{William Cerf's Creativity Journal 

The most confusing project I've undertaken in my doctoral studies has been being clear about concepts of performance and performativity. Social reality (i.e. social structures) has performed rituals upon me so that I behave in certain ways and not others. I was too young to question whether or not to learn lip-reading and aural communication while refraining from learning American Sign Language (ASL). The majority opinion of educators of deaf people in the late 1950's was that children need to learn how to get along, adjust to the hearing world. I think ASL was largely a reaction from people who simply were too profoundly deaf to be able to learn to speak. They then became a sub-culture, with their own language - ASL whch I understand resembles French more than English. 

 

My parents bought into the cultural performance of the notion of assimilation, fitting in and getting along and they performed this upon me to such a degree that only now am I beginning to see that there has been a cultural performance upon me which has created how I perform as a deaf person.  I have accepted the cultural scripts so deeply that I have not had the motivation to learn ASL and gave up trying to connect with the deaf world because I felt so "out of place" the one time I went to an event where the dominant language was ASL and no English was spoken. I have also been able to "pass" to such a degree that I can be considered "hard-of-hearing" or what some people call deaf (as a medical condition and not a person who is culturally Deaf.) I think part of my work in alliance building has to do with bringing other people into coalition with peoples of color and the poor for social change work.