Deaf Liminality

(Still a WIP)

If I need to coin a term to describe the most common deaf experience that I have ascertained from my research and lived experience so far, I would call it “deaf liminality.” The multitudinal nature of this experience accounts for the intersectional identities of deaf* (includes DeafBlind, DeafDisabled, and hard-of-hearing) people and the diversity of deaf onto-epistemologies from all over the world.

I’m challenging the monolithic connotations of “Deaf culture” that tend to kowtow to the intimately related notions of DEAF-SAME and DEAF-FIRST.

Have you ever read Anzaldua’s Borderlands? It’s the same premise— the idea that there are multitudes contained in what many may have considered as a singular experience. Probably clearer to consider it in terms of categories. We, as humans, love to box everyone and everything in categories and that includes how we think of the deaf experience (as outlined in any book about “Deaf Culture”), but there are as many deaf experiences as there are deaf individuals so it may behoove us to consider the whole spectrum of the experience going across and beyond the boundaries of categories which is where the framework of deaf liminality comes in eg. being a DeafDisabled  musician with speaking abilities closely aligns with deaf liminality than to the idea of the singular “Deaf Culture”