The Politics of Visual Language: Deafness, Language Choice, and Political Socialization

Laurie C.C. Stanley-Blackwell is an associate professor of history at
St. Francis Xavier University in Nova Scotia.

Today, approximately 65 percent of deaf Canadians are functionally
illiterate. They have low professional achievement rates, and enjoy
little access to society’s political power structure. These are the
hard realities of the deaf experience in Canada. In The Politics of
Visual Language, James Roots searches for an explanation for these
phenomena in the dynamics of political socialization.

Language choice (oral vs. sign), Roots asserts, is a key determinant in
this process, especially for prelingually deaf children. Buttressed by a
weighty cross-section of academic studies, he concludes that the
agencies that shape the social and political identities of deaf
Canadians—namely family, school, and peers—have helped create a
double marginalization.

Oralism, for example, which seeks integration as its objective and
sets “hearingness” as the ideal, inculcates the deaf child with
negative lifelong traits such as passivity, low self-esteem, alienation,
and a sense of political impotency.

Manualism also has its shortcomings. Although “sign” contributes to
group coherence and more stable personal identities, the signing deaf
lack political skills and contacts, and are fated to be “political
outsiders.” Neither educational methodology has served the deaf well.
According to Roots, both the oral deaf and the signing deaf suffer a low
rate of acceptance into mainstream society. Their choices are bleak:
either “marginalized inclusion” or “inclusion in a marginalized
group.”

Roots’s study provides readers with a nuanced examination of the
complexities of linguistic politics. One of the book’s most
interesting features is the list of 10 recommendations enumerated in the
final chapter. This section reads like a manifesto. Roots urges
Canadians to devise a “new paradigm” for incorporating deaf people
into the social-political structure and to take their cue from current
policies implemented in Sweden. Although this book is sometimes
overwhelmed by the jargon of theoretical discourse, the messages that it
contains for parents, educators, medical professionals, and politicians
are clear and convincing: there should be greater sensitivity to the
needs and strengths of deaf children, and hearing people must learn to
listen.