Deaf women: educational experiences and self‐identity

Abstract

Using life history interviews with 10 college educated Deaf ¹ women this paper investigates connections between early education and college experience and how they identified as Deaf. The women developed strategies as they managed their impressions while employing Goffman’s practices of loyalty, discipline and circumspection. Acknowledging deafness and their own decisions about education affected their identities. The women experienced a cultural shift after attending a college for the deaf or after their exposure to the Deaf community and learning American Sign Language. The women developed strategies of becoming ‘lifetime educators’ and ‘self‐advocates’. Their experiences show the role of language in the identity making process and how the women navigated this in their schools.

Keywords:

• Deaf women
• higher education
• impression management
• identity
• linguistic minority

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank the women of this study and their families for giving of their time and for sharing the stories of their lives with me. Thank you to Dr Len Barton and to the anonymous Disability & Society reviewers for their thoughtful and insightful comments. I also wish to thank my family and friends as well as Marjorie DeVault, Shari Grove, and my friends and colleagues in the Sociology Department and the Center for Women & Work at the University of Massachusetts, Lowell.

Notes

1. The reader will note that the language used in this paper regarding the terms deaf/Deaf is contestable and not something that is stagnant. I use the term deaf to describe this group more broadly and Deaf when speaking of the Deaf community, who are a linguistic minority (Padden and Humphries 1988; Lane 1999). I take the position that the terms deaf, Deaf and hearing are defined on the basis of changing social contexts, namely schools, and are socially constructed by individuals and these social institutions. My rationale is in line with current Deaf Studies scholars, who argue that it is better to pursue a more flexible understanding of identity construction (Corker 1999; Davis 2007). Again, this paper looks at the slippery nature of these terms and how the Deaf women in this study experience their identities over a shift in their school experiences.