ABSTRACT
Being deaf is often framed as a disability in mainstream discourse. At SVT Teckenspråk (Swedish television’s team for programming in Swedish Sign Language) between 2010–2013, deafness was more than disability. It was about a shared visual culture – one that has become increasingly mediated by technologies. The SVT Teckenspråk team, at the time of this study, consisted of deaf and hearing employees who have as their goal to increase Swedish citizens’ awareness of Sign Language, as well as providing a cornerstone of cultural exchange for the Swedish d/Deaf community. This chapter presents a moment in the institutional history of SVT Teckenspråk, when employees understand deafness as more than a clinical definition and where Sign Language is understood as an embodied expression of Deaf culture. Sign Language from this perspective becomes a shared canon of meanings conveyed through the primarily visual media of film, television, and video meeting technologies. In this chapter, I examine the performance of a mediated version of deafness. Using a detailed account of a video meeting as an example of technologically mediated communication in Sign Language, I identify key elements of Swedish Sign Language communication, visual media technologies, and how these reconfigure and materialise different ways of being deaf. In video meetings, Sign Language and deafness are established as inherently bound to embodied and performative enactments of deaf identities and which are, to some extent, contingent on technological mediation.
