Deafness and community, representations of cultural resistance

2013-02-13

University of Virginia. School of Medicine

With availability of medical interventions like cochlear implants to treat deafness, health professionals caring for deaf persons or helping families make reproductive choices about deafness (as in prenatal genetic screening) tend to work from biomedical rather than cultural understandings of deafness. Deaf Americans have produced a fascinating literary corpus over the last 200 years, both writing in English and creating stories and poems in American Sign Language. Similarly, the work of deaf visual artists illustrates powerfully how deafness may be construed as visual and conceptual gain rather than as hearing loss. These expressions of deaf culture also respond to the pathologization and medicalization of deafness in our society, resist the majority's assumptions and norms, and argue for the value of the deaf community and sign. 

This Medical center hour explores deaf literature and visual art to suggest that a deeper understanding of deaf culture can help health professionals to provide better care and counsel, medically and ethically speaking, to deaf patients and their families.

Co-presented with the Department of English and the History of the Health Sciences Lecture Series, UVA

Krentz, Christopher (Speaker); Garden, Rebecca Elizabeth (Speaker); Childress, Marcia Day (Moderator); University of Virginia. School of Medicine

Claude Moore Health Sciences Library

Filmed lectures

Deaf culture; Deafness

Medical Center Hour

Claude Moore Health Sciences Library

English

The speakers in this presentation have given the University of Virginia permission to make it freely accessible online for all audiences to view. To request permission to reproduce, republish, and/or repost this presentation please contact the Historical Collections and Services Department of the Claude Moore Health Sciences Library at the University of Virginia.

1 online resource (1 video file, 61:20 min.) : sound, color

Local Identifier: u6081734