I would recommend this book to hearing people who are interested in deaf culture & the language that anchors it. If you can put up with the incessant references to "the white man" & the authors seeming fondness for seminal communist thinkers & their worldview, this work will furnish your mind with great research, this is a work that is of great credit to Ladd who has not, in my opinion, received the recognition from us deaf people that is so thoroughly deserved, much like the late Terry Riley for his efforts too.
It is my view that language rather than degrees of "hearing loss" or which school one went to is what truly defines the two and i was pleased to see this mentioned. The text also expands on the boundaries of the furiously debated D/d issue. "People with disabilities, Deaf people, and others who might not even consider themselves as having a disability have been relegated to the margins by the very people who have celebrated and championed the emergence of multiculturalism, class consciousness, feminism and queer studies, from the margins" (Lennard Davis, 1997) In fact the very first paragraph on the very first page accurately portrayed my perception of what has doggedly stunted our efforts for BSL getting legal status as well as perfectly describing the person whose response i have written above. I was happy to find a chapter covering this phenomenon (its not a new thing) & delighted to read of explanations as to the origins of this mindset, as well as how to counter it. This is to my mind a sinkhole that threatens the future existence of BSL & the deaf community. Horror at the legal precedent they set & the blurring of linguistic/cultural identity with that of disability. The fervor with which many people, D & d alike, have supported recent legal challenges which explicitly label all Deaf people as disabled filled me with abject horror. "If you don't like being called disabled, you must hate & look down on disabled people", this was a response to my own argument that i was certainly not expecting. I wanted to read this book as, being a deaf BSL user myself, i am concerned by the apparent increasing popularity of the younger, social media savvy generation of deaf people referring to themselves as disabled, as well as criticising other deaf who decline to label themselves in this way.
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