Abstract
Abstract This paper investigates the mothering experiences of college-educated Deaf women and connects this to their identities as part of the Deaf community. Using feminist life history interviews with ten Deaf women, the analysis focuses on their work as mothers and the connections with “maternal thinking,” difference and sameness. Discussions about wanting hearing or deaf children and communication with children influenced their identities and were part of the disciplined practice of this work. The women developed strategies to “normalize” experiences and viewed themselves as a linguistic minority. They made political decisions when using American Sign Language, English, or both and resonated with the Deaf community, hearing world, or “in between.” They worked to ensure the acceptability of their children as well as themselves. The author argues that an analysis of ability along with gender is useful to further current theorizing about gender and mothering as a kind of work.
Highlights
This paper investigates the mothering experiences of college-educated Deaf women and connects this to their identities as part of the Deaf community
How do deaf women experience their lives as mothers? What challenges might these women face and how do they deal with these challenges? How might their stories inform the current literatures on the sociology of gender and mothering? These questions are the focus of this paper, which is about the experiences of deaf mothers
I know sign language, I know Sign Exact English (SEE), not American Sign Language (ASL), which is the official language of the Deaf community and so I offered the option of an ASL interpreter to the women to ensure a smoother translation of their stories
Summary
This paper investigates the mothering experiences of college-educated Deaf women and connects this to their identities as part of the Deaf community. Najarian fathers are gendered on the basis of certain ideologies that we have of masculinity and femininity (Coltrane 2000, Gubrium & Holstein 1990, Lupton & Barclay 1997) These ideological constructs lead us to believe that the roles of mother and father are natural ones; sociological perspectives allow us to question if they are ‘‘natural’’ positions. Rich (1976) argues that one should consider the institution of motherhood as well as the experience and how they interact to construct cultural notions of mothering In her view, the embodied experience of mothering works in conjunction with the idea of mothering as an institution, which has its own set of practices.
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