Reflections of a Deaf Scholar 179
found inspiration in the work of Carol padden and Tom Humphries.^5 Their reflections
on their personal experiences and memories in Inside Deaf Culture (2005) convey the
movement toward reflexivity in deaf studies. padden and Humphries describe their diver-
gent backgrounds—“different pathways into the community” (p. 155)—and relate their
personal memories about awareness-raising in the American deaf community and the
development of sign language linguistics and deaf studies.
The realization in the 1970s that sign language was a natural language had a
strong impact on these authors. The concept of “deaf culture” provided a new tool
and a new perspective for describing deaf practices in the United States, as well
as a counterargument “for a group of people who [found] themselves in a highly
politicized environment such as medicine and disability” (2005, p. 162). However,
padden and Humphries began writing at a time when deaf studies was just emerg-
ing, and the breadth of new material left little space for personal narratives. Look-
ing back on this process, they say they now “recognize that we were writing not as
anthropologists, but as agents of a changing discourse and consciousness, as we
tried to model a new vocabulary to describe the community” (2005, p. 2).
The first decade of the new century was different. The adoption of a new
vocabulary, social change, evolution in the field, and their own acquisition of power
enabled padden and Humphries (2005) to reflect on the interaction between their
own biographies and their processes of knowledge production:It seemed to us that there were, on the one hand, scientific books about deaf-
ness and hearing loss, and on the other, personal stories about deaf people
born deaf or losing their hearing, overcoming their deafness, and becoming
successful despite their handicap. One side was cool and professional, the
other emotional and, occasionally, maudlin. We were suspicious of a tradition
of writing about Deaf people as objects of description, but not as masters of
their own description. (p. 8)padden and Humphries cite anthropologist Jim Clifford’s description of this con-
flict between objectification and mastery as “the state of being in culture while look-
ing at culture.” “We understand now that our personal lives are intertwined in the
very same history we describe in this book and that we too are implicated in ‘the
promise of culture’ ” (2005, p. 8). The present chapter is largely devoted to the
question of what it means to me to be connected to “the promise of culture,” both
as a scholar and as a young deaf woman.
I find answers to this question by exploring a parallel issue: deaf people’s con-
struction of their lives and identities and their discovery of agency in diverse con-
texts around the world. Telling their life stories provides people with the opportu-
nity to shape and reshape these accounts; my work has been dedicated not only to
describing this process of deaf people practicing and producing culture and lan-
guage, as well as determining their own lives, but also to creating room for their- The work of these scholars is also discussed in Chapters 1, 2, and 6.