Identifying and transforming normalcy : challenges to compulsory able-bodied oppression in the deaf community [abstract]

This presentation was made during the session "Violence and Kinship."Abstract of a presentation given at the 2008 Body Project conference at the University of Missouri-Columbia.This paper integrates excerpts taken from a fieldwork-based, thesis-length project that examines the personal experience narratives of Deaf and Hearing mothers of Deaf children. Driven by the goal of joining folkloric interpretations of narrative with theoretical concepts that have emerged out of Disability Studies, this paper provides a point of intersection between the two disciplines that takes story structure, and the nature of memory, into account. Responding primarily to Alison Kafer's "compulsory ablebodiedness" and Tobin Sieber's notion of "disability as masquerade", this paper uses (rather than challenges) ethnographic practices to illustrate the transformative properties of narrative that can be seen and compared among specific Deaf and Hearing groups. Disability Studies has largely ignored folkloric approaches to personal experience narratives which have long been engaged understanding the nature of stories, memory, and the expression of social relationships within the matrix of the ordinary. This paper uses transcripts of interviews with mothers who define their own roles by contextualizing both deafness, and "normalcy", in order to cultivate structures of feeling; the presentation of the instability of the present combined with the stability of the past allows for roledefining to be transformative

Deaf identity, motherhood and transforming normalcy : an ethnographic challenge to disability studies' treatment of personal experience narratives

The entire dissertation/thesis text is included in the research.pdf file; the official abstract appears in the short.pdf file (which also appears in the research.pdf); a non-technical general description, or public abstract, appears in the public.pdf file.Title from title screen of research.pdf file (viewed on September 19, 2008).Thesis (M.A.) University of Missouri-Columbia 2008.[ACCESS RESTRICTED TO THE UNIVERSITY OF MISSOURI AT REQUEST OF AUTHOR.] This thesis is a fieldwork-based examination of personal experience narratives told by Deaf and hearing mothers of Deaf children. Using participant observation and incorporating ethnographic reflexivity, I situate this thesis within the field of folklore and present it as a model for disability studies whose scholars seek to use narrative to further their goals of advocacy. I propose that an approach to narrative that includes methodological scope, an understanding of ethnographic responsibility, and the incorporation of various "writing culture" techniques presented by disciplines such as performance studies, is needed within disability studies to prevent an overly representative use of narrative. I present three strategies for evaluating narratives: comparative analysis, performative socio-linguistics, and an approach that echoes Elaine Jahner's treatment of life history as exemplary pattern.Includes bibliographical references