Deaf Culture Essay

Imagine a world where everything is quiet. There’s supposed to be noise but there isn’t. There’s no music, no singing, no talking, and no shouting. Nothing. Now imagine having to perform in front of an audience in that quiet world. There’s an entire community out there that understands this feeling. In fact, there’s an entire culture surrounding that quiet world. Being Deaf is more than just not being able to hear. They have a different language and different beliefs about their place in the world. Being Deaf means being surrounded by the Deaf culture since birth. Notice that when referring to the culture, Deaf is capitalized. When deaf is lowercase, it is simply referring to the condition of not being able to hear. There will also be references to those who are hard-of-hearing, which means they have moderate hearing loss, or they became deaf later in life and were not surrounded by the culture, or that they are a deaf person who does not want to take part in the Deaf culture (Padden & Humphries, 1990) (Life, 1994). The entertainment industry has very little deaf or hard-of-hearing representation, despite the fact that 13% of the U.S. population identifies as either deaf or hard-of-hearing. That may not seem like a large percentage, but that adds up to about 38,225,590 Americans (Harrington, 2004).