Deaf Epistemologies, Identity, and Learning

22 Deaf Epistemologies, Identity, and Learning

Such goals call to mind a 2007 book, The Case Against Perfection: Ethics in the Age

of Genetic Engineering, in which Harvard University professor Michael J. Sandel crit-

ically explores the ethics of enhancement, making a distinction between this and

an ethics of giftedness. He draws upon the work of May to argue for unconditional

love, which he admits may sound religious but is a valuable secular condoning of

freedom to negotiate based on human realities and limitations:

of course, unconditional love does not require that parents refrain from

shaping and directing the development of their child. To the contrary, par-

ents have an obligation to cultivate their children, to help them discover and

develop their talents and gifts. As May points out, parental love has two as-

pects: accepting love and transforming love. Accepting love affirms the being

of the child, whereas transforming love seeks the well-being of the child....

These days, however, overly ambitious parents are prone to get carried away

with transforming love—promoting and demanding all manner of accom-

plishments from their children, seeking perfection. (pp. 49–50)

A movement between ethics of enhancement and giftedness similar to that of par-

enting is echoed in science and medicine:

May finds in these competing impulses a parallel with modern science; it, too,

engages us in beholding the given world, studying and savoring it, and also in

molding the world, transforming and perfecting it. (Sandel, 2007, p. 50)

To discuss the question of deaf children’s quality of life is to open the debate on

manifold views of “normal functioning” and “good health”: “What counts as good

health or normal functioning is open to argument; it is not only a biological ques-

tion” (Sandel, 2007, p. 47). Sandel goes on to illustrate the discussion with the

competing views of deafness; i.e., as a disability versus as an identity. When one

looks at the lived experiences of deaf people and their complex social and cultural

practices, the question may arise as to whether such a duality is even germane, and

whether—certainly in the practices of genetic screening—more scope should be

provided for reflection on “the pressure to perform” (p. 57) and “the difference

between improving children through education or improving them through bioen-

gineering” (p. 51).

Ideally, societies offer their members a rich, diversified resource of co-existing

narratives from which people can build their own identity constructions (verhae-

ghe, 2012). Research remains limited on the formation of deaf identity, more par-

ticularly on the intersection of being deaf with other axes of identity. Identity pro-

cesses always involve a balance of identification and separation, and as such also

include a double risk of, on the one hand, too much identification with the group

(with the concomitant risk of aggression toward other groups) and, on the other

hand, too much separation (with the risk of aggression within the group).

Therefore, the identity question to address is this: How can we support deaf em-

powerment by offering identity constructions that enable deaf people to be “dif-

ferent” from a societal norm, define this difference in positive ways, and develop a