I appreciate how this week’s readings reveal the interconnected nature of language and identity, emphasizing how language ideologies are historically constructed and structure inequality. There is a clear relationship between efforts to control language and maintaining systems of oppression, and it is especially necessary to dissect these relationships. For my choice reading, I read Chapter 8 of Barrett et al., which discusses American Sign Language and Deaf culture.
Barrett et al.’s chapter on ASL and Deaf culture discusses the connections between identity, language, and ideological constructions of language, ability, and normativity. While I think the chapter could have had a more robust critique of ableism in its analysis of audism, it clearly lays out the systems of oppression that work in tandem to produce language normativity and ableism. This was clear in the discussion of d/Deaf education and historical context provided in the arguments of “oralism vs manualism” and the resistance to manualism in education, which stems from the idea that hearing and speaking are somehow essential for communication. This is an example of how, as Barrett et al. points out, “many of the disabling effects people associate with an inability to hear are not about hearing at all but rather emerge from the limitations placed on the deaf by the language ideologies and social expectations of the hearing” (174). This exemplifies how language ideologies are entwined with notions of identity and upholding normativity; as Chapter 2 lays out, language ideologies result from historical processes, such as through legal and political mechanisms, which uphold and maintain systems of power such as white supremacy and able-bodied supremacy.
To this end, it is essential to deconstruct and resist internalized ableist ideas surrounding sign languages that attempt to homogenize sign languages and dialects and accents within different sign languages in the same way that it is necessary to deconstruct the idea that any language must adhere to specific rules, sounds, intonations, accents, dialects, etc. Controlling language variation is a tool of colonization and upholds systems of power that must be disrupted, as Barrett et al.’s readings make incredibly clear. In the context of how d/Deafness is socially framed, the framing of d/Deafness as a “deficit” in relation to hearing constructs hearing as normative and “reflects a discriminatory language ideology that does not recognize the fact that sign languages are basically the same as spoken languages except for a different in modality” (162). Language ideologies uphold and construct ideas about who uses language and how they use it, and this example shows the clear link between language ideologies and systemic ableism.