audism

audism, belief that the ability to hear makes one superior to those with hearing loss. Those who support this perspective are known as audists, and they may be hearing or deaf. The term audism was coined in 1975 in an unpublished article written by American communication and language researcher Tom L. Humphries as a way to describe discrimination against persons who are deaf.

According to Humphries, audism manifests “in the form of people who continually judge deaf people’s intelligence and success on the basis of their ability in the language of the hearing culture.” It also appears when deaf people themselves “actively participate in the oppression of other deaf people by demanding of them the same set of standards, behavior, and values that they demand of hearing people.”

The concept of audism reemerged in the 1990s, beginning with the work Mask of Benevolence: Disabling the Deaf Community (1992) by American psychologist and speech researcher Harlan L. Lane. Lane described audism as a way for the hearing to dominate the deaf community. This notion was supported by the fact that environments tailored for deaf persons were limited in their visual stimulation and continued to give advantage to hearing persons. Thus, Lane’s description invoked the idea of institutional audism, whereby hearing ability was favoured.

Humphries’s and Lane’s contributions to the concept of audism have helped to make previously hidden structures of thought and beliefs visible. Institutional oppression is inherently difficult to detect, for it often masks itself as practices that follow common sense. The production of common sense—that is, the hegemony of hearing-as-norm—has roots that extend to fundamental questions of human identity. The idea of metaphysical audism, which is based on the concept that speech is fundamental to human identity, emerged in the late 20th and early 21st centuries, with the work of American English professor Brenda Brueggemann and American professor of deaf studies H-Dirksen L. Bauman. Brueggemann identified the problematic syllogism on which metaphysical audism rested: “Language is human; speech is language; therefore deaf people are inhuman and deafness is a problem.” However, the realization of the grammatical nature of sign languages and research in neurolinguistics suggest that every human is able to communicate via spoken, signed, or written language. Thus, speech is not the only language of humankind.

Awareness of audism has increased in the deaf and hearing communities, and it is now considered to be a matter of human rights and dignity for a linguistic minority to have access to a fully human language that best fits their visual learning needs. Thus, the discourse around audism allows its users to perceive the overarching drive to normalize deaf persons into hearing persons as a severe instance of discrimination and oppression at the hands of a ruling majority.