Deafhood

The term Deafhood was first coined by Paddy Ladd in 1993, and was developed in greater conceptual depth in Ladd’s 2003 book, Understanding Deaf Culture—In Search of Deafhood. The text and the concept itself have since spread rapidly around the world, aided by translations into Japanese, German, Spanish, Portuguese, and American Sign Language. It is now a set text in numerous Deaf Studies courses and used in a master’s degree in Deafhood Studies, established at the Centre for Deaf Studies at the University of Bristol.

Two features underpin the initial development of the term. The first was the need expressed by Deaf communities (hereafter Sign Language Peoples or SLPs) for a more positive term that would accurately reflect the nature of their collective existence. This could then be utilized to challenge the hegemonic medical model ascription of deafness, which frames SLPs solely in terms of hearing loss, thereby reinforcing audist oppression across a wide range of domains, most notably in Deaf education.

The second originating impulse was the need to develop a formal analytical framework that validated the concept of “Deaf culture,” which was either disputed or misunderstood by wider society. This required a historically grounded, in-depth sociological and cultural study of Deaf culture in a single country (in this case the UK). It became clear that Deaf cultures could not be properly understood without taking into account the influences of the majority cultures of the societies within which they were embedded.

[Page 288]Thus in order to develop a more sophisticated reading of the Deaf culture term itself, it was therefore necessary to unpack existing social relationships within each traditional “Deaf culture” and to deconstruct the socio-political patterns underpinning the effects of audism on those cultures. Consequently it became clear that the term “Deaf culture” itself was misleading, in that each country possessed its own unique Deaf culture.

Ladd’s text identified how audism as manifested in the UK had come to negatively impact UK Deaf culture, focusing on two sets of domains—oralism in Deaf education and the UK’s social welfare system. The text also explored Western Deaf history to locate examples of Deaf philosophies, which indicated that a more positive sense of Deaf self and identity had existed prior to oralist domination. The challenge was then to develop a formal approach that could absorb these positive qualities into the Deaf culture concept—and the term Deafhood thus emerged to represent the difference between traditional post-oralist Deaf cultures and a larger sense of Deaf self and Deaf potential to which present-day Deaf cultural members could aspire. It then remained to develop a framework by which the concept of Deafhood could be more easily understood.