Before Normal, There Was Natural: John Bulwer, Disability, and Natural Signing in Early Modern England and Beyond

Abstract

Disability studies scholars and Renaissance scholars have much to learn from early modern schemata of disability. Early modern people used nature and the natural to discriminate against and to include people with atypical bodies and minds. In his writings, the English physician John Bulwer (1606–56) considers Deafness a natural human variation with definite advantages, anticipating current concepts of biolinguistic diversity and Deaf-gain, while acknowledging his society's biases. He refutes the exclusion of sign language and other forms of what he calls “ocular audition” from natural law, which made capacity for speech the benchmark for natural rights. Instead of using Deaf people as exceptions that prove the rule of nature or as limit cases for humanity, Bulwer makes deafness part of a plastic understanding of the senses, and he promotes the sociability of signed languages as a conduit to a universal language that might be encouraged and taught in England.

La filosofía corporal de John Bulwer. Hacia una comprensión no fonocéntrica del lenguaje

“…10 Como explica la autora, Para Bulwer, la seña y la voz son comparables en sus capacidades expresivas, aunque tienen una aceptación tanto cultural como legal distinta. A este respecto, distinto de lo que sucede en los 10 Bearden utiliza este concepto para oponerlo a lo que ella describe, haciendo referencia a los trabajos de Jennifer Nelson y Bradley Berens, como un "colonialismo lingüístico" que considera como idóneo un sistema de comunicación, por lo general el oral, mientras que devalúa los demás (Bearden 2017(Bearden , 2019Nelson y Berens, 1997: 68). El vocablo de alguna manera remite también a la crítica al paradigma fonocentrista que propone la filosofía de Derrida.…”