Amazon.com Review
Douglas Baynton has written a learned history of the varied and sundry attempts that have been made to prevent deaf people from communicating with their hands.
Forbidden Signs intelligently explores the cultural aspects of deafness, laying out the naturalness of a gesture-based means of communicating by deaf people, exploring the unique aspects by which meaning can be conveyed without the spoken word. In this context, the pseudo-scientific arguments for preventing the use of sign language which predominated for nearly a century are laid bare as the arbitrary and capricious biases of the hearing world. The rise of a quasi-biological notion of eugenics and genetic determinism as well as the construction of a standard of "normalcy" against which deaf people were measured explains both the means and the rationale for the suppression of sign language. The incredible story of the extensive attempts to isolate deaf people and to break up communities of signers that Douglas Baynton has recorded will likely be difficult to imagine by those who know little of the history of deafness in America. Unfortunately, it is likely a story too familiar to deaf people, even today.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
Review
As the subtitle of this important book suggests, it is a study of American culture rather than a history of Deafness. Baynton uses the history of sign language and Deafness in America from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century to explore the shifts in practices, assumptions, dogma, and national mission during this volatile period of American cultural formation. . . Baynton is able to clarify significant, yet complex changes during America's most intense period of reform. . . Such a strategy of employing the particular to reveal the general makes this book of interest to scholars of Deaf culture as well as the general historian. Moreover, because Baynton thoroughly lays out in accessible language the argument that deafness is a cultural construction, this be used as a text with which to integrate disability studies into an American studies or history course. --
Disability Studies Quarterly, Summer 1997Baynton places this struggle between the 'manualists' and the 'oralists' into its very broadest cultural context, seeking to offer fresh perspectives on the shifting ways in which Americans have conceptualized human history and American identity, nature and human nature. . . Baynton's narrative is most powerful, not where the treatment of the deaf reflected a broader cultural consensus, but, instead, where the existence of the deaf shaped that consensus. Such is particularly the case in Baynton's illuminating discussion of the emerging scientific definition of the normal. --
Journal of American History, September 1997Baynton's brilliant and detailed history reminds us that debates over the use of dialects or languages are really the linguistic tip of a mostly submerged argument about power, social control, nationalism, who has the right to speak and who has the right to control modes of speech. --
Nation, March 10, 1997Excellent. . . Historians and specialists in sign language or education will gain valuable and unexpected insights into their own disciplines from this book. --
Times Higher Education SupplementForbidden Signs is an excellent cultural history that offers timely insight into our present. --
Journal of Communication, Summer 1997Forbidden Signs is replete with good things. --
New York Times Book Review, January 26, 1997In his wonderful book . . . Baynton suggests that there is a legitimate and important place for the study of . . . disabled people. Forbidden Signs is a fine piece of American cultural history, and it is clearly the finest example yet published of disability history turned on its head to illuminate the world all of us, whatever our disability, share. --
H-Net Reviews, August 1997Superbly written . . . balanced and convincing. His excellent historical analysis will interest not only specialists interested in deafness, but all cultural and intellectual historians. --
Journal of Social History, Spring 1998Unassuming originality [and] fresh details from the history of American deaf education. --
Times Literary Supplement, January 30, 1998