Zeng et al., “Cochlear implants: System design, integration and evaluation,” IEEE Review of Biomedical Engineering 1, no. 1 (January 2008), is a recent scholarly review of the state of the science. For discussions of the ethical controversy surrounding implantation, see John B. Christiansen and Irene W. Leigh, Cochlear Implants in Children: Ethics and Choices (2002); and Linda R. Komesaroff, Surgical Consent: Bioethics and Cochlear Implantation (2007).
245 Figures on the numbers of individuals who have received cochlear implants come from the above-cited National Institute on Deafness and Other Communication Disorders fact sheet on cochlear implants, at http://www.nidcd.nih.gov/health/hearing/coch.asp; and from Irene W. Leigh et al., “Correlates of psychosocial adjustment in deaf adolescents with and without cochlear implants: A preliminary investigation,” Journal of Deaf Studies & Deaf Education 14, no. 2 (Spring 2009).
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