Discourses on Deafness: Social Policy and the Communicative Habilitation of the Deaf

Abstract

Three principal approaches and discursive frameworks concerned with the communicative habilitation and education of the deaf are surveyed. The currently dominant approach, total communication, is found susceptible to the criticisms of proponents of oral-only methods and of Culture proponents of a bilingual deaf education based upon American Sign Language. The new oralism and the Deaf Culture, however, remain sharply polarized over the question of whether deaf children ought to be taught to speak now that many of them can be. The Deaf Culturalist demand to entrust the education of all prelingually deaf children to the Deaf community is shown to rely on a postmodernist politics of identity, the thrust of which is toward the self- ghettoization of the deaf. abstract.