annunciation and insurrection of the deaf difference: counter-actions in the biopolitics of bilingual education

Abstract

In the field of deafness, especially within an anthropological view, there is a constant fight of the deaf movements to untying deaf persons from discourses of disability. This process occurs in affirming that deafness is not a body's inefficiency condition, but a distinct relationship of the deaf body, given by the linguistic difference, precisely, an effect of not hearing. In the present society, the norm is an undoubtedly voracious strategy aiming the classification, nomination, gathering and representation that reduces any differences in the name of an intended equality: by including, it excludes many singularities, because it favors the homogeneity. Deaf people become targets of a normative knowledge proposed by the logic of school and inclusive society through the noso-political action that ranked them by decibels, disability and lack of language. In this article, we aim to point out the biopolitic mechanisms of the deaf body adjustments under the demand of the standard of inclusive school. It problematizes: what kind of deafness is allowed to experience in an inclusive school? Is there room for a deaf training? How to keep the deaf singularity when proposing a single model functioning? Although sign language has legal recognition and greater social visibility there are some processes of capture that dilute or striate the different uses of this language by deaf people. The promotion of a heterotopic school survives or resists in the insurrection of new knowledge and deaf forces which claim for other forms of life by the constant retaking of shabby concepts for the word inclusion, for example, by reconfiguring the school common area and transgressing it in other operating modes.