150 Deaf Epistemologies, Identity, and Learning
challenged these market values in the human life sphere as well as their acceptance
and implementation in society.
This is salient in her determined response to a young deaf community member’s
enquiry as to whether her failure may be due to faulty behavior:
Excuse me, I am really tired about this discussion on behavior, because it
means that you have already been judging me: “Agnes is not doing well, and
is experiencing barriers, so it may be due to her behavior.” This doesn’t make
any sense; I am aware that failure could be partly due to a person’s poor be-
havior, and I am also aware that I sometimes procrastinate. However, if I had
behaved terribly, I would not be standing here today. Altogether, this is not
about behavior. You and I both have hearing parents, but you have grown up
in the deaf world and I have grown up orally, with a long period of confusion
around my identity.
There was my experience of advanced education with an itinerant teacher
who had no experience with deaf students, without a sign language inter-
preter, just a note taker. Then there was the problem with my internship,
which caused me to fail even though I had passed the theoretical exams.
If I had started at my current internship, I would already have my degree.
I simply didn’t know about all these things. I happened to be in an edu-
cational setting that didn’t provide any information, and I didn’t have the
knowledge because of my educational background. It is important to consider
all these factors. The key is educational access for deaf people, which differs
regionally; that is the real problem.
As such Agnes’ storytelling can be seen as political, as calling for reasoning and plu-
rality in deaf identity, and as creating space for empowerment through challenging
exclusion. This mobilization brings to mind Hannah Arendt’s (1989) assertion that
the human condition is characterized by beginning because people are born twice:
while physical birth tends to take place in the private sphere, people are metaphori-
cally born for the second time upon their entrance into the public sphere:With word and deed, we insert ourselves into the human world, and this inser-
tion is like a second birth, in which we confirm and take upon ourselves the
naked fact of our original physical appearance.... [This insertion] is not forced
upon us by necessity, like labor, and it is not prompted by utility, like work. It
may be stimulated by the presence of others whose company we may wish to
join, but it is never conditioned by them; its impulse springs from the beginning
which came into the world when we were born and to which we respond by
beginning something new on our own initiative. (Arendt, 1998, p. 177)While our physical birth refers to our whatness (i.e. qualities such as gender, disabil-
ity, and ethnicity that make up a “physical passport”), as human beings we are con-
stantly interpreting and re-interpreting the constellation of this passport, providing
an open-ended process of responses to the question of who we are. The uniqueness
of each human being manifests itself when we show who we are in relation to others
when we enter the public stage.