ABSTRACT
Keywords: Deaf-hearing communication, ASL, Pierre Bourdieu, symbolic violence
Eyeth, a popular narrative in American Deaf1 folklore, describes a Deaf child’s
experience of alienation from the hearing majority. The child attends a school for Deaf
children and is discovered crying one Friday afternoon by his hearing teacher-crying
because he does not want to go home to a weekend with his nonsigning family. The
teacher tells him of a far-away planet called “Eyeth” where he can go someday to feel
more at home. The child grows up, studies rocket science, and becomes an astronaut. He
travels to this far-off planet and discovers, to his amazement, that on Eyeth everyone
signs. There he gets a job teaching hearing/speaking children to sign and, one Friday
afternoon, notices a child crying as she sits on the school steps. Recognizing that she
feels left out at home because everyone in her family is Deaf, he tells her of a far-off
planet called “Earth” where she will feel that she belongs. As the story ends, the viewer is
left with a profound image of parallel universes, identical in every way except that in one,
speech rules, and in the other, sign.
