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 look at Deaf women through a different perspective to understand gender issues among Deaf people, to include the Deaf female experience in Deaf Studies, Women’s Studies, Queer Studies, Cultural Studies, Disability Studies, and Ethnic Studies, and to increase publications about the Deaf female experience. The onset of the field of Women’s Studies exemplifies how Deaf Women’s Studies emerged.

In 1963, historian Gerda Lerner (1920–2013) taught the first known course on women’s history at the New School for Social Research in New York City. Interest was piqued, prompting the field of Women’s Studies to begin in 1969 at Cornell University and in 1970 at San Diego State University and State University of New York (SUNY) at Buffalo. Other institutions began similar courses, spreading all across the United States and overseas. Curricula employ feminist, queer, and critical theories through various epistemologic and methodologic approaches.

The field of Women’s Studies began predominately from a White woman’s lens. Women of color, particularly Audre Lorde (1934–1992), Patricia Hill Collins (b. 1948), and bell hooks (b. 1952), wrote to protest the omission of the [Page 320]intersectionality of race, gender, and class in these studies. As a result, the framework restructured to incorporate this intersectionality. Other issues of concern, such as ability, emerged as well. Deaf Women’s Studies also faces this dilemma, struggling in locating herstory of color.