Reflections of a Deaf Scholar 195
recounted by Brenda Brueggemann in “Deaf, She Wrote: Mapping Deaf Women’s
Autobiography,” a chapter in her 2004 book Literacy and Deaf People. I felt as if I
were doomed to stay on the path my social position had prescribed. Although
Brueggemann focused on autobiography, the questions she asked resonated with
me as I considered why I had to defend my academic authorship:
If deaf, she wrote... who then (and how then) will read? Who will answer
back? And how? Will they censor, or assure, her textual performance? When
she offers her difference, what will come back? In order to understand, read,
receive, and critically map deaf women’s autobiography, we will need as well
to understand her audiences—those she imagined and aimed to write for,
those who read it anyway, and those who wondered, in both affirming and
malicious ways, at her ability to master the tribal speech and “get a life” in the
literate act of autobiography.(p. 86)
When I completed the first ethnographic study of the Flemish deaf community, its
views were brought to the forefront for the first time (De Clerck, 2007, Chapter 3).
This study provided some new empowering perspectives for the community, but it
also rewrote a part of history from a deaf point of view. previously, the dominant view
had been that sign language research was the key to deaf empowerment in Flanders.
Recognizing the experiences of Flemish deaf role models provided a different
perspective. Initially, Flemish deaf empowerment was intimately tied to transna-
tional contact, visiting barrier-free deaf places, and meeting empowered deaf peers.
In a context where deaf studies and deaf education were not yet institutionalized
(for example in the form of undergraduate and graduate degree programs or spe-
cialized research departments in these domains), it was the first study to be devel-
oped from a deaf epistemological perspective, critical of standard epistemology.
This was new, and in the case defense, the examining committee’s reflection on this
seemed truncated, and its members chose to listen to the voice of a lone scholar
who had considered my approach unacceptable.
Again, the practices of dominance and control that affect modern deaf life
( padden & Humphries, 2005) seemed to be both very real and hard to grasp. How
could biased and irrational arguments be taken seriously and the expertise of in-
ternational and well-established scholars be ignored? One explanation is in the
process pinxten (2007) describes as the striving for theories and models that fit
the dominant research paradigms in the training of young scholars, a process that
removes the connection with the external context. pinxten refers to what Bourdieu
(1990, 1998) has called the “scholastic point of view” in modern academia, which
is fostered by slavishness to notions of logic and objectivity and often ignores the
complexities of the social world. These complexities include the propensity toward
symbolic violence, which involves an unconscious acquisition of self-negating beliefs
by people whose inheritance cannot be easily transformed into the cultural capital
of academic qualifications.^11- This is also a theme in Chapter 4, which discusses how a degree can make a difference for inter-
national deaf people when they return to their countries of origin.