Deaf Gain

Deaf Gain is a term conceived and elaborated on by H-Dirksen L. Bauman and Joseph J. Murray in a series of lectures and articles on American Sign Language, International Sign, and English from 2008 onward. The concept has been adopted as a key conceptual lens in studies of deaf people and sign languages across multiple disciplines in the humanities, social sciences, and cognitive sciences.

[Page 187]The idea of Deaf Gain reverses the traditional hierarchy of normalcy to ask how the view of deaf people and of the world might change if society stopped viewing deaf people as individuals with a hearing loss and instead looked at what contributions accrue to the world by the existence of people with a different sensory orientation. Deaf Gain is a term given to the idea that the unique sensory orientation of deaf people leads to a sophisticated form of visuospatial language and visual ways of being. This orientation has shaped human interaction and human societies in ways still being fully realized.

Deaf Gain is part of a larger trend among scholars looking to redefine our understandings of human experience. Instead of measuring individuals against a baseline of “normal” physical bodies, scholars are increasingly conceptualizing humanity within the framework of biodiversity. Cultural, ethnic, and linguistic diversity is recognized as beneficial for society. The various ways in which people interact with the world—through different bodies and different cognitive and sensory experiences—can also be seen as adding to the richness of the human experience. As with all other theoretical constructions, deaf gain should not be understood to be universalist. Any investigation of deaf gain must be attentive to the existence and experiences of particular deaf people situated within specific temporal, societal, and cultural contexts.

A shift to Deaf Gain perspective must first acknowledge that current ways of understanding deaf people are rooted in a perspective of loss, specifically hearing loss. This perspective draws from the 19th-century invention of the category of “normal” versus “abnormal” humans. The bell curve, or normal distribution, is the most prominent symbol of human variation being seen as measurable. These measurements are then arranged on a scale from superior to subnormal, one prominent example of this being the Intelligence Quotient (IQ) test. The rise of normalcy and the grouping of human populations on a normal distribution according to physical, sensory, and cognitive differences is an integral part of contemporary life. The stifling of sign language in Deaf education and deaf lives has much to do with efforts to reshape deaf people to fit ableist standards of normalcy. A bias toward normalcy has led to oral-aural education, and an apparatus of technological intervention designed to restore some semblance of hearing to deaf children.

But there is an alternative model for understanding people with physical, sensory, and cognitive differences. An integral trait of life is its biological diversity and its strong correlation with cultural and linguistic diversity. There are numerous languages and cultures in the world, each with people who have their own finely evolved ways of approaching and coexisting with their lived environments. Many languages contain concepts and ideas that have proved to be a boon to people from other cultures. Approaching deaf people from a perspective of biodiversity opens up new ways of understanding the existence of deaf people and of sign languages as an integral part of the world’s biodiversity. Deaf people and the sensory universe created by deaf ways of being have existed throughout human history. Scientists are now starting to explore what this means for the rest of the world.

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