Look, this isn’t hard to understand. Yes, one could say that there is such a thing as “blind culture”, or “paraplegic culture”, because those people share things with each other that they don’t with the broader community.
But “Deaf culture” has an added dimension. The added dimension is that most deaf people find it difficult to communicate with most hearing people. And they find it effortless to communicate with other deaf people. Sure, deaf people can write, they can speach read, they can get vocal training. But it will always be harder. So deaf people tend to seek each other’s company more often than paraplegic people do, or blind people do.
The key is that deaf people, because of their disability, become a linguistic minority. Can we accept that Chinese immigrants who speak no English but live in a linguistic enclave around people like them are part of “Chinese Culture”, but are isolated from “American Culture”? Well, in some ways the deaf are less isolated because they mostly are part of hearing families, and most have english literacy skills. But in other ways they are more isolated, since they will often never be able to learn to speak english proficiently, whereas a Chinese immigrant could learn to speak English.
Deafness IS a disability. It is a disablity that creates a linguistic minority, and therefore creates a separate community, and therefore a seperate culture.
Just to give an example. My nephew is profoundly deaf and has been since birth. He can read and write, he can use email, he can read books, he does a pretty good job speechreading. But he can’t speak english, and never will. All his close friends are deaf. Why? Because he goes to a school for the deaf where all the teachers sign. Sure there are some hearing people his age who sign, but most of them do so because they have a deaf family member. And this is likely to continue throughout his life. Most of his friends will be deaf, most of his social contacts will be with other deaf people, and most of THEIR friends and social contacts will also be deaf.
And so we get an isolated deaf community. Yes there are points of contact…hearing family members, the internet, books, hearing teachers, etc. And an isolated community with only a few points of contact with the wider community is going to develop in ways that diverge from the wider community. Think Venn diagrams here, people. There are deaf theatres, deaf clubs, deaf boarding schools, deaf universities, deaf mailing lists, deaf newletters, etc. Yes, they are accessable to hearing people who learn sign, or who have a reason to join an internet group for the deaf. Add in that many deaf people are isolated from their hearing families, since no one in their family bothered to learn to sign beyond a few rudimentary concepts.
Deafness is a disability that neccesarily forms a culture, unlike most other disabilities. Jeeze, this is just like arguing whether Judaism is a religion or an ethnicity. Can’t it be both?
