Deaf Identity Revisited 161
nomadic pathways and opening up promising “sites and sights” of sustainable
futures:There are so many ways to bump and see the same pieces again, but now all
arranged differently. In keeping our eyes out for deaf commonplaces while
also admiring the ever-shifting capabilities of perspectives (in both our “eyes”
and our “I’s”) and attending to the value of being between worlds, words,
languages, cultures even as we can be contained in either one, the sites and
sights of Deaf Studies promise us ever-enchanted explorations. (Bruegge-
mann, 2009, p. 24)While the dialogues reveal that settings of community and education continue to be
worlds apart, they also illuminate the strength of individuals to explore the poten-
tiality of learning from each other’s perspectives to develop practices of inclusion.
The bridging capability of deaf professionals to facilitate dialogue among cultures,
generations, and individuals also came to the fore.
Following the educators’ perspectives on how to support a heterogeneous group
of deaf learners in their identity process, the “tales of birth” show how the very act
of storytelling enables people to take new positions of identity and citizenship. This
illuminates a movement toward the third stage of emancipation. Storytelling in “an
eye/I space,” in this case an open platform for participatory citizenship, seems to be
vital for finding and creating “deaf commonplaces” in this movement.
This role of storytelling in shaping identity and citizenship, and the role of desire
as a force driving a person to tell their story, are deepened in the next section. The
questions from deaf community members and professionals also relate to the collec-
tive narratives in the section following the next.THE QUEST FOR DEAF IDENTITY AND DEAF STUDIES:
INTRODUCING DESIRE
The quest for deaf identity has been a leitmotiv in deaf fiction and deaf studies. In
this section, I want to approach this theme from a new perspective by looking at the
human desire for telling one’s story and for having it seen, heard, and read ( Cavarero,
2000). As a driving force, desire transformed Agnes’s anxiety for disclosure, creating
space for a between form of identity beyond familiar forms of representation through
the act of storytelling (see the introduction to this chapter; also see Hoegaerts & De
Clerck, in press). For the exploration of the notion of desire in relation to narration
and identity, I draw on Cavarero’s (2000) theory of the “narratable self,” which was
inspired by Hannah Arendt’s relational ontology.
For Arendt, politics are “a plural and interactive space of exhibition,” which
enables Cavarero to conceptualize “the scene of narration, of telling each other
life-stories” as “political action” (Cavarero, 2000, p. xxiii). It is this desire for her life
story, which can only be met through the very act of storytelling, which drives Agnes
to move beyond the limits of a perspective of what she is (e.g., how well one fits in