ABSTRACT
This chapter is dedicated to deaf people’s personal histories, focusing in particular on their experiences of social participation and language use across a range of domains including the family home, the Mary Chapman School, mainstream hearing schools and wider society. Drawing on autobiographical participant accounts, the discussion shows how past events are interpreted and integrated to produce coherent and self-defining narratives through which participants make meaning of their life trajectories. Through analysis of these accounts, the chapter illuminates the social significance of YSL, demonstrating how attending the Mary Chapman School for the Deaf and learning to sign precipitated an array of social developments for participants, including active social participation, growing self-esteem and a new, positive, deaf identity. In claiming this new identity, participants are shown to radically reconstruct the meaning of deafness, subverting wider societal understandings in which being deaf is linked to disability and deficiency, and emphasising their status as an independent and highly capable linguistic and cultural community instead.
