Deaf-Hearing Family Life

Abstract

This article brings together poetic narratives of three women—two hearing and one deaf—who are mothers to both deaf and hearing children. When asked, “What’s the story of your family?” they each uncover, discover, and recover narratives that embrace politics, spirituality, marginalization, ignorance, resistance, love, care, and celebration. Their stories—signed, spoken, and written—deconstruct and reconstruct intimate and poignant experiences of negotiation between deaf and hearing worlds, between sign and word, between acceptance and judgment, and, in particular, in response to a particular piece of government legislation. In the United Kingdom, monocultural, multigenerational deaf families are the exception rather than the rule; therefore, questions of cultural knowledge transmission, reproduction, and survival are endlessly troubled, contested, and reclaimed in bicultural, bilingual deaf-hearing families, particularly in the face of dominant, mainstream discourses of disability and normalization. The three women’s narratives repair and bear witness to misunderstood and marginalized deaf and hearing lives. As sign language has no written form, the stories are re-presented here as poetic texts as a way not only to bridge the gap between “oral” narrative and the written (translated) word but also to bring to life on the page the inherent poetry of their resistance stories. ¹