The (Deaf) Culture Wars

OK, so there's this Deaf couple staying at a motel, and in the middle of the night the woman asks her husband to go buy her some aspirin. So he gets out of bed and drives to an all-night drugstore, and when he gets back the motel is dark and he can't remember which room is his. At first he doesn't know what to do, but then he drives to the middle of the parking lot and begins honking the horn. Pretty soon lights start going on in room after room, and people are peering out their windows to see who's making all that noise. The man waits until every room is lit up — and then drives to the one room that's still dark.

That's the famous motel joke, signs Minnie Mae Wilding-Diaz. She is sitting in her living room in Riverton with her husband, Julio Diaz, who is also deaf. In the kitchen, her three deaf children are playing with Legos.

In Wilding-Diaz's motel joke, the tables have been turned. The Deaf man has used sound — and the hearing world's predictable attentiveness to it — to his advantage. In the joke, the hearing world has to accommodate.

In reality, says Wilding, it has been the hearing who have historically been in charge, the hearing who have decided what the rules are, what's normal and what's not. "Audism," some people call that. Or "phono-centric." Or even, sometimes, "colonialism."

The 16th Winter Deaflympics are in full swing in Salt Lake City this week, which makes this a good time to see some elite skiing and hockey and also to explore what it means to be Deaf with a capital D. For people who can hear, that exploration sometimes feels like visiting a foreign country, across an ocean of silence and a cultural divide.

To be Deaf with a capital D, says Julie Eldredge, a Deaf teacher of Deaf culture at BYU, is to believe first and foremost that deafness is not a disability or a pathology. Being deaf, she says, is just another way of being. There's nothing that needs fixing, and "hearing-impaired" is not a suitable synonym. Sound and speech aren't the goal; communication is.

"Deafness doesn't hurt, it doesn't kill you, it isn't a disease," says Julie's hearing husband, Bryan, who heads the American Sign Language and Deaf studies program at Utah Valley State College. "It's just a kind of existence. A perfectly acceptable existence. But hearing people have always been uneasy with people who aren't like them."

Not everybody who can't hear is culturally deaf, he says. People who grow old and lose their hearing may be deaf but they're not Deaf. Ditto for many people who grew up deaf but wore hearing aids or learned to lip read. Diane Larsen, who has been a lip reader since a bout of meningitis at age 4 and who now has a cochlear implant, says she has never considered herself culturally Deaf.