A Matter of Life and Deaf? Uncovering Genocide of the Deaf under the Ableist Framework and the Project of Modernity.

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BY

Hannah Alice Hunter

A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF

MASTER OF ARTS IN

Holocaust and Genocide Studies Universiteit van Amsterdam

Supervisor: Prof. dr. Johannes Houwink ten Cate

July, 2017

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2

Introduction

In 1985, radical and deaf activist Paddy Ladd, who founded the National Union of the deaf, suggested in an article titled Oralisms Final Solution, that from 1880 onwards there have been significant efforts by hearing communities to suppress deaf culture by capitalizing on ‘curing’ deaf children, whereby the Cochlear Implant represented a fourth terrible state in Deaf history and its persecution.1_{Ladd continued to write, “The medical profession, for so} long the enemies of the deaf community, are eager to get their hands on deaf children of our community. We will make these children hearing, they imply, if we can’t get oralism to work any other way, then we’ll make them into hearing children; as if they could.”2 Similarly, Harlan Lane, distinguished Professor of Psychology and founder of the Center for Research and Hearing Speech and Language, situates the history of the deaf within the conquest of minority languages such as sign, within a broader Western culture of the success of imperialistic attitudes to colonizing minority linguistic culture.3 Deaf activists, scholars and radicals, such as Ladd and Lane, argue the ushering in of the Information Age has cemented the belief that deafness it no social norm; advancements in medical technology has reinvented deafness as a correctable, and indeed an avoidable pathology. The founding’s of these arguments run deep, with the CI being characterized as a ‘technology of normalization’.4

The CI is hence presented as an example of attempts to intervene in a series of global phenomena, such as mortality, longevity, fertility and birthrate, but also decrease, modify and regulate both physical and social abnormality. According to Schmitt, the marrying of the biopolitic paradigm and the immunologic context results in the undesirable part of the social body to be expelled from the organization, for the sake of the community as a whole. Hence, disability, of which the deaf have been understood as, have come to represent in modern culture the unhealthy part of the whole, something which is to be prevented, cure, or overcome. The understanding of a nation state as a garden, as explored by the late, great, Zygmunt Bauman, where the undesirable ‘weeds’ of society must be sheered, and uprooted, in order to nurture the growth and strength of other plants, namely those that are healthy and do not unjustly occupy resources; they give back to the garden beauty, strength, and

1 The National Union of the Deaf was a small radical organization active in the 1970s and 1980s. See Paddy Ladd, “Oralism’s ‘Final Solution,’” British Deaf News (Autumn 1985): 5–6.

2 Paddy Ladd, “Oralism’s ‘Final Solution,’” British Deaf News (Autumn 1985): 5–6

3 Harlan Lane, “Ethnicity, Ethics, and the Deaf-World,” Journal of Deaf Studies and Deaf Education 10 (2005): 291–310.

4 See Anders, Abram. "Foucault and 'the Right to Life': from Technologies of Normalization to Societies of Control." Disability Studies Quarterly. 33.3 (2013)

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6 longevity. Similarly, the seminal Raul Hilberg, one of the greatest authors on the inner workings of the Nazi state and its Holocaust crescendo, has suggested that in a modern, eliminationist society, there exists a ‘jungle theory,’ which is a ‘last ditch defense emphasizing that life is a struggle and those who refused to do what is necessary to preserve their way of life would lose it’.5 These arguments reflect two conclusions in historiography as it currently stands.

Firstly, social and anthropological research based historiography conceptualize genocide is as a means of social control. It is an example of long-term, indirect extinction of traits, or negligence, where harm to a victim is caused within reasonable doubt, even if this is not the primary aim. As suggested by Green, genocides reveal modernity’s tragedy to be giving numerous cures such as vaccination, birth control, and didactic education frameworks a new dimension of catastrophe.6 Understanding deafness as an impairment has allowed for an identity of disability to be placed upon this group, leading to psycho-social problems of deaf individuals who remain in the margins of society, typically misunderstood and stigmatized by the hearing community.According to Professor of Sociology Bill Hughes, the oppression of disabled people is not simply reducible to social restrictions which are the outcome of a set of structural dimensions.7 Instead, they are umbilically linked to the visual construction of impairment in the scopic regime of modernity.8 Echoing Bauman, invalidation and disfigurement of impaired bodies is therefore not purely an economic and cultural response, but arises in the mode of perception which visualizes them as strangers.9 Whether it be the ‘species typical body’ in science, the ‘normative citizen’ in political theory, or the ‘reasonable man’ in law, all these signify a hostage of the body.10_{Within genocide} scholarship however, there remains a general absence of interest in disability history beyond that of treatment of the disabled as a ‘pathway’ to genocide. Understanding of the nuanced and sophisticated turns in recent disability scholarship may uncover hidden truths about the relationship between modern readings of modernity, genocide and the desire to ‘cure difference’ through medical means.

5_{Hilberg Jungle theory, as cited in. Roth, John K. Ethics after the Holocaust: Perspectives, Critiques, and}

Responses. (St. Paul, MN: Paragon House, 1999).p, 73.

6_{See Green, Linda. 1994. “Fear as a Way of Life”. Cultural Anthropology 9 (2). [Wiley, American}

Anthropological Association]: 227–56. http://www.jstor.org/stable/656241

7_{Hughes, Bill “The Constitution of Impairment: Modernity and the aesthetic of oppression’, Disability &}

Society, (1999) 14:2, 155-172, DOI: 10.1080/09687599926244 [p. 155].

8_{Ibid,. p. 155.} 9_{Ibid., p. 155.}

10_{Campbell, Fiona K. “The Project of Ableism” in Contours of Ableism: The Production of Disability and}

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7 Secondly, the belief that in order to maintain and preserve a way of life, one must ‘do what is necessary,’ encompasses currently disability scholarship concerning the deaf and maintenance of their cultural roots. Whilst deaf, with a lower case d, refers to the physical impairment of being unable to hear, Deaf, with an upper case ‘D’ has come to represent the cultural and ethnic identity of being deaf, which is underpinned by the sharing of language, common heritage and above all, resisting the medical understandings of deafness as a pathological impairment that requires remedy, cure and eventual elimination. The Deaf not only resisted being treated as ‘the weeds’ but additionally attempt to build subculture cohesion and strength, by sentiments such as the aforementioned jungle theory that there kind will be outgrown within the Deaf community, should those faced by this impairment not remain vigilant against medical treatment of their bodies. A great deal of this is characterized by active and often aggressive resistance to the Cochlear Implant, suggesting that it is tantamount to a genocide of the deaf, as it prevents deaf individuals being able to become members of, and sustain Deaf culture and identity. Furthermore, this fierce belief is often discussed as a legacy of previous ‘historical mistreatments of the deaf’. Scholars such as Ladd and Lane, who are radical but nevertheless representative of the greater discourse of Deaf and disability scholarship, use historical examples such as the Third Reich Euthanasia programs, and the Deaf lives of Parisians during the Napoleonic and Revolutionary Period as evidence of ‘those who refuse to do what is necessary to preserve life’. Deaf identity, ethnicity, and subculture concentrates is roots, and legitimizes its current and future endeavors concerning the protection of their generations, in the past ills their community have faced. Amongst this movement, is the distinct understanding that the deaf have been victims of genocide, and that the Cochlear Implant represents a ‘final state’ of this devastating and violence crime.11

Current disability discourse discussion about the experiences and narratives of Deaf identity and disability politics are situated in a broader climate of ‘Ableism,’ which is currently dominating scholarship. Indeed, Linton describes the apparent exhaustive marginalization and discrimination against deaf peoples as a product of Ableism, which is defined very basically as the idea that a person’s abilities or characteristics are determined by disability or; that people with disabilities as a group are inferior to non-disabled people’.12 Campbell elaborates, suggesting that Ableism is more broadly the network of beliefs,

11_{The National Union of the Deaf was a small radical organization active in the 1970s and 1980s. See Paddy}

Ladd, “Oralism’s ‘Final Solution,’” British Deaf News (Autumn 1985), p. 5

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8 processes and practices that produces a particular kind of self and body (the corporeal standard) that is projected as the perfect, species-typical and therefore essential and fully human13.

However, the problem of these arguments, and indeed the problem of the thesis, is a question of separating historical truths from contemporary political minatory identity and narrative. Hence, the leading research question is has there been a genocide of the Deaf in past historical examples, as citied by Deaf scholars, not those involved in the challenges and rigors of genocide studies, that legitimize the monopolization of Deaf identity around the absolute resistance to medical intervention? Have both genocide studies scholars, disability researchers and Deaf activists and radicals been using terms such as genocide and ethnocide, to describe the victimization of the Deaf throughout history, in a uniform and justifying way, from its point of origin in the 1948 UN Genocide Convention. Genocide is, after all, a strictly legal term used to describe criminal behavior and acts, for the benefit of prosecutors in international criminal courts, to try some of the most violence and grotesque crimes in contemporary history. Accordingly, during this thesis, it should be noted that use and analysis of the world genocide, although with legal foundations, is to be used in an anthropologic, social, historical and more general way also. The use of definitions will be outlined throughout on a case by case basis.

Hence, the research direction, and problem of the thesis is to address the general ideas of Deaf scholars such as Ladd and Lane, in addition to the great community of disability scholars such as Hughes and Campbell, that there has been multiple genocides of the Deaf throughout history, with the Cochlear Implant (CI) being the most recent example which is legitimized by the alleged previous genocides. The task of the thesis is to reply to this claim with evidence of why and how the Deaf have been treated harshly in specific parts of history, that have recently come to the fore, whilst explaining them as defined by numerous and changing definitions of genocide legally, socially and anthropologically.

Sources

As journalist, Harvard graduate and writer at the Telegraph commented in a piece published by Quarts, titled Sweden’s Liberal Image is a mirage […], ‘Sweden is supposedly a liberal utopia: a land of generous welfare, substantial foreign aid donations, and green-fingered

13_{See Campbell, Fiona K Contours of Ableism: The Production of Disability and Ableness. (Basingstoke:}

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9 sustainability. But Sweden’s noble image is hiding an ugly truth.’14_{Accordingly, the 2015} United Nations report present by the Human Rights Council found that ‘The Swedish philosophy of equality and its public and self-image as a country with respect for human rights, non-discrimination, and liberal democracy blinds it to the structural racism faced by Afro-Swedes and Africans in its midst’.15 Although this reference is to a specific race groups and relations in contemporary Sweden, it illustrates perfectly how Sweden’s reputation has historically blocked fruitful discussion of very real oppression and systematic marginalization against those not deemed as worthy of the so-called ‘Swedish utopia’. This veneer of liberalism is perhaps why it still remains relatively unknown in public thought, that between 1935 an 1975, 62,888 disabled Swedes were sterilized in a broad national campaign of social reform.16 The sources detailing these experiences generally remain minimal, partially owed to Sweden’s limited facing of its troubled past. It has thus made primary sources, and basic estimations about the number of deaf people that were victim to sterilizations, hugely difficult to estimate. Victims remain absolutely unwilling to discuss their experiences, as much as the general population of contemporary Sweden appears unwilling to listen or acknowledge any behavior that deviated beyond their impressive track record of economic and social equality.

Conversely, the Holocaust has become one of the most saturated areas in contemporary historiography. As an extreme case of genocide, the Holocaust – the murder of Jews and Romanies of Europe by the Nazis during the Second World War – has become in the West, the archetype of evil.17_{Despite this, the treatment of the Deaf within genocide} studies appears to be comparatively lacking, where only a number of studies have been taken place, most notably a monograph by Horst Beisold in 1989 of the treatment of the Deaf during the Nazi sterilization campaign. Thus, the leading question of this section will be to understand whether the treatment of the Deaf was substantial, severe, genocidal and/or violent, so much so that it could be understood and genocide under the 1948 Genocide Convention.

14_{Goldhill, Olivia. "Sweden’s Liberal Image Is a Mirage That Hides a Very Ugly Problem." Quartz. N.p., 05}

Oct. 2015. Web. 02 June 2017. <https://qz.com/516017/sweden-is-not-the-tolerant-raceless-paradise-it-claims-to-be/>.

15_{United Nations, Human Rights, OHC, Report of the Working Group of Experts on People of African Descent -}

visit to Sweden, 1-5 December 2014 (A/HRC/30/56/ADD.2) <accessed 16/06/17>

http://www.ohchr.org/EN/Issues/Racism/WGAfricanDescent/Pages/CountryVisits.aspx

16_{Stråth, Bo, and James Kaye. Introduction. From Wokler, and Kaye, James, and Bo Stråth. Enlightenment and}

Genocide, Contradictions of Modernity. (Bruxelles: P.I.E.-Peter Lang, 2000)., pp. 28.

17_{Stone, Dan., “Introduction,” from The Historiography of the Holocaust (London: Palgrave MacMillan, 2004),}

p. 1. See also R.J. Bernstein, Radical Evil: A Philosophical Interrogation (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2002), especially Part III: ‘After Auschwitz’, for a discussion.

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10 In all four historical case studies of France, Nazi German and Sweden, and the CI, as a result of the fundamental lack of primary data, a reliance on secondary sources of preexisting historiography, and critical engagement with them will be necessary. This will be accomplished in interrogation of quantitative data, uses of terminology, and building a general picture of the climate of Deaf experience during these historical periods, in accordance with varying definitions to genocide. The lack of primary data has a number of reasons behind it, most notably that deaf individuals were less well educated, existed on the fringes of society and were often shrouded in shame, both my communities, families, and themselves. Therefor the deaf experience has seldom been recorded. What can be understood is the way the Deaf identity interplays with and has come to be part of disability identity however, as often when deaf are mentioned, it is in reference to understandings of disabilities, and ways to treat impairment.

Structure

By engaging with the problematic assertion that the CI is tantamount to ethnocide, which follows in the footsteps of generations of genocidal acts, challenges faced by a comparative genocide scholar are vast. Paramount is vigilance over the universal uses of terminology.

The first chapter will attempt to outline why deaf and disabled people have been the focus of such oppression, marginalization, and structural violence in the modern and contemporary Western, specifically European world. In order to uncover this, themes and paradigms such as modernity and Ableism will be investigated, in conjunction with ongoing changing anthropological and social definitions of genocide, in addition to the merits and failings of the legal definition used in the 1948 Genocide Convention. By addressing why the the Deaf experience has been so different an additional analysis of the relationship between modernity, genocide and biopolitics will be reached.

In chapter two, it will be investigated how Deaf people have been treated, as a manifestation of the questions of ideology addressed in Chapter One. During this chapter, it will need to be understood how the Deaf community have come to understand their ethnicity, and through what means this has been marginalized. It hopes to address the ways in which Ableism is a characteristic of the ‘civilizing process,’ and how perpetrators of genocide have been enabled to carry out violent and harmful acts in the past, but specifically how this could apply to the realms of medicine, and the desire to cure those understood as sick. Thus, what is

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11 core to this chapter is the function of eugenics, and its complex and often conflicting relationship with modernity and genocide.

The final, and longest chapter of this thesis will comprise of four case studies, that have been selected for their understood links, both obvious and subtle, to the alleged genocide, ethnocide, or marginalization of the Deaf. These examples are also typically discussed by Deaf scholars, radicals and activists for justifying resistance to the CI. The selection of Revolutionary France, the Swedish welfare state, the sterilizations and euthanasia campaigns of the German Third Reich, and finally analysis of the Cochlear Implant will allow specific analysis of the relationship between medicine, modernity, ‘the civilizing process’ and genocide to be accomplished. Study of the integrationist and assimilations policies of post-Revolutionary France, allows an investigation into the harmful and effects of forced education on the deaf identity and sensibility, despite the liberal ideals of acceptance during this time. It will contribute to genocide studies by understandings alleged compromised Deaf identity in the context of social and anthropological understandings of genocide. The Swedish Welfare state and forced sterilizations between 1934 and 1975, and the actions of the Third Reich were both selected to provide an in-depth assessment of the role of productivity an ordering national aims and desires, especially when it becomes intertwined with socio-economic and racial streamlining in an attempt to produce national solidarity and security. It may also makes for a hugely interesting comparison, as the former has become an icon of European liberal achievements, and the latter remains in the shadows of its now very public, dark past. As aforementioned, the past and currently inequalities of Swedish history are largely absent from the national narrative; Sweden is so convinced by its own reputation that the government has even removed the word “race” from the Discrimination Act—because the law assumes that all people belong to the human race.18 The United Nations was unimpressed; the country completely fails to acknowledge its part in the transatlantic Slave Trade, a greater symptom of the general amnesia of grotesquely violent crimes, the forced Sterilization of the disabled being amongst one of them.19

Conversely, Holocaust historiography is prolific. Despite this, the treatment of the Deaf within Holocaust studies appears to be comparatively lacking, where only a number of studies have been taken place, most notably a monograph by Horst Beisold in 1989 of the

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12 treatment of the Deaf during the Nazi sterilization campaign. Thus, the leading question of this section will be to understand whether the treatment of the Deaf was substantial, severe, genocidal and/or violent, so much so that it could be understood and genocide under the 1948 Genocide Convention. The final case study of this chapter will investigate the Cochlear Implant itself. Whilst the legal case for genocide may be too difficult to make for this study, what is useful is the way in which the previous historical case studies underpin the claims by Deaf radicals that the CI is genocide, whilst also considering other more flexible and general definitions of genocide in the marginalization and treatment of the deaf in a contemporary, “civilized” medical arena. This medical arena has its sights focused on healing those deemed unwell, with a code of conduct lying well within the realms of patient welfare and good health. Is it possible, that despite the liberal, healing and good intentions of the medical arena, that the Deaf scholars, radicals and activists have uncovered something that the members of the genocide studies community must hastily address? Has the use of terms such as genocide,

ethnocide, final solution and violence etc. been used with the same definitions, intentions and

political implications? Hence, what can be gained from all four case studies, and particularly the CI debate as a curtain call for those prior to it, is the comparison between the uses of genocide terminology, that has its origins firmly supplanted in International Criminal Law. Is use of terms across all disciplines universal, and if not, how does that hamper genocide studies research and fruitful, meaningful disability scholarship? Both fields are young and growing rapidly, and so consistency will be key in coming years should there be gaps in research areas such as the treatment of the Deaf in genocidal and non-genocidal acts, events and ideologies.

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Chapter 1. The Why Question

Why are the deaf considered inferior? An analysis of disableism,

modernity, the deaf as an ethnic group and the definitions of genocide.

Among the seismic shifts in post-war culture during the 1960’s, there emerged a much quieter but nonetheless profound revolution in understanding of human language and culture. The validation of the fully linguistic nature of sign languages and the subsequent rewriting of deaf identity from deaf to Deaf, (that is, from a pathological state of hearing loss to the cultural identity of a linguistic minority), is noteworthy in changing our understanding of disability and cultural identity.20 Furthermore Dirksen and Bauman continue to stress that prior to this time, prevailing wisdom perceived signed languages as primitive communication systems limited to iconographic representations, posing a grave danger to society, as they encouraged defective individuals to become socialised, form associations, and ultimately intermarry and increase their numbers.21 Accordingly, in the late nineteenth and the early twntieth century, scientist Alexander Graham Bell warned against the formation of a deaf variety of the human race.22 This chapter will examine why the Deaf community, and disability generally, has been formulated as a deficit, and lesser human, that becomes incompatible with the project of modernity. Furthermore, the chapter will explore how to the manifestations of the deficit identity measure against legal, anthropological, and social definitions of genocide, especially when Deafhood is considered an ethnicity or linguistic minority.

Significantly, it seems illuminating to consider the existence of Deaf cultures, and deaf peoples when reviewing the writings of major Holocaust scholars and historians Bauman. Furthermore, H. Friedlander suggests that ‘genocide, as the most radical method of excluding groups of human beings from the […] national community, was a policy of exclusion that grew upon more than fifty years of scientific opposition to the equality of

20_{Bauman, H-Dirksen L. Open Your Eyes: Deaf Studies Talking. (Minneapolis: Univ. of Minnesota Press,}

2008), p. 1.

21_{Ibid., p. 1.}

22_{See Alexander G. Bell, Memoir upon the Formation of a Deaf Variety of the Human Race, Paper presented to}

the National Academy of Sciences, November 13, 1883 (Washington, D.C.: National Academy of Sciences, 1885).

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14 man’.23_{Geneticists, anthropologists, and psychiatrists advanced a theory of human heredity} that merged with the racist doctrine of nationalists to form a political ideology based on race.24 Human inequality became a matter of scientific fact.25 A central question in this study will be to examine to what extent modern medicine’s desire to cure operates along genocidal ideology or frameworks, (especially considering the absolute importance of the euthanasia program, social Darwinism and racialized science), in the regulation, control and discrimination of those considered degenerate and inferior in Western societies, following the aftermath of the enlightenment.26

Modernity and Tragedy

As social scientist Bill Hughes has argued, radical disability studies can prosper from the inclusion of a critique of modernity which entails a shift from its singular epistemological origins in the critique of capitalism.27 In addition to the contention that oppression of disabled people is reducible to social restrictions, the oppression of disabled people is also inextricably linked to the visual constitution of impairment in the scopic regime of modernity.28 The invalidation of disfigured and impaired bodies is an modern economic and cultural response, that visualizes and articulates them as strangers.29 The concept of the stranger, particularly as conceptualised by Zygmunt Bauman, is central to understanding the ways in which genocides have, and have not, been perpetrated against disabled peoples.

When it comes to disability identity, F.K.Campbell rightly points out that matters of ontology are seldom a paramount concern in sociological and legal discussions about disability subjectification, which tend to locate “the problem” of disability at the level of culture bias and discriminatory attitudes.30 Disability is a ‘personal tragedy,’ and, in agreement with American professor of political science Wendy Brown, a negative ontology,

23_{Friedlander, Henry. The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution. (Chapel Hill: U of}

North Carolina, 1995), p. 1.

24_{See Proctor, Robert. Racial Hygiene: Medicine Under the Nazis. (Cambridge, Mass: Harvard University}

Press, 1988).

25_{Friedlander, Henry. The Origins of Nazi Genocide: From Euthanasia to the Final Solution. (Chapel Hill: U of}

North Carolina, 1995), p. 3.

26_{Ibid., p. 23.}

27_{Hughes, Bill (1999) The Constitution of Impairment: Modernity and the aesthetic of oppression, Disability &}

Society, 14:2, 155-172, DOI: 10.1080/09687599926244 [here, p. 155]

28_{Ibid. p. 155.} 29_{Ibid. p. 155.}

30_{See Campbell, Fiona Humari “Legislating disability: Negative Ontologies and the Government of Legal}

Identities” from Tremain, S. Foucault and the Government of Disability. (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2005).

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15 as such when marginalized constituencies appear to embody or assume an “injured identity.”31_{This is employed in order to justify Ableist centred state objectives, and} recuperate the values and beliefs that cast Deaf and disabled identity in a demeaned social location in the first place.32 Indeed, within this framework, the victim embodies the narrative of the victim, where in order for their specific needs to be deemed acceptable by the state, they must demonstrate the understanding that they are, somehow, inferior. Hughes asserts the injured identity and personal tragedy narrative allows states to define disability principally in terms of sociological categories, including exclusion, discrimination and oppression.33

Invalidation through confinement of incapacity and deficit of credibility has been exemplified as the primary form of experience of disability during modernity.34 It is this deficit of credibility that provides the spurious rationale for the disposal of disabled bodies by means of elimination (inter alia extermination or segregation) or correction (inter alia sterilisation of rehabilitation).35 These are the social practices that have been used to erase both the psychological aversion and the problematic social difference that disability has come to represent.36 The negative response to biological and intellectual difference is strongly influenced by the tendency embedded in the ‘civilising process’ to incrementally deride the value of physical and intellectual difference and promote a sanitized norm of human behaviour and appearance.37 As the early moderns embraced reason, Hughes details how the opposite became a central source of anxiety: filth that needs to be extracted and cleansed. Bauman claims that at the heart of modernity one finds ‘a dream of purity,’ a vision of order, a world clean and hygienic; modernity is opposed to tradition and as such, it stands for a ‘perpetual new beginning’.38_{Purity must be continuously redefined and invented:}

Perpetual beginning generates ever new ‘improved’ targets of purity and with each new target cuts out new categories of ‘dirt’—

31_{See Brown, Wendy. “Wounded Attachments.” Political Theory, vol. 21, no. 3, 1993, pp. 390–410.}

www.jstor.org/stable/191795.

32_{See Ibid. See also for personal tragedy, for example, Deutsch, H. & Nussbaum, F. (Eds) Defects: engendering}

the modern body (Ann Arbor, MI, University of Michigan Press, 2000).

33_{Hughes, Bill (2007) Being disabled: towards a critical social ontology for disability studies, Disability &}

Society, 22:7, 673-684, DOI: 10.1080/09687590701659527, p. 673.

34_{Hughes, B. (2000). ‘Medicine and the Aesthetic Invalidation of Disabled People’. Disability & Society, 15 (4),}

555–68 [here p, 558]

35_{Hughes, B. “Civilizing modernity and the ontological invalidation of disabled people. In D. Goodley, B.}

Hughes, & L. Davis (Eds.), Disability and Social Theory: New Developments and Directions (Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012) . (pp. 17-32). p. 17.

36_{Ibid., p. 17.}

37_{See Elias, N. The Civilizing Process. (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000).}

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an unheard of dirt and an unprecedented dirt ... order making now becomes indistinguishable from announcing ever new abnormalities, drawing ever new dividing lines, identifying and setting apart ever new strangers.39

Disability and the Homo Sacer

Historically, in Western countries, the killing and harming of disabled people because of their disability has been found in both genocidal frameworks, for example the Third Reich, and non-genocidal frameworks, such as the American and Swedish Eugenics movement of the late 19th and 20th century. In popular belief, it has been thought that disabled peoples have

always been subject to hatred, discrimination, poor treatment, imprisonment and

oppression.40 However, this raises a question surrounding what links regimes that explicitly display and enact genocidal motivations to those that do not carry out actual or attempted killings of a minority but, nevertheless, devalue their existence to a point wounded of existence, if not complete erasure. Henceforth, any attempts at sustaining direction over the minorities’ historical narrative and future identity is both undervalued and futile. The extent of dehumanisation can manifest in either formalized and systematic, or implicit and ingrained approaches. It will become evident through this thesis that the devaluation of Deaf communities under protectionist frameworks of Ableism have solidified the understanding of those either disabled or impaired people as absolute outsiders or strangers to the remainder of society, even if this does not necessarily satisfy the rigors of the genocide convention.

Taken from the philosophers Foucault and Agamben, the concepts of biopolitics and bare life are useful for understanding the conceptual relationships between genocide, the contemporary Western State, and the assigned ‘power’ or integrity of disabled people. In the famous Homo Sacer (1998), Agamben explores the nature of sovereign power and the production of bare life, describing the homo sacer as someone whose ‘entire existence is reduced to bare life, stripped of every right to exist by virtue of the fact that anyone can kill him, without committing homicide’.41 Quickly however, it should be remembered that

39_{Bauman, Z., Postmodernity and its Discontents (Cambridge; Polity, 1997). p. 11.}

40 _{Often, particular in the United Kingdom, poor treatment of the disabled peoples or impaired, has often been}

justified because the care provided is still ‘better than what it used to be’.

41_{Agamben Giorgio, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, VA,}

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17 ‘biopolitics and biopower downplay the role of ideology, where instead cold scientific objectification which is central to the functionalist explanation, concurs with the biopolitical stress on the enumeration and medicalization of society where the state turns genocidal. This ‘genocidal turning’ results in a dynamism of destruction that desires impersonal and ostensibly non-ideological measures such as registration, identification, segregation and ‘eugenic extermination’.42

According to Reeve, the homo sacer can be considered an outlaw or bandit who lives in a state of exception, someone who is not simply outside the law and indifferent to it, but who has instead been abandoned by the law. This provides a useful model for contemporary examples of disableism, for example the comparison of the hospitalisation of people with severe mental distress, to the nature of refugee camps and detention centres.43 Both are denied basic human rights, and are understood as strangers with elements of otherness. It is this ‘bare life’ which is a product of the modern understanding of modernity, which allow collectives to understand the disabled as below-human. Furthermore, according to Shelton, attitudes and prejudices that fuelled the Nazi mass murder against disabled peoples, are today reflected in law and policies that reinforce stereotypical perceptions of people with disabilities as passive, sick, dependent, in need of medical cure and charity, and in the case of people with medically diagnosed disabilities, dangerous.44

The identification of disabled people as dangerous is especially significant, as, according to Boronivsky, ‘radicalised hostilities play an essential role in making killing possible in a biopolitical context; they allow the taking of life to be seen as a means of achieving a normalized collective, where genocide is a tool of material intervention of the species.’45 The disabled are dangerous and threatening on an existential level; presence of the disabled body is unsettling for non-disabled people who are often in denial about their own vulnerability. This is the psychological and emotional component of what disability scholars call ‘Ableism,’ core to the dehumanising process of ‘othering’ impaired of disabled bodies.

42_{Stone, Dan “Biopower and Modern Genocide.” From Moses, A. Dirk. Empire, Colony, Genocide. (New}

York: Berghahn Books, 2008), p. 164.

43 _{Reeve, D. ‘Biopolitics and bare life: Does the impaired body provide contemporary examples of homo}

sacer?’, in K. Kristiansen, S. Vehmas and T. Shakespeare (eds) Arguing about Disability: Philosophical Perspectives, (London: Routledge 2009), pp. 203-217. [here, 204].

44_{Shelton, D. ”Disability and Eugenics” Encyclopedia of genocide and crimes against humanity. (Detroit:}

Macmillan Reference, 2005) p. 258.

45_{Boronivsky, Tomas, “Towards an Affirmative Biopolitics: Bureaucracy, Critical Thinking and}

Prevention”Dialogi Polityczne. Political Dialogues. Journal of Political Theory; Lugar: Toruń; Año: 2015 vol. 1., p. 5-13. [here. P.5]

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18 Under this ideology of the Other, the deaf community abode.46_{In race, ethnicity and gender,} the majority group individual was in some ways safe; whilst the Jews, for example, according to Nazi propaganda sought complete violent domination of the collective, the body of the Aryan remained ‘pure’ if desired and controlled by the subject, hence truthful to the state. A

true German could not simply become Jewish through no fault of their own. However,

anybody can become disabled or impaired at any stage of their lives, the chances of which typically lie beyond the power of that individual.

Hence, the ‘majority seeks to eliminate difference by becoming more hegemonic, and total,’47 thus destroying as Arendt suggests, ‘plurality’.48 “Modernity, was the culture of forgetfulness, exclusion, and confinement” where disability and impairment were the antithesis of that movement.49 Genocide [is not] the return of the ancient right to kill, [it is instead a dream] because power is sustained and exercised at the level of life, the species, race and the large scale phenomenon of population.’50 In modern interpretations of homicide, the disabled are never able to truly become victims of this crime, as they have scarcely occupied the privilege to be considered human initially. Reading the history of the mistreatment, oppression and violence used against the disabled under the lens of genocide studies is highly challenging, because cotemporary understandings of impairment are still prejudice.

Disablism, Personal Tragedy and Linguistic Rights.

In the United Kingdom, disability studies view disability as a form of social oppression experienced by people with impairments.51 According to Reeve, disableism can be considered to be analogous to racism, sexism, ageism and homophobia, marked by similar experiences of social discrimination, exclusion, and even violence towards people who are

46_{Hughes, Bill. 2012. "Civilising Modernity And The Ontological Invalidation Of Disabled People". Disability}

And Social Theory, 17-32. doi:10.1057/9781137023001_2. [here, p. 18]

47 Not a direct quote, but see the entire chapter, Feierstein, “The Concept of Genocidal Social Practices, in Jones, Adam (eds)., New Directions in Genocide Research (London: Routledge, 2012).

48 Arendt, H., Eichmann in Jerusalem. A Report on the Banality of Evil, (London: Penguin Classics, 1963), p. 93.

49 Bill Hughes (2002) Bauman's Strangers: Impairment and the invalidation of disabled people in modern and post-modern cultures, Disability & Society, 17:5, 571-584, DOI: 10.1080/09687590220148531, p. 572.

50_{Foucault, Michel, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (Harmondsworth,}

UK, 1984), p. 137.

51_{Reeve, D. ‘Biopolitics and bare life: Does the impaired body provide contemporary examples of homo}

sacer?’, in K. Kristiansen, S. Vehmas and T. Shakespeare (eds) Arguing about Disability: Philosophical Perspectives, (London: Routledge, 2009), pp. 203-217, [here, pp 204-208].

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19 marked out as ‘different’.52_{It is a form of social oppression involving the imposition of} restrictions of activity on people with impairments and the socially engendered undermining of their psycho-emotional well-being’.53 Whilst disability studies have been excellent at theorizing the structural dimensions of disableism, the psycho-emotional dimensions remain relatively understudied, which is the way in which the wellbeing of an individual can affect who they can be.54 Thus, it could be suggested that the history of oppression alone is enough to effect the strength of an identity

Additionally, there is an individual model of disability, where disability is regarded as a product of biological determinism or "personal tragedy," which presupposes a necessary causal link between a certain condition in the individual and disablement.55 For example, according to Ladd, linguistic recognition is intertwined with cultural relativity and based on cultural experience.56 Acknowledging Deaf culture, therefore, implies two further concepts: the pathological ‘deafness’ model centred on individualism, with each Deaf person within it treated as an atomistic being; and the ‘Deafhood’ model, which acknowledges the collectivity of Deaf self-perception.57

The Deaf as an ethnic group

According to a literary review of the infamous Harlan Lane’s work, the Boston Globe reports that the half million hereditary deaf in America, Lane explains, should be understood as an ethnic group, with many of the same qualities that define more commonly recognized ethnicities: a common language, shared ancestry, common stories and artistic traditions, and a community that perpetuates cultural norms through the generations.58 Key to North American deaf culture is American Sign Language, a robust language with a complex vocabulary and a

52 _{Ibid., pp 204-208.}

53_{Thomas, Carol. Sociologies of Disability And Illness. 1st ed. Basingstoke [u.a.]: (Palgrave Macmillan, 2009),}

p. 115. And, Reeve, D. (2009) ‘Biopolitics and bare life: Does the impaired body provide contemporary examples of homo sacer?’, in K. Kristiansen, S. Vehmas and T. Shakespeare (eds) Arguing about Disability:

Philosophical Perspectives, London: Routledge, pp. 203-217, [here, pp 204-208].

54_{Thomas, C. Female forms: experiencing and understanding disability (Buckingham, Open University Press,}

1999), and Reeve, D. 'Counselling and disabled people: Help or hindrance?' in J. Swain, et al. (eds) Disabling Barriers - Enabling Environments, 2nd Edition, (London: Sage Publications, 2004) pp. 233-238.

55 _{Disability, Gene Therapy and Eugenics: A Challenge to John Harris Author(s): Solveig Magnus Reindal}

Source: Journal of Medical Ethics, Vol. 26, No. 2 (Apr., 2000), pp. 89-94 Published by: BMJ Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/27718459 Accessed: 18-10-2016 09:16 UTC, p. 89.

56_{Paddy Ladd. Understanding Deaf Culture: In Search of Deafhood. (Clevedon: Multilingual Matters, 2003), p.}

402.

57_{Ibid., p. 402.}

58 _{Sanger-Katz, Margot. 10-Apr-2011. "Deaf-World: The Rise Of A New American Culture". The Boston Globe.}

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20 grammar distinct from English.59

There exist two perspectives on the mode of deafness. The first, the pathology model, suggests that it is entirely a disability, and the second, the sociocultural, suggests that it is in fact a social barrier, and a cultural identifier of difference.60 According to Reagan, from the former pathology model, the deaf are inferior to hearing people in a physiological sense.61 It is easy then to appreciate that for many hearing parents with a deaf child, they would unquestionably assume that hearing is objectively preferable to being deaf.62 Whilst internationally there have been flourishing Deaf subcultures for centuries, it is only recently that the Deaf community has euphemistically ‘come out of the closet’. Dolnick of The

Atlantic in 1993 remarked;

Deafness is not a disability. Instead, many deaf people now proclaim, they are a subculture like any other. They are simply a linguistic minority [‘speaking’ sign language] and are no more in need of a cure than are Haitians or Hispanics. 63

According to Irma M. Munoz-Baell, Australian expert on speech linguistics, Deafness is defined as a medical condition that requires some kind of remediation, either through correction or compensation by the hearing majority.64 Moreover, it emphasizes the needs to encourage speech and lip reading based on the assumption that competency in a spoken language is the only means for cognitive development in the child.65_{In general, as Lane} discusses, we identify children as members of a language minority when their native language is not the language of the majority, however ninety percent of Deaf children have hearing parents who are unable to effectively model the spoken language for most of them.66

59_{Ibid. N.p.}

60 _{Munoz-Baell, Irma M., and M. Teresa Ruiz. "Empowering the Deaf. Let the Deaf Be Deaf." Journal of}

Epidemiology and Community Health (1979-) 54, no. 1 (2000): 40-44. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25569121.

[here, p. 40]

61_{Reagan, T. Toward an ‘archaeology of deafness’: Etic and emic constructions of identity in conflict. Journal}

of Language, Identity, and Education. (2002). 1, 46–66. [here, p. 45].

62 _{Campbell, Fiona K. Contours of Ableism: The Production of Disability and Abledness. (New York: Palgrave}

Macmillan, 2009), p. 93.

63 _{Dolnick (1993) 302. Dolnick, E. 1993. Deafness as culture. The Atlantic. 272(3), 37–53.}

64_{Munoz-Baell, Irma M., and M. Teresa Ruiz. "Empowering the Deaf. Let the Deaf Be Deaf." Journal of}

Epidemiology and Community Health (1979-) 54, no. 1 (2000): 40-44. http://www.jstor.org/stable/25569121. [here. P. 40]

65_{Hoffmeister RJ. Cross-cultural misinformation: what does special education say about deaf people? Disability}

and Society (1996): 11: 171-89.

66 _{Lane, Harlan, “Construction of Deafness” from Davis, Lennard J. The Disability Studies Reader. (New York:}

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21 Accordingly, ethnicity typically denotes a group with an identity rooted in common culture or history, but the term may also refer broadly to a group seen as possessing a different and distinct identity from others. Ethnicity also overlaps with other forms of identity, such as nationality and religion; Deafhood isn’t necessarily the sole ethnicity of deaf people.

Norman Namark refers to ethnic cleansing ‘as a product of the most “advanced” stage in the development of the modern state,’ while Michael Mann argues that democracies are even more likely than ‘stabled authoritarian regimes to carry out ethnic cleansing’.67 The deaf as an ethnic group makes for a useful investigation of genocidal tendencies, and potential ethnic cleansings, as they have occurred, and continue to occur to different degrees, across some of the most ‘sophisticated’ societies and nations. A glaring problem with the Deaf identifying themselves as an ethnic group, is that ethnicity commonly focuses on a specific group’s relationship to geography, where ethnic cleansing refers to removal of a group from a particular area.68 This could be applied to examples such as the Swedish Welfare state and the Third Reich, with the general domestic policy being that of cleansing the nation states stock, where the Deaf identity specifically could not exist in that area in the eyes of the majority. However, in contemporary studies, Deafhood does not have a typical national agenda or relationships with specific geographical areas.69 Conversely, we could consider Scheper-Hughes’ theory that micro-genocidal wars take place in very specific, confined environments, for instance: hospital wards, schools, care homes, places typically with vulnerable identities.70

Deaf as a linguistic minority

Today, the public sphere reverberates with voices from within the Deaf community and disability allies of the Deaf as a linguistic minority. British Deaf radical, activist and scholar, Ladd has said: “We wish for the recognition of our right to exist as a linguistic minority group... Labelling us as disabled demonstrates a failure to understand that we are not disabled

67_{Norman Naimark, Fires of Hatred: Ethnic Cleansing in Twentieth Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard}

University Press, 2001), 4; and Michael Mann, The Dark Side of Democracy: Explaining Ethnic Cleansing (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), p. 4.

68 _{Liberman, Benjamin, “Ethinc Cleansing versus Genocide?” from Bloxham, Donald, and A D. Moses. The}

Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2010), p. 42-44.

69_{The word ‘Deafhood’ was first coined by Paddy Ladd in 1993.}

70 _{See Scheper-Hughes, ‘Coming to Our Senses: Anthropology and genocide’, (eds) Hinton, Alexander L.}

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22 in any way within our own community”.71_{American Deaf scholar Tom Humphries concurs:} “there is no room within the culture of Deaf people for an ideology that all Deaf people are deficient. It simply does not compute. There is no “handicap” to over come . . .’ 72 American Deaf leader MJ Bienvenu asks: “Who benefits when we attempt to work in coalition with disability groups? . . . How can we gain for social recognition of ASL and allow ourselves as “communication disordered” at the same time?”73 There are additional indications that American Deaf culture, for example, simply does not have the ambivalence that, according to Abberley, is called for in disability: “Impairment must be identified as a bad thing, insofar as it is an undesirable consequence of a distorted social development, at the same time as it is held to be a positive attribute of the individual who is impaired”.74 Deafhood, and ‘Deafworld’75 can be considered an ethnic collective, not a linguist minority. However, if one considers, according to Johnson an Erting, following their studies of ethnicity in classrooms for deaf children, Deafhood is not a claim about hearing status at all; it is an expression of that self-recognition or recognition of others that is defining for all ethnic collectives.76 It is predictive about social behaviors (including attitudes, beliefs values) and language, but not specifically and primarily about hearing status.

Shapiro, a journalist specialising in discrimination against the disabled in America, has reported that “personal assistance services are the new “trend” issue for the disability rights movement.”77 However, Lane has observed that Deaf people do not attach particular importance to medical care, nor place any special value on rehabilitation or personal assistance services,nor have any particular concern with autonomy and independent living.78 Instead, the preconditions for Deaf participation are more like those of other language minorities: culturally Deaf people campaign for acceptance of their language and its broader use in the schools, the workplace, and in public events.79 With the shift in the construction of

71_{Cant, T. & Gregory, S. (1991) Unit 8. The social construction of deafness, in: Open University (Eds.) Issues}

in Deafness (Milton Keynes Keynes, Open University).p. 14-18.

72_{Humphries, T. ‘Deaf culture and cultures, in: K. M. Christensen & G. L. Delgado’ (Eds.) Multicultural Issues}

in Deafness (White Plains, NY, Longman, 1993)., p. 14.

73_{Bienvenu, M. J. Disability, The Bicultural Center News, 13 (April, 1989), p. 1.}

74 _{Aberley, P. ‘The concept of oppression and the development of a social theory of disability,’ Disability,}

Handicap and Society, (1987) 2, pp. 5–19.[here. p. 9]

75_{Sanger-Katz, Margot. 10-Apr-2011. "Deaf-World: The Rise of A New American Culture". The Boston Globe.}

<accessed 19-01-2017> http://archive.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2011/04/10/deaf_world/.

76 _{Johnson, R. E. & Erting, C. ‘Ethnicity and socialization in a classroom for deaf children’, in: C. Lucas (Ed.) e}

sociolinguistics of the Deaf Community, pp. 41–84 (New York, Academic Press, 1989).

77 _{Shapiro, J. P. (1993) No Pity: people with disabilities forging a new Civil Rights Movement (New York:}

Times Books), p. 251.

78_{Lane, Harlan, “Construction of Deafness” from Davis, Lennard J. The Disability Studies Reader. (New York:}

Routledge, 2006), p. 85.

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23 disability has come an emphasis on the bonds that unite people with disabilities to the rest of society beyond culture, for example sport).80_{This is at striking odds with the Deaf} community, where Lane continues to illustrate is small and tightly knit, with its own language and culture, sharply demarcated from the rest of society; there is no slippery slope between Deaf and hearing.81 “Deaf people are foreigners,” wrote an early president of the National Association of the Deaf, “[living] among a people whose language they can never learn”.82 Furthermore, social rejection and alienation from the larger hearing community reinforces their view of themselves as a cultural and linguistic minority group.83 This is perhaps no more evident in the fact that nine out of ten deaf people marry another deaf person, placing Deaf people at the highest rate of marrying into the same ethnicity, more than any other ethnic group.84 It is a cultural norm.

Thus, understanding control over the ‘bare biological life’ among citizens in market capitalism has been fashioned on the basis of deficit, specific to disability and others occupying peripheral embodiments.85 It allows scholars to situate disability as a primary case of social injustice rather than exception to the rules of human governance.86 Thus, W Hughes argues that the failure of the social model of disability to embrace the ‘cultural turn’ in social theory (Hughes, 1999, 2000) can be abrogated, in part at least, by an appeal to Bauman’s radical critique of the cultures of modernity and postmodernity, and to his lifelong hermeneutic endeavor to understand the ‘other’.87 Agamben, additionally, describes how every society, however modern, decides who its homo sacer is, whose life is seen as ‘life devoid of value’.88_{Agamben however, may be described as ‘too apocalyptic’}89 _{His theories} perhaps rest too heavily on juridical and legal perspectives, as opposed to social.90

80_{Barton, L. ‘The struggle for citizenship: the case of disabled people,’ Disability, Handicap and Society,}

(1993) no. 8, pp. 235–248.

81_{Lane, Harlan, “Construction of Deafness” from Davis, Lennard J. The Disability Studies Reader. (New York:}

Routledge, 2006), p. 86.

82 _{Hanson, cited in Van, Cleve J. V, and Barry A. Crouch. A Place of Their Own: Creating the Deaf Community}

in America. Washington, D.C: Gallaudet University Press, 1989. Print., p. ix.

83_{Foster S. Social alienation and peer identification: a study of the social construction of deafness. Human}

Organization 1989: 48: 226-35.

84_{Sanger-Katz, Margot. 10-Apr-2011. "Deaf-World: The Rise Of A New American Culture". The Boston}

Globe. <accessed 19-01-2017> http://archive.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2011/04/10/deaf_world/.

85_{Agamben, G. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. D. Heller- Roazen, (Stanford, CA: Stanford}

University Press, 1998), p. 1.

86_{Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. “Introduction.” The Biopolitics of Disability: Neoliberalism,}

Ablenationalism, and Peripheral Embodiment, University of Michigan Press, Ann Arbor, 2015, pp. 1–32,

www.jstor.org/stable/10.3998/mpub.7331366.5. [here, p. 7].

87_{See Bauman, Z. Hermeneutic and Social Science—approaches to understanding (London, Allen and Unwin,}

1978).

88 _{Agamben, G. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. D. Heller- Roazen, (Stanford, CA: Stanford}

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24 Definitions of Genocide

As explored earlier, victims of genocide are typically dehumanized to such an extent by the perpetrators that they become a homo sacer, but how do the varying and conflicting definitions of genocide inform critiques suffering or harm in disability and atypical ethnic groups, such as the deaf. Whilst the Convention has been critiqued by scholars such as Helen Fein, who questions the basis of the legal definition of genocide, paving the way for a more rigorous theoretical understanding of genocide, it is important to understand, before investigating the changing and dynamic new definitions of genocide, the 1948 Genocide convention, and why the genocides of disabled people are absent from legal definition. As outlined by Anderson, the ‘Holocaust seems to be a constant reference and comparison point’91 and therefore ‘genocides that often occur incrementally, undermining the existence through systematic oppression and willfully reckless policies,’92 are not encompassed by the 1948 Genocide Convention. Although contextually, Anderson’s theory applies to understanding the relationship between genocide and colonialism it is useful for understanding the ways in which the Genocide Convention perhaps pertains to a traditional, rigid and legal understanding of genocide, omitting the importance of cultural genocide. Accord to Blackian theory, ‘genocide can be explained as a theory of social control,’93 which is marked by structural violence, which includes, ‘an ordering of the oppressive inequality, through the use of legislation which hides behind the mechanisms of the social distribution of wealth and establishes a coercive force obligating people to respect them’.94 It is important to explore specifically why the killing, persecution and poor treatment of disabled peoples is not included in the Genocide Convention, after which, different definitions of genocide will be explored.

89 _{See Bull, M. (2004) States don't really mind their citizens dying (provided they don't all do it at once): they}

just don't like anyone else to kill them, Online. Available HTTP:<http://www.generation

online.org/p/fpagamben2.htm> (accessed 25 Nov. 2016).

90_{Lemke, Thomas “A Zone of Indistinction”–A Critique of Giorgio Agamben's Concept of Biopolitics.}

Outlines. Critical Practice Studies_ 7 (2005). (1):3-13, [here, p. 3].

91_{Anderson, Kjell (2015) "Colonialism and Cold Genocide: The Case of West Papua," Genocide Studies and}

Prevention: An International Journal: Vol. 9: Iss. 2: 9-25.

92 _{Ibid. 9-25.}

93 _{Campbell, Bradley. (2009). “Genocide as Social Control”. Sociological Theory 27 (2). [American}

Sociological Association, Wiley, Sage Publications, Inc.]: 150–72. http://www.jstor.org/stable/40376129. [here, p. 153]

94 _{Manz, Beatriz. “The Continuum of Violence in Post-war Guatemala”. Social Analysis: The International}

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25 Legal Intent and identification of Cultural Groups

According to Greenwalt, intent appeals to the central concept of criminal culpability, where the problem is that historical understandings of criminal intent have eluded uniform understanding.95 Furthermore Fein again suggests that the problems of the UN Genocide Convention, include, but are not limited to: a. The gaps in groups covered; b. The ambiguity of intent to destroy a group ‘as such’; and c. the ability of non-state parties to invoke the convention; the Convention has repeatedly been criticized for omission of political groups and social classes as target groups.96 From the strictly legal perspective and in agreement with Greenwalt, Schabas suggests furthermore, ‘far from being mutually exclusive, [the clauses of the convention] suffer from significant conceptual overlap, and have historically context-specific and geospatially contingent meanings.’97 Race, for example, is sufficiently amorphous to reasonably encompass Germans (a nationality), Jews (a religious group) and Gypsies (a darker-skinned ethnic group), as Nazi ideology of racial purity demonstrates.98 Other groups, such as linguistic, political, and persons with disabilities, were denied legal refuge in the genocide convention. Conversely, members of the Deaf community would identify themselves ethnically, linguistically or culturally, rather than from a disabled/impairment perspective. This will be explored comparatively using case studies in chapter three, but is important to consider presently, as it contextualizes why the definition of groups is significant, as victims and perpetrators often identify with the out-group framework differently.99 The victim, for example, will be dehumanized from the outset by the perpetrators, however, the victim will not reciprocate this ideology until the final stages of genocide, if we consider Claudia Card’s ‘social death’.100

An authoritative voice in the field of genocide studies, William Schabas has argued that ‘diluting the definition, either by formal amendment of its terms or by extravagant interpretation of the existing text, [we] risk trivializing the horror of the real crime when it is

95_{Greenawalt. Alexander K. A “Rethinking Genocidal Intent: The Case for a Knowledge-Based Interpretation.”}

Columbia Law Review, vol. 99, no. 8, 1999, pp. 2259–2294. www.jstor.org/stable/1123611. [here p. 2263].

96_{Fein, Helen, Genocide: A Sociological Perspective (London, Sage, 1991), p. 8-11. Check. Could be 8 9 10}

23-25.

97_{Schabas, William A. Genocide in international law. (Cambridge University Press, 2000)., p. 113.} 98_{Ibid., p. 113.}

99_{Out group is to mean those determined by the majority group as incompatible with their aims, identity, and}

often a threat to their existence.

100_{See Card, Claudia. “Genocide and Social Death.” Hypatia, vol. 18, no. 1, 2003, pp. 63–79.}

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26 committed,”101_{Accordingly, legally genocide must remain a very specific ‘crime of} crimes.’102_{While not to counter this perspective and agreeing with Schabas’ concerns,} investigating the genocide of people with disabilities, and specifically deaf people, reveals the exclusionary and rigid terms of the convention leave much to be desired, such as recognition of Deaf ethnicity. Chalk and Jonassohn further criticize the exclusivity of the Convention with the strong statement that ‘the wording of the convention is so restrictive that not one of the genocidal killings committed since its adoption is covered by it.”103 Although the United Nations recognizes persons with disabilities as a legally cognizable group in the Convention

of the Rights of Persons with Disabilities (2006),104 the act falls short of criminalizing

‘systematic discriminatory actions taken against persons with disabilities, actions which when taken the aggregate, may result in mass loss of life’.105

The problem, in many respects, stems from the identification of groups, and the willingness to treat minority groups similarly. In opposition to Schabas and his rigid approach to definition, scope and type of victim group of genocide, political scientist Professor Barbara Harff proposes an amalgamation of genocide with politicide: ‘the promotion, execution, and/or implied consent of sustained policies by governing elites or their agents – or, in the case of civil war, either of the contending authorities – that are intended to destroy, in whole or in part, a communal, political, or politicized ethnic group.’106 Significantly, this definition also includes groups that are either self or authoritatively defined. Though useful in understanding that genocide concerns more than the opinion and historical narrative of the perpetrator, in addition to comprehending that for victims, suffering does not end once the threat of violence has passed, reverberating through post-generations, the definition is too broad. Whilst appealing to human rights advocates, suggestions from those such as Chalk and Jonassohn are additionally unhelpful, as their legal standpoint lacks an objective measure to determine group membership, leaving the implicit purpose of the Genocide Convention

101_{Schabas, William A. Genocide in international law.( Cambridge University Press, 2000), p. 114.} 102_{See Ibid., p. 114.}

103_{Chalk, F., & Jonassohn, K. The history and sociology of genocide: Analyses and case studies. (New Haven,}

CT: Yale University Press, 1990), p. 11.

104_{UN General Assembly, Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities : resolution / adopted by the} General Assembly, 24 January 2007, A/RES/61/106, available at:

http://www.refworld.org/docid/45f973632.html [accessed 21 June 2017]

105_{Rahman Ford, > J.D. “A Race Apart: Genocide and the Protection of Disabled Persons Under International}

Law Review” of Disability Studies: An International Journal;2009, Vol. 5 Issue 2, no page.

106 _{Harff, B. (2003). No lessons learned from the Holocaust?: Assessing risks of genocide and political mass}

A Matter of Life and Deaf? Uncovering Genocide of the Deaf under the Ableist Framework and the Project of Modernity.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter 1. The Why Question

Why are the deaf considered inferior? An analysis of disableism,

modernity, the deaf as an ethnic group and the definitions of genocide.