April 3, 2018 - 12:15
The article, "Designing Deaf Babies and the Question of Disability," by H-Dirksen L. Bauman, discusses a controversial anecdote of genetics and disability, as well as connects the story of the deaf lesbian couple with more theoretical discussions of deafness, disability, and society. I found these connections with broader themes of disability studies we have discussed in class to be an especially interesting theme of the article. The author contemplates where disability lives and explain that it is in the society as a whole not just - if at all - inside of the individual: "It is only in the hearing/deaf contact zone where the site of disability emerges" (Bauman, 314). If a deaf couple wants to be able to communicate with their child through sign language and deaf culture, the child does not need to be deaf. It is only when the family as a whole interacts with outside societal expectations and constraints that the family might feel the difference between a deaf child and a hearing child.
This theme in the "Designing Deaf Babies..." article reflects the sentiment of the article by H-Dirksen L. Bauman and Joseph J. Murray, called “Deaf Studies in the 21st Century: ‘Deaf-Gain’ and the Future of Human Diversity." The idea of deaf gain instead hearing loss flips societal expectations on their head and exposes the prejudiced nature of the constructed idea of what is normal.
These reading and Karey's mid-term paper both ponder the choices that parents and modern medicine make about disability. I think that in both cases, it is hard to ask questions like "who deserves to live" and "what parts of a person or family culture gets to live" (as in - does a parent get to pass on genes of a genetic condition that is considered disability) without first asking questions like where does disability live. This last question reveals disability in society itself and leads to further questions like, how can society change to accommodate a spectrum of “normal?”