A rhizomatics of hearing: becoming deaf in the workplace and other affective spaces of hearing

Abstract

This paper stages a corporeal and affective trail through plateaus of ‘Becoming deaf’ in the workplace of academia. The paper aims to display the unfamiliarity of deafness in a profession whose ability to speak and hear the written word is all too commonsense. In this piece, Deleuze and Guattari's ‘rhizome’ acts as sensibility and motif as a body deafens. I make use of photography, poetry and poesis as multi-textual pedagogy for engaging with the disjuncture between advocacy and experience, and to draw attention to the dysphoria of theorising affect and the multidimensionality of experiential relations of affect. The paper argues that deafness/becoming deaf is always a form of hearing and the ‘strange label’ of disability is brought into question just as it increasingly opens presence, tension, texture, and interdependence.

Keywords:

• affect
• disability
• deafness
• pedagogy
• rhizome

Acknowledgements

Special thanks go to Amelia Walker for her inspiration and generous support in relation to poetry, to Cassandra Loeser, to Claire Woods, Michael Galvin and Jackie Cook for other forms of inspiration and generosity in hard times. Also to my writing group, to friend reviewers (including Anna Hickey-Moody, Bridget Garnham and Julia Horncastle), to blind reviewers for their invaluable insights and critique: thank you. A final huge thank you goes to my Honours research methods class of 2009 – a class that grabbed me by the throat and in which we all gained a form of composure as we lurched and learned about embodiment, affect and the prospect of shortened lives in research practice.

Notes

1. I also take it up as a practice informed by and as an act of solidarity with those who experience the medical capture – ‘gender dysphoria’. In a most pernicious and striking manner the western medicine and the medical profession seem unwilling and unable to apprehend transgender outside of psychiatric illness and disorder. See for instance the work of Nestle, Howell, and Wilchins (2002), Judith Halberstam (2005), Susan Stryker (1998), and Currah, Juang, and Minter (2006).

2. The Deaf Community is a bilingual identity group comprised of people with hearing impairment who communicate through spoken and sign language. They see themselves as an ‘oral’ culture whose identity is grounded in sign more than in written forms. The Deaf Community's history of struggle for recognition (including combating eugenicist ideation) is documented by authors such as Susan Burch (2002) and Douglas Baynton (1996) in the USA, Trevor Johnston (2006) in Australia, and Mieke Van Herreweghe and Myriam Vermeerbergen (2004) in Europe.

3. The no longer agile or the arthritic hands of ageing people often struggle to manage the finely made and tuned instruments and their own frustration can be met with frustration and rough treatment by technicians.

4. My response is relayed here without any intention to assert or deny equivalence or to suggest that there is not an important conversation to be had, already existing and in progress. Having to announce myself as deaf does not parallel having to announce myself as lesbian, queer, etc. This clearly speaks to an all too common constrained relationship with disability and is a question for another paper and one that queer scholars in disability are pursuing.

5. I was not yet 40 when it was suggested to me that I needed to see a hearing specialist. It was not for another decade that I got hearing aids and was told that if I ‘stayed at home and only went to the shops once a week then I could do without them’. The ‘world of isolation’ for the hearing impaired is well exemplified in this casual aside by the hearing specialist.

6. The ability of medicine, science and technology to ‘kick-in’ in the context of hearing is one where affluence really counts. Hearing technology is costly. Most prosthetic companies have a range of low-cost, medium-cost, and high-cost hearing aids. The quality of hearing and the ease of use between the three is vast. The pace of technological innovation and advancement means that hearing aids are well out-dated in five years. The current cost of two hearing aids at the high end is about $10,000–12,000. This is beyond the means of very, very many people and especially those who have multiple medical needs. The right to good hearing is nowhere a social norm.

7. These included people noticing the hearing aids and responding by shouting or mouthing words in more distinct ways, the discomfort of acquaintances and even some friends, along with a sometimes palpable ‘omg’ of ‘oh no’ or even immediate impatience and visible evident calculation of deafness equals intellectual impairment. All of these become accentuated when old age is added into the equation – there is nothing cool about deafness and older ageing.

8. As, for instance was displayed in ‘Breaking Point’ (2010).

9. I find myself returning to Joan Scott (1991), ‘The evidence of experience’, its next iteration as ‘Experience’ in Feminists Theorize the Political (1992) and to the recent return to her work in the special edition of Cultural Studies < = > Critical Methodologies (see Berry & Warren, 2009; Moriera, 2009; Pollock, 2009; Warren & Berry, 2009) to inspect a site of my own dysphoria, an eruption of my own ambivalence.