The Spectre of Abnormality: Deaf Education and the Poetics of Contestation at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

When, during the Revolution, the French government committed to supporting the education of Deaf people, they left it to teachers to determine the methods and contents of this education. Less than a century later, the Ministry of the Interior of the third Republic reformed the teaching in use in most institutions in the direction of methods of pure speech. This moment coincided with the development of new categories to classify children in relation to the educational project, especially ‘backward’ and ‘abnormal’ at the turn of the twentieth-century. While Deaf writers did not oppose the teaching of speech, they soon questioned the legitimacy of this reform, and exposed the threats it posed for the development of Deaf pupils. In addition to examining the stakes and the impacts of the political decision, this paper will analyze the development of a poetics of contestation throughout Deaf writing, as manifested in the adoption of a variety of rhetorical strategies, ranging from irony to critical analysis, in the rewriting of the category of abnormality. This article will show how these years of struggle were also years of emancipation, insofar as the acquisition of language became a poetical and political act.