166 Deaf Epistemologies, Identity, and Learning
their way of communicating, and that I had mine. I belonged to a community
and had a true identity. I had compatriots.
In Washington, they told me, “You’re like us, you’re deaf.” And they showed
me the sign for deaf. No one had ever SAID that to me. That was a revelation
because I hadn’t constructed the concept in my mind yet. I was still at the
stage where I defined myself in terms like “Emmanuelle doesn’t hear you.”
Earlier, I had understood the concept of “I.” “I’m called Emmanuelle.” That
evening, like a flash of lightning, I understood: “I’m deaf.” (Laborit, 1998, p. 46)
Laborit’s narrative seems to capture one of the rare moments where “the unity of
the self can be entrusted to a single act” (Cavarero, 2000, p. 43). As an alternative to
the categories of representation, which concentrate on what she is, on the label of
deafness, and on the absence of a political space in which she can show who she is,
she finds a “shared, contextual relational space” in a group among deaf peers who
“exhibit who they are to one another” (Cavarero, 2000, p. 59). It is in this political
scene and in the practice of consciousness raising, which has been common in deaf
communities, that she was told her story of birth.
To gain insight into this process, Cavarero looks into the desire for self-narration
in feminist consciousness-raising groups in 1970s Italy:
In the practice of consciousness-raising, the narratable self, pushed by the
justifiable fear that the partially unexposed is partially non-existent, comes
by herself to satisfy her own desire for a narrated story. The life-story, having
come into its own tale, puts into words an identity—at the same time and in
the same context in which the women present generate a political space that
finally exposes them. (2000, p. 59)
As we know with Cavarero (2000, p. 4), “the question: ‘who am I?’ flows indeed, sooner
or later, from the beating of every heart. It is a question that only a unique being can
sensibly pronounce.” Laborit (1999, pp. 46–47) answered this question as follows:
Now I knew what I was going to do. I would be like them, since I was deaf like
them. I would learn, work, live, and talk, because they did. I was going to find
happiness because they had.
I saw happy people all around me. People with a future. Adults. They had
occupations, and someday I would have one, too. I had suddenly been made
aware of my strong points, my capabilities, my potential. Now I had hope.
Braidotti (2011, p. 277) also looks into social movements and their poles of same-
ness and difference:
Political activism can be all the more effective if it disengages the process
of consciousness-raising from negativity and connects it instead to creative
affirmation. In terms of the crucial relationship to sameness and difference,
this means that the dialectical opposition is replaced by the recognition of the
ways in which otherness prompts, mobilizes, and engenders actualization of
virtual potentials.
Laborit’s story is a narrative of relations and transformation, illuminating a leav-
ing behind of negative effects and their influence on relating with others, for