ABSTRACT
Fiona (15) lived in the space between two worlds of the deaf and the hearing. She was partially deaf and attended her local mainstream secondary school. Her teachers described her as ‘hearing impaired’, but she and her mainstream peers preferred the term ‘deaf’. At home, she was deaf, like her brother, mother and grandmother, but her sister and father both had normal hearing. She had exposure, then, to both deaf and hearing worlds, but from her account seemed to be fully part of neither. This is a case study of splitting. Deaf people have their own values, history and, above all, a sense of community (Morris, 1991; Taylor and Bishop, 1991), but Fiona appeared not to see herself as fully part of that community, even though her deafness featured in her account of herself. Fiona’s experience of mainstreaming was excluding and marginalizing, by dissolving difference (Kyle, 1993), transforming her deafness into a disability and ‘denying the existence of an alien Deaf culture’ (Corker, 1996a:51, original emphasis). Booth (1988) contends that the silencing of deaf culture within mainstream schools amounts to an extreme prejudice and her transgressive practices could be interpreted as a ‘survival tactic unknowingly cultivated by those caught between’ two worlds (Hartsock, 1996:49). Wynter has suggested, however, that the status of liminality experienced by individuals forced to live out two realities gives them a ‘cognitive edge’ over others (1987:235). This chapter focuses on Fiona, the governmental regime of her mainstream peers, her transgression out of deafness, and the teachers’ practices. It explores similar themes to those contained earlier in the book, but Fiona’s experience of liminality from both the hearing and deaf worlds seemed to merit consideration in a separate chapter. The unique features of deaf culture and identity are also considered and the chapter ends with a discussion of the collective transgression of deaf people, who have demanded ‘recognition as a cultural and linguistic minority group’ (Gregory, 1993:5).
