| When hearing parents in the United States receive the diagnosis of prelingual deafness for a child, they enter a historically disputatious social field that few, if any, have the slightest notion of previously. What counts as the "proper" intervention to offer parents mirrors local ethos systems concerning embodiment "differences," attitudes towards multi- and bilingualism, and often fairly invisible power dynamics masked by pressure to conform to elite institutions' favored practices. Certainly, as Victor Turner suggests "differences may lead to conflict or complementarity," and medical "impairments" (loss of a physical function) do not always lead in a straight line to being a "disabled person." After cross-cultural comparison fieldwork in the U.S., Denmark, Sweden, and to a lesser extent, Norway, I suggest that "disability" as a theoretical category may be used to think about any stigmatized form of embodiment. In this regard, "negritude," "the feminine," and the "queer" all describe categories of embodiment that have been and are "disabled" in American society. Similarly, I found the category of person, "Turk" or "Muslim," to be "disabled" within Danish society. All of these categories share the encompassment of their heterogeneity under a falsely homogeneous "sameness.";The immediate problem for deaf children of a "one size fits all" approach to their embodiment is the erasure of individual difference that this false homogeneity produces. When anti-signed language proponents of the cochlear implant technology suggest that signing and vision "take over" speaking and hearing parts of the brain, imagining fixed locations that resemble national border and war-like incursions or colonization. Such images do not follow what is presently known about the immense plasticity of children's brains, including a second florescence of brain cell growth through puberty.;Signed languages and pediatric cochlear implants stand as central symbols to all disputes about pediatric deafness. Cross-cultural comparisons of the diagnostic process just reveal just how much geography and history figure into the social consequences of various locally dominant descriptions of deaf embodiment. |
