Deaf Identity Revisited 169
The film received mixed reactions from the American deaf community; a sen-
sitive issue is that the viewer can only learn the perspective of Sarah through the
“words” of James who voices over—or translates—her ASL into English. The camera
and editing also do not enable viewers to see Sarah in her full signing space, which
makes her voice “invisible” and inaccessible for a signing audience. This makes it
hard to look at the film today from the perspectives of deaf emancipation, deaf cin-
ema, and sign language media (Rijckaert, 2012).
However, there is a scene in the film that I found particularly moving and that
is still powerful today. Sarah communicates through signing during the entire
film; however, in a dramatic moment, pushed by James, she screams. Michael
Davidson (2002, p. 80) writes about this in Hearing Things: The Scandal of Speech in
Deaf Performance:It is a powerful scene because it is the first time a hearing audience has expe-
rienced her voice and realizes that she can speak but prefers not to. It is also
powerful because instead of achieving the desired result, Sarah’s vocalizing
illustrates the coercive force of an educational system based around speech
rather than manual signing. What James witnesses is a kind of deaf perfor-
mative—a form of speech that enacts or performs rather than describes—its
meaning contained not in the form of Sarah’s words (most of which are un-
recognizable), but in the results it achieves in shaking his oralist bias....
One of the (many) things that James... cannot understand is that
although Sarah may not speak, she certainly has a voice and she uses it to
communicate her agency and independence despite being surrounded by
oralist instructors. If the use of speech is scandalous in some forms of Deaf
performance, the idea of voice has a much nobler—if contested—pedigree.
The contemporary reading of the film challenges the role of this deaf heroine;
however, my own experience of watching the film is situated in the 1990s, in which
there was not yet much reflection on the possible role of such characters in the
identity formation of deaf young people. For example, services for university stu-
dents with disabilities were still in their infancy; this made it a context in which
identity development was largely a process of self-exploration. Watching this scene
touched my soul, evoking Joke Hermsen’s (2011, p. 74) idea of the intangible and
inexpressible experience of the soul, which manifests through being touched by a
landscape, face, or poem, but also “when something is gnawing away inside you and
there is a voice whispering: ‘You have to go,’ or ‘You have to change your life.’” Per-
haps the constraints of the protagonist’s representation mirrored my own process
of identity, while stimulating me to advance it. At the time, it was still in the process
of recognizing shared experiences of deafness, which, of course, was a vital aspect of
my personal response to the film. In Changing My Mind, zadie Smith (2009) reflects
on these aspects of resistance to identification in minorities. When she was 14, her
mother gave her the book Their Eyes Were Watching God, by zora Neale Hurston. She
situates her resistance also in the criticism that book had received (e.g., that it was
told from the perspective of an all-knowing third person, rather than through giving
the main character a voice). Smith (2009, p. 13) realizes that she needs to step back