Writing the hearing line: telling family stories of Deafness

The history of the deaf has been regarded as ‘A history of misunderstandings’ [de Saint-Loup, A. 1996. “A History of Misunderstandings: The History of the Deaf.” Diogenes 44 (175): 1–25]. Literary writing about deaf lives is so rare that scholars discuss the ‘invisibility’ of deafness in the cultural imaginary (McDonald, D. 2011. “HEARSAY: How Stories About Deafness and Deaf People are Told.” PhD diss., Griffith University). In response to this dearth of literature, this paper considers the unique potential of creative nonfiction writing to offer new epistemological understandings of ‘the hearing line’—‘the invisible boundary between the deaf and the hearing’ (Krentz, C. 2007. “Writing Deafness: The Hearing Line in Nineteenth Century Literature.” USA: University of North Carolina Press, 2).

I discuss the process of writing a memoir, titled ‘A Sense of You’, which explores my relationship with my Deaf grandparents.

By engaging with family history and stories, this work provides a window to interactions across the hearing line. I argue for the value of literary representations that disrupt existing understandings of both deafness and hearing, utilising family history and creative nonfiction to animate lived experience. Through engagement with Deaf Studies philosophy, this paper troubles medical understandings of deafness.