DEAF space, a history: The production of DEAF spaces

Emergent, Autonomous, Located and Disabled in 18th and 19th

century France.

Abstract
DEAF people do not describe themselves as those ‘disabled’ by an inability to access
hearing spaces. Rather, they celebrate an alternative, DEAF space that is produced
as contexts such as urban centres, long-term DEAF families, and schools for deaf
children allow them extended opportunities to come together, author DEAF
languages and cultures, and transmit them from one generation to the next.

This thesis employs Lefebvre’s Production of Space to describe examples of this

DEAF space revealed in France in the 18th and 19th centuries. It does so in four
stages. The first begins by locating three DEAF space emergents that span the
period of the Enlightenment. The second moves to 1760 to identify a further DEAF
space emergent and describes the way in which the administrative neglect that
followed the French Revolution afforded it the autonomy it required to blossom
towards maturity. The third follows the same DEAF space through the 1830s to
examine the way in which the corrective philanthropy of early anthropologists caused
DEAF people to begin to locate their production of DEAF space in relation to spaces
of the hearing world. The fourth identifies a later example of that DEAF space located
and demonstrates how it was manipulated by DEAF and hearing groups within the
1900 Universal Exhibition in Paris, ultimately resulting in the disabling and
disempowering of the DEAF community.

The research demonstrates that these DEAF spaces, although contextually

minoritarian, were as valid as the realities of the surrounding hearing-authored world.
It, therefore, offers a unique lens through which to examine DEAF people on their
own terms and a way to move current theoretical representations of DEAF people’s
reality away from notions framed by compensatory or contestatory ‘geographies of
dis-ability’ towards ‘geographies of ability’ that validate DEAF space alongside other
human pursuits of a Lefebvrian Totalité.