Representation and resistance: A qualitative study of narratives of Deaf cultural identity

Theoretical framework

This study uses the social psychological concepts of social identity and social representations – described as ‘the twin pillars of a distinctive European social psychology’ (Elcheroth et al., 2011, p. 735) – to guide its analysis of participants’ narratives. Social identity theory conceives the significance of social group membership for self-concept and self-esteem (Tajfel, 1978) and posits that we strive to achieve positive social identity and to maintain it if it is threatened (Tajfel & Turner, 1979). Threat refers to any devaluing or stereotyping of a social identity, such as a gendered or racialised identity (see Roberts et al., 2008), and encompasses experiences and perceptions of discrimination and marginalisation, such as deaf individuals’ report (Chapman & Dammeyer, 2017). Tajfel and Turner (1979) advanced three broad strategies by which group members may respond to a devalued social identity and seek to achieve positive distinctiveness: firstly, social mobility, whereby individuals dissociate themselves from the threatened group and seek to identify with a higher-status group; secondly, social competition, whereby group members collectively set themselves against a defined ‘out-group’ and pursue social action and identity politics in order to achieve group rights and enhanced social status on objective measures; and, thirdly, social creativity, whereby group members collectively work towards achieving positive distinctiveness for their group through often symbolic means, for example, through emphasising distinct cultural attributes. While the strategies of social competition and social creativity both involve strengthened in-group identity, the former is associated with greater in-group/out-group polarisation and hostility towards a homogenised out-group (Tajfel & Turner, 1979; see also Wagner et al., 2012).

This study follows research and theoretical studies that integrate the concept of social identity with that of social representations (e.g. Chapman, 2016a; Chryssochoou, 2004; Duveen, 2001; Elcheroth et al., 2011; Howarth, 2002a). As Elcheroth et al. (2011) elucidate, this approach conceives that social identities are forged through representations of those identities and depend on ‘how we orient to different types of knowledge and assimilate them to the self’ (p. 736). Analytic focus on social representations as systems of values, ideas, beliefs and practices helps retrieve the original emphasis in social identity theory on context and meaning, an emphasis overshadowed by applications of the theory that depend on notions of inherent imperatives of intergroup discrimination (see Reicher, 2004). It also helps shed light on how identities are constructed through negotiation of prevailing systems of social knowledge. For example, Duveen’s (see 2001) work on gender explicated that while dominant representations of social identities cannot be avoided and entrench power relations, they are not merely imposed on individuals but are always variously negotiated or resisted. This space of ‘re-presentation’ and identity construction can be conceived as a space of agency, encompassing the inseparable forces of regulation and transformation (Chapman, 2016b).

The research here was grounded in the understanding that social identities are developed in a cultural and socio-historical context, and that it is specific constructions of identity in context that explain intergroup dynamics. This guided the study’s attention to the content and context of participants’ representations of identity: how they experienced and defined their identity as deaf and achieved positive distinctiveness as a minority group, and how this related to the intergroup positions they took. Through this, the study sought to both interrogate current models of deaf identification and contribute to a field of social identity research that seeks to explicate how group identities and intergroup strategies are shaped in cultural and socio-historical context.

The bilingual–bicultural educational context

The participants in this study were educated within Denmark’s Bilingual–Bicultural (BiBi) programme of deaf education. The BiBi programme of education prioritised sign language as the first language of profoundly deaf children and was institutionalised in the Scandinavian countries of Denmark, Norway and Sweden from the 1980s until the mid-2000s when oral education and integration into mainstream schooling began to take over (see Swanwick et al., 2014). While aspects of BiBi policy and practice have been pursued in other countries including the United Kingdom, the social democratic Scandinavian countries led the way and institutionalised the paradigm through establishing it as a legal right and developing special schools and curricula for bilingual education (Swanwick et al., 2014). In its heyday, Denmark’s BiBi programme comprised a nationwide system of pedagogical support and education from kindergarten onwards that used sign language as the primary language of instruction and sought to provide children with a sense of Deaf culture and community. For example, they were supported in attending Scandinavian summer camps for the Deaf community and engaging in education and other activities in international Deaf contexts.

The decline of the BiBi approach in Denmark and elsewhere is tied to the rise of cochlear implant (CI) surgery, which is now the standard treatment in Denmark and many other countries for young children with severe to profound hearing loss (see Danish Health Authority, 2012; Raine, 2013). Cochlear implantation involves the surgical insertion of a device into the inner ear that stimulates the auditory nerve with electrical signals that can be interpreted as sound and speech. With intensive auditory–verbal training, many children with CIs can develop oral speech to the same level as hearing children (see Raine, 2013). The rise of CIs has entailed the waning of sign languages and specialist Deaf education (Swanwick et al., 2014). This is particularly the case where the national health authority advises against the use of sign language by children with CIs, as is the case in Denmark (see Danish Health Authority, 2012).

The years of the BiBi approach in Denmark and elsewhere can now be understood as constituting a discrete era of learning that embraced sign language and supported a distinct Deaf community. A generation of individuals was raised and educated in these years. Despite this, its significance for the development of identity and culture has not been researched. This is arguably more important than ever at a time when Deaf communities must negotiate the implications of CI technology and clinical stances on sign language use.

Deaf identity

The Deaf rights movement, out of which the BiBi approach developed, celebrates and defends minority cultural identification as Deaf with a capital D (Burch & Kafer, 2010). Drawing on the legacy of the civil rights era, it developed apace in the 1980s in the United States and refuses a medical model of deafness that views it as an impairment that should be fixed (Burch & Kafer, 2010; see also Ladd, 2003; Leigh, 2009). The movement shares much ground with that of disability rights, which advances an analysis of how societal attitudes and institutionalised barriers at once construct and marginalise disability and difference (see Burch & Kafer, 2010; Ladd, 2003; Leigh, 2009). This social model, as opposed to medical model, holds that individuals are oppressed (and disabled) by societal barriers and normative values (Burch & Kafer, 2010). However, the Deaf rights movement departs from the disability rights movement in a key respect. Rejecting disability as a category of self-definition, it distances itself from the disability movement and embraces understanding of the Deaf community ‘as a cultural, sociolinguistic minority community’ (Robinson, 2010, p. 18).

Despite efforts to shift representations and affirm a cultural identity, research shows that negative attitudes to being deaf remain widespread. For example, a study of representations of hearing loss in different national contexts reported that, in all the countries studied (India, the UK, Portugal and Iran), hearing loss was seen in general as an adverse phenomenon and widely associated with disability and a poor mental state (Manchaiah et al., 2015). The authors observed that any positive connotation ‘was not in the view of celebrating deafness, as many deaf people might do within the deaf culture’ but rather focused on ‘solutions to hearing loss as a condition’ (p. 869). In Denmark specifically, a recent survey study found that, despite the country’s BiBi legacy, individuals identifying as Deaf reported relatively high levels of feeling discriminated against (Chapman and Dammeyer, 2017).

Deaf identity in research

Much research on deaf identity to date has used multi-item psychometric questionnaires such as the Deaf Identity Development Scale (DIDS) (Glickman, 1996; Glickman & Carey, 1993) and the Deaf Acculturation Scale (DAS) (Maxwell-McCaw, 2001). Through questions on such items as attitudes to sign language and hearing technologies, these scales construct four categories of identity: Deaf or immersion identity, which understands being Deaf as a distinct cultural-linguistic minority; hearing identity, which views being deaf as an impairment and strives to integrate into hearing society; bicultural identity, which positively values both the Deaf and hearing communities, and embraces cross-cultural engagement; and marginal identity, which signifies ambivalence and a lack of positive identification as either Deaf or hearing.

This model is well-established in deaf studies and has been used in questionnaire-based research in different contexts that has shown the significance of deaf schooling and sign language for the cultivation of Deaf identity and culture (Nikolaraizi & Hadjikakou, 2006) and high levels of self-esteem, well-being and life satisfaction among those identifying as Deaf (Bat-Chava, 2000; Chapman & Dammeyer, 2017; Maxwell-McCaw, 2001). However, the four-cluster model of deaf identity is not without critique. McIlroy and Storbeck (2011) argued from their qualitative research on deaf identity that the model perpetuates constructions of identity that fail to reflect nuanced realities. They make the case that the model constructs a (separatist) Deaf cultural identity that is pitted against the identity of other deaf individuals who seek to integrate into the hearing world, for example, by using hearing technologies to support spoken communication. For McIlroy and Storbeck (2011), this opposition does not reflect increasingly fluid and diverse identifications and communicative approaches among deaf people.

While qualitative research is perhaps best placed to explore the cultural context and meaningful content of contemporary deaf identities, there are few in-depth studies aside from McIlroy and Storbeck’s (2011) research in a South African context. The present article adds to the literature through its report of qualitative interview research in Denmark exploring how deaf identity and intergroup positions are constructed in context.

Design

The study collected data through individual in-depth interviews with seven Danish deaf adults who were educated within the BiBi approach. The objective was to gather extensive qualitative data that explored in-depth participants’ life narratives and development of identity. Guided by the social psychological framework detailed above, a thematic network analysis (Attride-Stirling, 2001) was conducted to explore the shared content within participants’ accounts of the development and meaning of their identity as deaf.

Participants

Participants were recruited primarily through the networks of the Danish Deaf Association, the national non-governmental organisation that supports deaf individuals and local member associations. The criteria for participation were that individuals were either born profoundly deaf or became so in early childhood and were educated within the BiBi programme.

All participants started to learn Danish sign language before the age of three. The average age of the participants was 27, with a range from 26 to 33. All participants were white Danish. Only one participant had a deaf parent, reflecting the reality that most deaf children are raised within a hearing family environment. Supported by the BiBi programme, all parents had learnt sign language. This was generally the case for hearing siblings also, but not for members of the extended family.

Participants had attended either a day deaf school or a ‘centre school’, meaning a mainstream day school with a specialist class following a BiBi approach. All but one had also attended Nyborg school, the one-time national ‘after school’ for deaf students that offered educational and pedagogical support at the age of around 16 in preparation for further education.

At the time of interview, four of the participants were in higher education, two were employed in work related to the Deaf community and one was on an employment break to raise children. Overall, five of the seven participants were either in or had completed university education and three had studied for a time at Gallaudet University for deaf students in the United States.

Procedure for data collection

Guided by the approach of narrative interviewing (Murray, 2003), participants were encouraged to freely relate the story of their experiences of growing up deaf and developing identity as a deaf individual. The interviews were guided lightly to focus on the development and meaning of identity in relation to three broad areas: firstly, childhood and experiences of family life and schooling; secondly, current life experiences and relationships; and, thirdly, the context of Deaf identity and culture in Denmark and more widely. The interviews were conducted by the article’s author, a hearing English-speaking researcher. The interviews were conducted with sign language interpreters who interpreted between Danish sign language and spoken English.

The identity of the researcher as hearing raised some issues of ethical import, including considerations of Deaf scholarship and control over representations of identity (see De Clerck, 2010). This demanded ongoing attention to the ways in which the research constructed its subjects and how different identities impacted the research relationship (see Howarth, 2002b; Khawaja & Mørck, 2009). The researcher endeavoured to maintain both critical reflection and sensitivity with respect to how the research relationship itself may have reproduced the minority–majority dynamics under study.

Analysis

The study used thematic network analysis (Attride-Stirling, 2001) to explore themes in the interview data. The initial stages of analysis involved a process of coding guided by the research aims and broad theoretical framework. Codes were evaluated multiple times and consolidated into themes that progressively summarised commonalities in participants’ accounts of the development and meaning of their identity. A key part of the process involved the development of different strands of coding and themes. For example, there was a strand for the representational content of participants’ claims for their identity as deaf (revealing the construction of a positive cultural identity) and a strand for the representational content of participants’ articulations of others’ behaviours, views and attitudes (revealing the experience and perception of stigma and exclusion). Having different strands facilitated attention to the dynamics of social identity and representation within the dialogue, such as the dynamic whereby participants detailed the stigma they faced (e.g. the stigma of deafness as impairment) and contested it through particularising Deaf cultural identity (thereby revealing a socially creative strategy of threatened identity). The final stage of analysis involved a process of organising global themes that both summarised and interpreted the main themes in order to convey key dynamics of social identity and representation in the data.

Findings

‘We were always compared with the hearing’: Overcoming marginalisation and finding belonging within the Deaf community

For most participants, growing up deaf meant they often felt cut off from those closest to them. Many recounted times when they felt marginalised and lonely in a family context, as Terese described:

[A]t the family dinners with my greater extended family, only my sister and parents would know sign language, so all the uncles and cousins and grandparents, none of them would use sign language, so I felt SO excluded. I kept asking dad, ‘can you please tell me what they’re saying?‘, and everybody would be laughing, and I would be like, ‘what’s funny?’

One participant, Anja, told of past insecurities that were more marked than those of other participants and which she connected to a particularly isolating rural childhood. She reflected: ‘I’ve completely accepted that I’m deaf, but that little feeling, that little thought [what if I’d been hearing?] sometimes pops up’. Anja told a story about a recent event in her life in which she witnessed an elderly woman falling down in the street. She related how she could not help the woman physically and could also not talk to her or organise help:

I couldn’t really carry her […] So I sat at the side, looking to see if everything was alright, but I couldn’t really do anything. I actually had a really guilty conscience afterwards because I was sort of: bloody hell, why couldn’t I be hearing just for ten minutes so I could ask her, are you alright, do you need any help, can I do anything? And just have dealt with it. That was so frustrating.

Anja’s narrative here revealed how a sense of inadequacy and loss continued to resurface in her life, despite having achieved a secure identity as deaf over time.

Other participants spoke of an early sense of ‘shame’ and, perhaps surprisingly, reported their BiBi schooling as an environment where they sometimes felt shamed and denigrated for being deaf. This is illustrated in Helle’s account of how teachers disciplined students by contrasting their abilities with hearing peers:

Hearing were like a success, that was the success, the hearing were doing better. Maybe it was something the teachers said because we made trouble. They said ‘you should behave like the hearing’, that’s what the teachers would say, ‘you have to sit quietly and don’t make that much noise, and you have to behave like the hearing’. And somehow we took that in and felt that we weren’t as good as the hearing because we were always compared with the hearing.

Stories like these reveal how, at a young age, many participants internalised (‘took in’) representations of being not only different from but also lesser than their hearing peers. Participants also recounted experiences of direct exclusion, bullying and discrimination that affected them profoundly. Terese described her experience of being shunned at university by fellow members of a study group:

They made it hard for me to work with them on projects and stuff because it would often be ‘oh we forgot to let you know, we forgot to tell you that we had to meet at another room’. So I would often turn up for an arrangement and it would have been changed or moved and that really affected me mentally. I became really sad because, to me, it looked like they didn’t like me as a person. I know that they didn’t want to be with me because I was deaf and I had to realise that it was about them being bad people, that they wanted to exclude me for being different.

As has been elucidated for the impact of racism and the racialising ‘gaze’ (see Hall, 1997), the narratives here revealed a long struggle to overcome marginalisation and the stigmatising representations of being deaf that are conveyed by others’ behaviours and exclusions.

For the participants in this study, a secure identity was achieved over time through increasing involvement in the Deaf community and cultural activities. While at times critical of their schooling, participants celebrated the value of the BiBi approach, as Helle did: ‘So my generation is the golden age, if you can say that. We got a really good bilingual education and we had teachers who knew sign language and were really competent’. Many participants described a powerful moment when they fully realised they ‘belonged’ within the Deaf community. For some, this came when attending a Nordic summer camp for Deaf students. For others, as for Anja, it was when studying at Nyborg: ‘I realised, this is it, this is my identity, this is who I am’. Terese described her experience in an international Deaf educational context in similar terms:

I felt that I had something in common with these people and there was a world where I was right […] So I could meet new people without any boundaries and everyone knew sign language, everyone could communicate with each other in international sign as well, so this is where I actually felt that I have this Deaf thing within me.

As with Terese, participants underlined the significance of immersion in sign language and the Deaf community for a sense of belonging and developing positive representations of being deaf that contrasted with experiences of marginalisation in the hearing world. As the next theme explores, elements of both socially competitive and socially creative strategies are revealed in participants’ reflections on their strong in-group identification as Deaf and how they related to the hearing majority.

“Deaf with a capital D”: Developing a cultural identity as Deaf

It was evident from participants’ narratives that a sense of threat wove through their experiences and bound their in-group identity as Deaf. The social world was often represented in binary terms as divided between the Deaf community and the exclusionary hearing majority. Participants spoke frequently of the injurious construction of deafness as impairment, which they connected to the rise of CIs and perceived in others’ behaviours towards them. For example, when recounting an experience of how a hearing friend of hers at high school had been bullied on account of the friendship, Signe reflected:

I suppose it was that majority opinion that minorities are wrong and should be fixed, that deafness is a disease or some disability that should be fixed. Instead of seeing the deaf person as a person, they see it as something that shouldn’t be touched, that should be left alone.

Later she observed:

The impression of deaf people in wider society is that we should be cured or fixed and it wasn’t when I was young. That opinion has been there all along but there’s a great difference, how prevalent it is, now they have the technology to fix or to save deaf people.

As this illustrates, the rising tide of CI technology and its associated system of representation was a key context of threat for the participants here, and one they had witnessed developing apace over the course of their lives. When participants spoke of activism, it was often linked to defending sign language rights, as threatened by the context of CIs. For example, Lise observed that while she was not usually very active, she had attended demonstrations to ‘save sign language, to acknowledge it as a language within the law’. Helle’s narrative as she discusses the impact of CI technology captures the process of threat and response through which identity becomes a resistant political project:

Of course the Deaf community is very afraid that sign language will die, that we the Deaf people will die and there won’t be any future for us, we won’t exist in the future, because there are a lot of stories about the generation before but now who is going to be the next generation? Who is going to fight for us? Who is going to have a board and who is going to do the Deaf Association work and, when we’re old, who is going to do that work? […] And we need a small core of people who are Deaf and hold onto sign language and don’t speak at all, that’s what we need, a core group of people and, if we don’t have that core, then the Deaf community won’t exist.

There were some expressions of direct antagonism towards the hearing that disclosed a more conflictual dynamic. For example, at one point, Helle described hearing people as ‘profiting from’ the Deaf community through a well-funded infrastructure of education and support. However, while there was evidence of competitive identity dynamics, such expressions of homogenising views were rare.

Most salient in the narratives were participants’ elaborations of the Deaf community as a distinct cultural-linguistic minority. While the construction of cultural identity supports identity as a political project, it constitutes a socially creative approach, whereby threat is resisted through construction of a positively distinct identity (Tajfel & Turner, 1979; Howarth, 2002a). The interlocking of these processes can be seen in how Lars ‘rejects and reverses’ the ‘prevailing value system’ (Tajfel & Turner, 1979) that denigrates deafness as impairment. Claiming identity as an activist, Lars said:

I have a strong Deaf identity. From early on, I found out I am Deaf with a capital D […] I don’t want the medical way, I don’t want to see it as my hearing doesn’t work. I don’t want to see it as a disability and something that I can’t do, you know. I’d rather see it as what we can do, we can do sign language, we can do all these things, and I want this to remain my focus, being a cultural minority as Deaf. But I do see both sides of it. The medical view of a deaf person, it’s true that I can’t hear and it gives me some disadvantages in the main society, some struggles […] I acknowledge both. But we have a strong cultural Deafhood, we have a strong connection as Deaf people. It’s just that society is not really, it doesn’t fit us.

Lars claims strong minority identity politics and distances the Deaf community from a society that ‘doesn’t fit us’. There are elements of a competitive orientation here but creative processes are inseparable: Lars responds to the threat of the ‘medical way’ by emphasising the Deaf community as a cultural-linguistic minority, rejecting and reversing notions of disability. Lars also shows awareness of identity as a constructive project and is reflective: he acknowledges ‘both sides of it’ and demonstrates engagement and negotiation of perspectives. In a similar vein, many participants engaged and negotiated perspectives on CI technology, as Marna does here:

When you get cochlear – obviously it’s fantastic for them and I’m not against it at all – but what of the few when they get it and it doesn’t work? If they don’t benefit from it, do they get lost in the system somewhere? […] For example, being deaf and not having sign language, I think I would struggle with self-identity all the time, am I good enough, can I do this, can I do that, am I good enough for this? I have never felt like that. And I have to say because of sign language. I have this language, I have sign language.

Marna at once acknowledges the success of CI technology, qualifies that success and makes a case for continued bilingualism for new deaf generations. Moreover, through representing a secure and positive Deaf community with sign language at its heart, she counters and contests the idea of deafness as deficit that CIs reify. Marna’s narrative is illuminative of the creatively resistant work of identity that was salient across the interviews and, particularly in the case of CIs, co-existed with more competitive positions.

All participants claimed a strong and distinct cultural identity as Deaf with sign language at its heart. They articulated and directly countered outsiders’ representations that sign languages are ‘not real languages’ (Signe) and celebrated their richness, beauty and dynamic development, as Signe does here: ‘I love delving into different sign languages […] If I find a beautiful French sign or a beautiful Dutch sign, I can mix and match’. Participants also celebrated the distinctiveness of sign language as one that entails physical expressivity and founds a particular kind of embodiment in the world. Linked to this, participants described shared ‘Deaf norms’ as encompassing more demonstrative and informal interactions than those typical in the hearing world. Marna provided an example:

I remember, a general example, if you enter a Deaf class, you always have to smile and say good morning to everybody, to show that you’re here and you’re fine and whatever. But in high school or the gymnasium, you don’t do that. At the beginning, I was smiling and people didn’t smile back, and I was like, are they angry? Did I do something wrong? That was a little bit strange for me. So socially it’s different.

Another distinctive aspect of the Deaf community that participants celebrated was its culture of liberal values and acceptance, including in relation to sexuality, as Lars described:

We are quite close to each other and quite accepting of each other that we are different, because it’s the Deaf society, and there is a big percentage of people who are also members of the LGBT community. Compared to hearing people, there is a bigger percentage of people who are. It becomes natural because we are already different.

Participants also celebrated a form of transnational kinship that resides in the formative experience of how it is to be Deaf in a hearing world. Participants used the term ‘Deafhood’ to express this sense of a shared understanding, culture and pride that develops through lived experience and use of sign language (see Ladd, 2003). The significance for Deaf communities of transnational kinship and social capital has been highlighted elsewhere (see Breivik, 2005); the analysis here shows how it is tied to the process of representing a distinct cultural identity as Deaf.

‘We’ll figure it out, sign language and this and that’: Embracing cross-cultural dialogue and relations

Another significant feature of the data that this theme captures was participants’ concern for cross-cultural dialogue and relations. This was particularly evident when participants reflected on close relationships with hearing relatives and friends, and was especially the case for Marna who had a hearing partner. She described strategies of communication with hearing friends and family:

Often when I have a conversation with a hearing person, I will write with them and have two or three conversations at the same time, but also I know that person could have a conversation with another hearing person, so the paper will stay there until they have the time to answer, and I will write or talk with another person and in that way avoid sitting there alone, feeling alone. At the same time, it takes a lot of energy to do that.

Marna’s account here reveals the ‘energy’ required to engage but also her determination to do so. She emphasised the importance of minimising oppositions:

There are maybe some Deaf people who are ‘this is my sign language space’. There are some people who are like this and use up the entire space, and I modify it a little bit, make it a little bit smaller and not so extreme. For me, it’s quite important that you ease into it, nice and quiet, we’ll figure it out, sign language and this and that, we can take it slow basically, it doesn’t have to be so extreme, everything at the same time.

While a strong element in some narratives, the embrace of cross-cultural communication and engagement was evident among all participants, including those who at times expressed a hostile view of the hearing community. Helle, for example, reflected on sign language in the following way:

Sign language is only for the Deaf of course but it’s a big gift I think for society. People could gain from sign language. A lot of people who have autism could gain from sign language and also some of my friends who are hearing say wow, if we don’t think just about hearing, we should all learn sign language, whether you’re Deaf or hearing, you should learn it when you’re a baby because it’s very expressive […] I’m very proud of my sign language and I wish everybody would learn it.

Here, Helle reveals her hearing friendships and celebrates sign language in terms of the possibilities of cross-cultural enrichment rather than of minority rights and identity politics. Elsewhere, she spoke of the positive impact and feeling of establishing communication with hearing strangers who know a few signs. Helle’s narrative is illuminative of contextual positionings that involve some shifting elements of both oppositional identity politics and a more dialogical, socially creative sensibility.

While participants often reproached mainstream hearing society for exclusion and lack of awareness, they also described a sense of responsibility and their own creative approaches to overcoming marginalisation. For example, Lise spoke of endeavours to overcome communication difficulties and convey a positive representation of Deaf identity:

I feel I have a strong identity but I’m not the kind of person, I’m not very active […] My sense is more to show I am Deaf by going into a coffee bar and, if I have the time, try using sign language to ask for a cup of coffee. If they don’t understand me, I will change and write it on a piece of paper but I would use signs first. I have experienced myself that if I just go in there and say, pointing at my ears, ‘sorry, I cannot hear, can we write?’, suddenly they think I’m stupid […] but actually I was the one who initiated the situation so I could change that. And since I did that and showed just normal sign language in the situation, we feel more equal. They have a better representation of me: ‘ok, this is a Deaf person’.

Lise’s account reveals again the constant threat of stigma but a more creative than oppositional response that strives to establish cross-cultural connections and positively represent Deaf identity.

Discussion

Resistance and representation in the construction of Deaf identity

The findings here show how Deaf identification is a social psychological process that entails a struggle for secure identity and ongoing dilemmas of how to relate to a hearing world and others’ representations of being deaf. The identity dynamics of the participants are illuminated through application of Tajfel and Turner’s (1979) model of responses to threatened identity. While the strategy of social mobility – that is, individual dissociation from the threatened group – is possible for some deaf individuals with CIs who can find belonging within the hearing majority (see Mance & Edwards, 2012), this was not a possibility for the individuals here who were born at a time when CI technology was in its infancy. Nor, more importantly, would it have been psychologically feasible once Deaf community and cultural attachments started to develop. What this study shows is that participants developed a secure and positive self-concept through finding belonging within the Deaf community and identifying as culturally Deaf.

Significantly, however, participants continued to experience their identity as threatened. The combination of positive minority identification and perception of threat resonates with the findings of a large-scale survey in Denmark that those identifying as Deaf reported relatively high levels of feeling discriminated against while also having high levels of well-being over all (Chapman & Dammeyer, 2017). As social identity theory and research illuminate, positive minority identity is often partly constructed through and against a sense of threat. Guided by Tajfel and Turner’s (1979) framework, the analysis here found expression of a socially competitive strategy of identity. This was evident in a binary conceptualisation of society as divided between the Deaf and the hearing, commitments to activism for Deaf minority rights and (occasional) hostile representations of the hearing majority. However, overt hostility towards the hearing community was expressed only rarely. Further, it was not analytically plausible to characterise any participant as exhibiting a generally competitive outlook. Rather, this was most to the fore when participants reflected on the polarising context of CIs or confronted, through recounting experiences of marginalisation, the representational system of deafness as disability or deficit.

A socially creative strategy of identity was most salient in the data. The analysis showed how positive distinctiveness was achieved through emphasising the Deaf community as a cultural-linguistic minority. This centred on the significance of sign language and community but was also achieved through defining Deaf identity through positive group norms and values, such as those of emotional expressiveness, liberal acceptance and openness, and transnational kinship. The analysis showed how processes of representation and resistance were entwined. For example, it showed how collectively representing sign language as a full, rich and uniquely expressive language was constructive of a Deaf cultural heritage that directly countered stigmatisation of sign language as a lesser language and deafness as deficiency. As Howarth (2002a) observed in research on racism and identity, ‘the elaboration and rejection of particular representations is, therefore, a crucial part of the co-construction of positive social identities’ (p. 156).

Beyond the model of Deaf versus bicultural identities

Representations of Deaf cultural identity of course support the construction of Deaf identity as a political project demanding recognition, rights and equality in law. Unlike disability politics, Deaf identity politics depends upon self-understanding as ‘a cultural, sociolinguistic minority community’ (Robinson, 2010, p. 18). Nevertheless, as already stated, a strongly competitive strategy of identity was not prevailing. The narratives showed a general orientation of creative social change that was underpinned by a concern for increased dialogue, exchange and understanding between the hearing and Deaf communities. This entailed critical self-awareness at times: participants reflected deeply on their presence as Deaf in a hearing world and often expressed a sense of responsibility for interactions and how they represented themselves as Deaf, as Lise shows when describing communication in a cafe. Indeed, the level of self-reflection expressed by Anja on occasion evoked the peril of insecure identity. Overall, however, this study revealed the construction of positive social identity characterised by creative, cross-cultural agency and reflectiveness.

The findings here run against the established model in Deaf studies of four clusters of deaf identity that separates Deaf and bicultural identifications. The Deaf Identity Development Scale (Glickman & Carey, 1993) constructs these opposed deaf identities through responses to items such as ‘Deaf people should only socialise with other deaf people’ (Deaf identity) and ‘I want to help hearing people understand and respect Deaf culture’ (bicultural identity). The findings of this study do not fit these categorisations and lend support to McIlroy and Storbeck’s (2011) argument that established constructions of deaf identity fail to articulate the contemporary lived realities of many deaf people and risk perpetuating traditional identity politics. They sustain McIlroy and Storbeck’s (2011) formulation of DeaF to describe an identity that both proclaims Deaf culture and engages in ‘critical self-reflection and cross-cultural dialogue' (p. 508). The proposition of a new ontology not only challenges the ability of established models to capture the complexities of deaf identity but also highlights how they risk propagating the idea of polarised identities (e.g. Deaf identity as self-segregating and competitive versus bicultural identity as open and pluralistic). To paraphrase Reicher’s (2004) concerns about theories of identity, the worry is sometimes less that they are true than that they can become so.

Social identity as ‘irreducibly cultural’

The study here also resonates with critiques of reductionist treatments of social identity theory, in line with Reicher’s (2004) exposition and other qualitative studies of threatened identity using a social representation approach (see Chapman, 2016a; Howarth, 2002a). As Reicher (2004) details, far from proposing an imperative for intergroup discrimination, original theorisation of social identity was designed to explain ‘how individuals can come to define themselves in terms of a construct that is irreducibly cultural, and to explain that this cultural content gives shape to all the processes that flow from our sense of who we are’ (p. 928). This study was able to shed light on the specificities of how a positively distinct Deaf identity was collectively constructed and communicated through representations of cultural-linguistic heritage and positive norms and values, such as those of linguistic and emotional expressiveness and liberal acceptance and openness. These norms and values help explain the positive cross-cultural intergroup positionings that were most salient in the narratives. As Reicher (2004) writes, ‘where in-group norms are positive, prosocial behavior may result’ (p. 930). The analysis here, therefore, demonstrates the importance of qualitative studies of social identity that retrieve the theory’s original emphasis on cultural systems and context to explain identities and intergroup dynamics. More concretely, it may be surmised that the norms and values that defined Deaf identity here are suggestive of the positive legacy of Denmark’s ‘golden age’ (Helle) of BiBi education. There is existing evidence of high levels of positive well-being among those who identify as culturally Deaf in Denmark and grew up in this era (Chapman & Dammeyer, 2017) but more large-scale research on the outcomes of the BiBi approach is needed. From the findings here, it can be conjectured that, by immersing children in sign language and a wider Deaf community while also providing education locally and supporting families, the years of the BiBi programme supported the development of a highly educated Deaf community and a positive social identity that combines celebration of Deaf culture with a cross-cultural openness.

Negotiating the threat and dilemmas presented by CIs

None of this is to gainsay the more resistant, competitive expressions of identity that also emerged in participants’ narratives. As already highlighted, the analysis showed that this dynamic was particularly salient when participants reflected on the rising tide of CI technology, experiences of marginalisation that drew on a medicalising system of representation, and risks to the future support of sign language. The sometimes shifting dynamics of identity in the narratives seem, therefore, to mirror how the context for Deaf identity has shifted radically over these participants’ lives and shed light on the dilemmas facing the Deaf community. The complete reversal of the BiBi approach in Denmark in favour of CI technology and auditory–verbal therapy has been a sociopolitical as well as technological development and has seen the closure of schools for the Deaf and related infrastructure. It has revived and reified the representation that being deaf is ‘wrong’, sign language is a ‘loser language’ and deafness is something that should be ‘cured or fixed’. Moreover, it entails the decline of sign languages and imperils the very future of Deaf communities and culture. In short, the context for Deaf identity today is polarising and easily productive of a minority rights agenda and the oppositional intergroup dynamics that occasionally surfaced in the narratives. As Tajfel and Turner (1979) hypothesised, ‘when a group’s action for positive distinctiveness is frustrated, impeded or in any way actively prevented by an out-group, this will promote overt conflict and hostility’ (p. 49).

Even so, many participants were just as likely to engage reflectively and dialogically on this issue, in line with a generally creative approach to achieving social change. They acknowledged the opportunities that CIs provide while also making the case that, for many reasons, some people do not fully benefit from CIs and would benefit from parallel use of sign language and engagement with the Deaf community. More research is needed, with new methods and epistemologies (see De Clerck, 2010), on both the development of new deaf identities and the insights, experiences and cultural achievements of established Deaf communities. As researchers in the field of deaf studies have highlighted (e.g. Hyde & Punch, 2011; Dammeyer et al., 2018), consideration should be given to the potential benefits of supporting flexible, bicultural deaf identifications and use of sign language among future generations of deaf children.

Resonances for disability and minority identity studies

Finally, there are resonances in this study for relations between Deaf and disability studies, and perhaps for issues of minority identity more widely. While Deaf and disability studies remain separate fields attached to different movements and communities, this study suggests possibilities for engagement around cultural and representational work to critique normativity and, as the scholar Yerker Andersson expressed it, ‘expand the understanding of identity and people’ (Andersson & Burch, 2010, p. 195). This is an endeavour that demands vigilance within minority communities with respect to the dilemma of ‘how to advocate for inclusiveness while at the same time defining one’s difference for the purpose of political advocacy and transformation’ (N. Erevelles in Erevelles & Kafer, 2010, p. 215). There are important questions of inclusiveness for Deaf communities and scholarship, particularly with respect to disability, that this study does not address. Nonetheless, the analysis here reveals a construction of Deaf cultural identity that at least engages the dilemma that Erevelles and Kafer (2010) articulate in its embrace of prosocial, liberal values and commitment to cross-cultural dialogue and enrichment.