Deafness Reflection Paper

730 Words2 Pages

This paper explains the two views of deafness: disability/pathology perspective and cultural/social perspective. It explains how the two perspectives differ from each other and why there are conflicts between them. The paper also explains the author’s personal perspective of deafness.
Keywords: deafness, disability/pathology perspective, cultural/social perspective

Disability/Pathology vs. Cultural/Social Perspectives The advancement of medical technology has caused the advent of two different viewpoints about deafness: the disability/pathology perspective and the cultural/social perspective. The history of Deaf Studies, at one point, explored the thought-provoking differences and conflicts between the two perspectives that have become the basis of how people perceive deafness nowadays. …show more content…

Under this perspective, deaf or hard of hearing (DHH) people are characterized as lacking or disabled due to their hearing loss that needs to fixed through the medically- and technologically-grounded Deaf-gain and normalization process (Bauman & Murray, 2010). On the other hand, cultural/social perspective of deafness is anchored on the idea that deafness is about the Deaf community considered as a linguistic minority. Under this perspective, DHH people are characterized based on their way of life as reflected on their unique identity: culturally Deaf identity, culturally hearing identity, or bicultural identity (Scheetz,

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