The Construction of Deafness in Western Europe and the United States (17th to 19th Centuries)

Sabine Arnaud studies the construction and diffusion of medical, scientific, and philosophical knowledge on deafness to consider how an infirmity was constructed simultaneously with different areas of competence designed to attend to and possibly eradicate it. She examines visual and textual documents in detail in order to trace the development of criteria of reference and traditions through citations, symbolic investments, intermeshing opinions, and the establishment of classifications. Drawing on literary genres, affecting recognizable styles and rhetorical figures, and evoking particular imaginings, these works bring together existing references and usages to new effect. Medical and philosophical texts, for example, established analogies between the deaf, animals, automatons, and people to be colonized and configured sign language as a means of accessing a natural or universal language. Sabine Arnaud analyzes how a complicated web of references was enlisted to support the respective claims of each discipline and to make speaking or signing an essential feature when defining the ontological, epistemological, and moral expectations placed upon mankind. The study of rewritings at the turn of the nineteenth century—a moment when new medical categories were being produced—thus allows her to ask how the body becomes an object of political investments.

Recent events:

October 30, 2012
Workshop
Constructing Norms and Disputing the Boundaries of Expertise: Interrogating the Legacy of Georges Canguilhem and Michel Foucault, with the participation of Sabine Arnaud, Alessandro Bossetti, Jean-Braunstein, Peter Cryle, Todd A. Meyers
Further information

December 10-11, 2012
Conference
Deaf World/Hearing World: Spaces, Techniques, and Things in Culture and History, Sponsored by the Max Planck Institute in Berlin and Project Biocultures, University of Illinois at Chicago
Conference website