Interembodiment and language: Deaf language practices as resistance

This article approaches language as both a vehicle for interembodiment and as a fundamentally interembodied process. Drawing from approximately 18 months of ethnographic fieldwork with deaf immigrants in the northeast United States, this article explores how interembodiment emerges through language forms and practices; and how deaf language practices entangle interlocutors, sometimes bodily, with others. As intelligibility can only be achieved relationally, this article likewise asserts language as a fundamentally interembodied process. Meaning in communicative encounters is made among and across interactions (not individually). Given the inherent interdependence of language, I detail how deaf immigrants co-construct meaning with family members and friends through practices of informal interpreting and how, through informal interpreting, deaf immigrants can better navigate an immigration system that is ill designed to address their complex communication access needs. In this way, interdependent and embodied deaf language practices become a form of resistance to policies and procedures that traditionally marginalize or exclude those whose bodyminds are considered non-normative.