Deaf People, Language, and Emancipation in Modern France, 1789-1914. By Sabine Arnaud

In Deaf People, Language, and Emancipation in Modern France, 1789-1914, Sabine Arnaud explores a paradox in the history of deaf experience: how did the multiplicity of social exchanges between deaf and hearing people evident in 1800 lead to the segregation of these groups as “normal” versus “abnormal” a mere century later? In answering this question, Arnaud engages recurring themes from a small yet rich body of work by scholars such as Anne Quartararo, Harlan Lane, François Buton, Patrick Bourgalais, Jean-René Presneau, and Didier Séguillon—the contestation between the medical model of deafness as a disability versus the social and linguistic model of a minority community; the Foucauldian narrative of deaf education as one of institutional repression; and, most crucially, the resistance and agency of deaf people against the forces of normalization. In charting a history that seems to run contrary to the general expectation of gradually expanding disability rights over the modern era, this book celebrates the plurality of actors and ideas of an earlier time when alternative laws, norms, and systems could be imagined.