ABSTRACT
As is now widely acknowledged, and as the quote from Ladd and John indicates, disabled and D/deaf people1 can have quite divergent views of the place of deafness within disability. In this chapter I want to look at how the experiences of deafness are contained, or not, within disability theory. There are several reasons why the particularities of deafness might be of interest to the academic understanding of disability in general. First, the question of where to place deafness within the spectrum of physical variation does not have a simple answer, and that alone makes it worth a closer look. But second, the fact that situating deafness within disability theory is problematic points to the persisting inadequacies of our thinking about disability and impairment as a whole: deafness tests the coherence of current disability theory, and frequently finds it wanting.
