Diversity: Women

The field of Deaf Studies explores Deaf lives to learn how these lives are affected by the mainstream society as well as how Deaf lives contribute to the mainstream society. In the infancy of the Deaf Studies field, these anthropologic, ethnographic, and historical explorations were conducted primarily by hearing people, mostly from an androcentric lens. Examples include Richard Winefield (1987), John V. Van Cleve and Barry Crouch (1989), Oliver Sacks (1989), Owen Wrigley (1996), and Harlan Lane (1999). As time progressed, more Deaf people, such as Carol Padden and Tom Humphries (1988, 2006), Paddy Ladd (2009), and Thomas Holcomb (2012), took up these explorations of Deaf lives. However, these explorations did not distinguish the gender differences within the Deaf community. It then became critical to ...