Narratives of identity

Abstract

Living in the world as a Deaf person provides a different situatedness in which deaf individuals construct their identity. How does living in the world, different from the hearing majority, influence the ways deaf individuals go about the creative act of constructing identities? Traditionally, researchers of D/deafness have constructed identity categories in order to research identity and hearing loss. For example, there is a distinction made in the literature between deafness (written with a lower case ‘d’) — an audiological state related to having a hearing loss — and Deafness (written with an upper case ‘D’) — a marker of a culturally Deaf identity. This article is about how three women constructed narrative identities relating to hearing loss in life stories. And how they incorporated, resisted, and/or rejected various cultural discourses in narratives they told? Using a poststructural narrative analysis, I explore how identities relating to hearing status were shaped and limited by four discourses at work in the participants’ narrative tellings (discourses of normalcy, discourses of difference, discourses of passing, and Deaf cultural discourses). For example, I discuss how discourses of normalcy and discourses of difference led to the construction of identities based on opposites, in a binary relationship where one side of the binary was privileged and the opposite was “othered”, e.g., hearing/deaf, and Deaf/deaf. Finally, drawing on the work of Judith Butler, I conclude the article with a discussion of some theoretical implications that emerged from using a poststructural narrative analysis.

Narratives of migration: Emotions and the interweaving of personal and cultural identity through narrative

“…As some authors have emphasised, under certain conditions, some personal narratives become stabilized and are reused as powerful instruments for sense-giving (McAdams, 2001; McAdams, Josselson, & Lieblich, 2006). These narratives can refer to different topics, such as narratives of women’s experiences regarding infertility, adolescent sex and the romantic narrative and narratives by teenage mothers (Kirkman, 2002); deafness (Hole, 2007); breast cancer narratives (Thomsen & Jensen, 2007), and so on.…”

The Confucian Educational Philosophy and Experienced Teachers’ Resistance: A Narrative Study in Macau

“…In this study, narrative refers to a method of inquiry, research methodology, the means of data collection and the data itself (Goodson & Gill, 2011;Webster & Mertova, 2007). Informed by post-structuralism, narratives become the mobile sites where personal experience and contextual discourse intersect in certain ways (Hole, 2007). In their narrative, teachers position themselves in the culturally created web of meaning and draw on the discourse available to them in the particular context.…”

“…Based on Hole's (2007) idea regarding post-structuralist analysis of narrative, this is specifically concerned with people's experience of resistance as a process of deviation from, or defiance towards, the dominant discourses. The data analysis mainly focuses on certain discourses adopted in the teachers' stories, particularly on the teachers' resistance against the dominant influence of neoliberalism through their local and fragmentary voices.…”

Deaf Identity Salience: Tracing Daphne’s Deaf Identity Salience Through Switched at Birth

“…Daphne was born hearing and grew up with a hearing mother, who learned to sign with Daphne after Daphne became Deaf in her early youth. Daphne is a balanced bicultural Deaf person, meaning she is comfortable in hearing and Deaf communities (Holcomb, 2012;Chapman, 2021). 1 We note that Daphne represents one Deaf person, and her story is a single fictional story amongst a large spectrum of real stories and experiences in the US Deaf, deaf, and Hard of Hearing communities.…”