Uncovering Deaf Women Philosophers

When I was in graduate school, I started keeping a notebook with all of the references to deaf people and the experience of being deaf that I encountered in my philosophical reading. Not surprisingly, these were written by philosophers who were male and hearing, similar to the majority of my professors in grad school. It hadn’t occurred to me at that time that there might be deaf philosophers, and it certainly hadn’t occurred to me that there might be deaf women philosophers!

I viewed these references to deaf people as falling into two groups. The first included references to deaf people and how they communicated with their hands — be it gestures or signed language, as in Plato’s Cratylus. The second group consisted mostly of speculations of how one might encounter the world via the absence of the sense of hearing, such as Herder’s Treatise on the Origins of Language.

What was rare was any writing by philosophers about their own experience regarding being deaf. Sure, there are a few pages in Rousseau’s Confessions about becoming hard of hearing, and unilateral deafness in the hands of philosophers is reduced to a joke about Hayek being deaf in his left ear, and Karl Marx deaf in his right ear, but thoughtful philosophically inclined writing by deaf philosophers was not something I encountered in graduate school. Deaf philosophers were not mentioned in my graduate education. I took it as a given that this was equivalent to saying that there were no deaf philosophers.

It wasn’t until I took a seminar on Descartes and I read Margaret Atherton’s book Women Philosophers of the Early Modern Period that I started to wonder whether there were any deaf women who had written about their experience in a philosophical way. At some point, years later, I stumbled upon the name Teresa de Cartagena, a late-deafened converso nun of fifteenth century Spain.  Shortly afterwards I found Dayle Seidenspinner-Nunez’s book, The Writings of Teresa de Cartagena, which included translations of Teresa de Cartagena’s two surviving essays: “The Grove of the Infirm” (Arboleda de los enfermos) and “Wonder at the Works of God” (Admiracíon operum Dey).

Deaf Categories

How might one think about the experience of being deaf? It is probably not known by many philosophers (unless they have spent considerable time in academic signed language space) that there exists among deaf academics some tension regarding the use of the words ‘deaf’ and ‘deafness’. My colleagues at in the Deaf Studies department at Gallaudet University have long pointed out the medicalized connotation that is frequently associated with ‘deafness’; I will also note that the use of the word ‘deaf’ as a descriptor predates by centuries the current social movement of identity-first language that is supplanting the people-first language that came to the fore in the 1980s.  The normative connotations of deaf categorization are rich and complex, and far beyond the scope of this blog.

Another categorization uses upper case ‘Deaf’ to pick out the sociocultural linguistic community of signing people with auditory deafness, reserving the lower case ‘deaf’ as a marker for people with ‘atypical’ audiograms (again, the fraughtness of using the word atypical) depicting hearing loss (can it be a loss if one has never heard?). I have argued that these categories are problematic in part because of conceptual overlap, but they can be useful in helping us take note of another distinction — of Hearing/hearing, the first of which denotes the sociocultural linguistic community of Hearing people (upper case) who use a spoken language as a primary language of discourse and the latter for those hearing people (lower case) who have species typical audiograms.

Deaf/deaf categories have recently been under fire by a group of mostly European deaf studies academics, who argue that the D/deaf distinction is no longer useful, and has the potential to harm by generating divisions that undercut the political benefits of solidarity and greater numbers. The number of signing deaf people is considerably smaller than the number of nonsigning deaf people. Not only is this a matter of numbers, but technology has introduced much more fluidity to how deaf and hard of hearing people move through the world in both signed and spoken languages.

Other key distinctions include those that note when a person became deaf or whether one is blind or sighted. Whether a person is prelingually deaf or post-lingually deaf has implications for language acquisition. It is important to note that this does not always map onto spoken language acquisition, since a deaf child born to signing deaf parents will not be prelingually deaf. People who have spent their formative years and beyond using a spoken language and who become deaf later in life are often referred to as late-deafened.   Those who are DeafBlind (note the uppercase letters) identify as part of this sociocultural linguistic community and may communicate using ProTactile (PT).

The upshot of this section is to offer a brief overview to the value-laden assignment of deaf categories as a helpful backdrop to my deaf philosophy project, which I now explain.

Deaf Philosophy?

My first question after reading Teresa de Cartagena for the first time was to ask whether she could properly be called a philosopher (oh the gate-keeping!). I also wondered whether she could properly be considered deaf, using the yardstick of how that term is understood today.

What would it mean to call something deaf philosophy (word order chosen to reflect not only the ASL roots of the phrase, but also to reflect the longstanding identity-first usage of deaf)? Is deaf philosophy significantly distinct from philosophy of disability that it warrants its own line of inquiry? If so, is it the nature of a signed language that confers this uncoupling, or is it the experience of having a different relationship to sound that drives this inquiry?

I have been thinking of deaf philosophy as having primarily two strands of inquiry. The first focuses on questions about language and language modality of philosophy when done in a signed language (e.g. what does an argument literally look like in American Sign Language?). The second considers ways that one might approach philosophical questions using a deaf lens. If I could make an affirmative argument for Teresa de Cartagena as deaf *and* as philosopher, I might be able to make an argument for adding her to the list of medieval women philosophers for others to read. I could also build my case for a pet project of mine on the notion of deaf philosophy.   

I’m often asked to provide a reason or motivation for my deaf philosophy project. Sometimes I’m asked whether I’m making an essentialist argument for deaf philosophy. My response generally is another question: is feminist philosophy essentialist? Is philosophy of race essentialist? Or philosophy of disability? The questions of deaf philosophy, as with those in these other areas of philosophical inquiry, begin with questioning the assumptions of a particular social phenomenon and considering where this may lead us. The addition of a language in a signed modality rather than spoken (rarely existing in a written form), not only gives us a language with some distinct features to philosophize in and about, but as languages do, it also reflects what these language users value and select as worthy of discussion.

Was Teresa de Cartagena deaf?

To the issue of audiological deafness, the answer to this question of deafness is simple: yes. Teresa de Cartagena became deaf in her late teens or early twenties as a result of illness. The writing of “The Grove of the Infirm” is dated roughly 20 years after this, and so written after a considerable period of being a deaf woman in the world, albeit a late-deafened woman.

In my view, the concept of deaf philosophy ought to be a big tent term — this should include all manner of deaf people’s documentation of philosophical argument regarding the aspects of being deaf, as well as those philosophical questions that are informed or shaped by the deaf experience. If my definition of deaf philosophy as inclusive of all kinds of deaf experience (late-deafened, pre-lingually deaf, primarily signed language users, nonsigners, deaf-blind, hard of hearing, and so on) is accepted, then Teresa de Cartagena counts as deaf.

There is another way to define deaf philosophy that offers a narrower stipulation. This picks out a subset of all deaf people — those who use a signed language. If such a definition ends up characterizing the topic of deaf philosophy, then Teresa de Cartagena would not be included as a deaf philosopher, since she did not sign. Why might the mode of language used be the criterion for restricting what is meant by deaf philosophy? One common response is that of linguistic relativity – e.g. language shapes how one views the world. I’d like to extend this idea to suggest that the kinesthetic, tactile, and visual nature of producing signs and receiving their meanings also shape a person’s thoughts in ways that can be overlooked by those who function in spoken and written languages.  I suspect that this response gives too much weight to the language and not enough to the embodied experience of being deaf, but leave this discussion to another time.

Calling attention to the notion of deaf philosophy leads to questions about how the unexamined assumptions of Hearing philosophers shape their philosophical views. To what extent is the sensory experience of hearing integral to philosophical assertions about knowledge? Or reality? What topics in ethics might Hearing philosophers overlook that are central to the experience of being deaf? Does a starting point of medicalized deafness narrow the scope of bioethical inquiry too much, leaving aside other important topics of inquiry?

Is Teresa de Cartagena philosophical?

Teresa de Cartagena’s “Grove of the Infirm” not only presents an autobiographical account of a late-deafened converso nun living in 15th century Spain, but is arguably an early expression of what has been called deaf gain in the 21st century. The idea of deaf gain is a simple one — consider it antithetical to the concept of “hearing loss.” Current discussions of deaf gain include arguments of how the deaf experience can increase human knowledge in a number of areas, much as I have suggested via my sketch of deaf philosophy.

Teresa de Cartagena’s account of her isolation as a nonsigning deaf woman begins with a lament of what she has lost in becoming deaf. It is important to take care not to fall into the trope of sensory loss compensation, where one is thought to become more adept at acquiring other kinds of sensory information on the loss of a sense. While Teresa de Cartagena does refer to compensatory behaviors, what is most striking to me is that at some point she shifts from sorrow over what she has lost to recasting her sense of self in terms of what she has gained as a result of becoming deaf. Her account of this is thoughtful and sophisticated — so much so that her male contemporaries questioned whether she had authored it. Her second surviving work “Wonder at the Works of God” is in part a response to this incredulity.

Like many other medieval women whose writings have survived, Teresa de Cartagena was a contemplative—and one might say that her transformation into a deaf person was largely responsible for that identity. What is unusual about Teresa de Cartagena is that she begins her writing from her experiences as a deaf and disabled woman, and she has interesting philosophical observations about deafness. As a fellow deaf woman, I am not only captivated by her account of what it is like to be deaf, but by the nuance and authenticity of her description of being deaf — which is quite distinct from the Hearing philosophers’ imaginings of what it is like to be deaf that I read in graduate school.

The Women in Philosophy series publishes posts on women in the history of philosophy, posts on issues of concern to women in the field of philosophy, and posts that put philosophy to work to address issues of concern to women in the wider world. If you are interested in writing for the series, please contact the Series Editor Adriel M. Trott or Associate Editor Julinna Oxley.