Brett & Toby

For nearly sixty years, painter Dorothy Eugénie Brett (1883–1977) made use of multiple hearing prostheses she collectively referred to as her “ear machines”: trumpets, auricles, carbon acoustic devices, and electric hearing aids. She relied on these machines both as technologies of assimilation and as objects of power to negotiate the often-contested boundaries between hearing and deafness. The ear machines—especially a large ear trumpet named Toby—serve as a prosthetic configuration of the “disabled gaze”: an autonomous claiming of identity that required, if not depended on, the revelation of disability experience as a guard against ableism. In letters, photographs, and paintings, Brett positioned her machines to foster positive connotations of deafness to both normalize their use and to dominate social spaces to ensure that the otherwise invisibility of her disability was not ignored. Through the disabled gaze, the ear machines bring to fore the deepest convictions between Brett’s private and public selves to enable her to live an autonomous life as a deaf woman and artist.