Academic literature on the topic 'Elizabeth Hastings'

In Act Three of Shakespeare's King Richard III the Duke of Buckingham asks Cardinal Bourchier to try and persuade Elizabeth Woodville to release the young Duke of York from sanctuary at Westminster. In the event of such tactics failing, Buckingham wishes Lord Hastings to accompany the Cardinal to Westminster and ‘… from her jealous arms pluck him perforce.’ The Cardinal's initial reaction is one of horror:‘…if she be obdurateTo mild enteraties god in heaven forbidWe should infringe the holy privilgeOf blessed sanctuary not for all this landWould I be guilty of so deep a sin.’

ABSTRACTThe first English translation of Castiglione's Il cortegiano was produced by Thomas Hoby, and published in 1561. Hoby began work on the text during Edward VI's reign, when Italian culture was admired for its progressiveness by the Protestant elite. He translated Book iii as a self-contained commission for Elizabeth Parr, marchioness of Northampton. The book in question had particular relevance for the marchioness at that stage of her career. Having ‘Englished’ it, Hoby did not initially intend to translate the rest of Il cortegiano. He knew that someone else was already engaged upon the project. The identity of this alternative translator has hitherto remained unknown. However, a strong case can be made in support of the candidature of William Thomas. Hoby only embarked upon a full translation after Thomas's execution for treason in 1554. By 1556, he had completed his task, and produced a dedication addressed to Henry Hastings. His choice of dedicatee is generally attributed to a sense of political and spiritual affinity; Hastings moved in the same intellectual circles, and shared the same Protestant background, as Hoby. However, the young man who would later be known as the ‘Puritan earl’ conformed to the prescribed religion of the Marian regime. More significantly, he was the nephew of Cardinal Pole. Hoby and several of his evangelical friends were seeking rapprochement with the Catholic government in 1556. Hoby hoped his translation would commend him to Pole, thus effecting his political rehabilitation. However, the authorities were suspicious of Hoby – and of the stationer to whom he entrusted his book. Doubts were also raised about the Catholic orthodoxy of Castiglione's dialogues. Consequently, Hoby's translation was not published until after the Elizabethan accession.

As they embark upon a dialectical examination of justice in Plato’s Republic, Socrates admonishes his interlocutors that the pursuit of justice is for those who “see clearly”. Indeed, the dialogue itself is meant to bring about such clear-sightedness as the interlocutors dialectically winnow the various accounts of justice proposed. In like manner, Thomas More’s History of King Richard III helps his readers to see clearly the tyrant and tyranny. In the History, More presents a portrait of a tyrant and the conditions that make his tyranny possible. Crucial to this portrait is what the various characters see as well as when they see within the dramatic context. Why are so many blind to Richard’s machinations? Is their blindness willful? What internal and external factors contribute to their blindness? Who does see and how, if at all, do they respond? In answering these questions, we as readers come to see the nature of the tyrant and tyranny. Along the way, four characters are considered in detail: King Edward, Lord Hastings, Queen Elizabeth, and the people of London.

The history of post-Reformation Catholicism in Yorkshire can be divided into two distinct periods: pre- and post-1570. Only in the aftermath of the 1569 Northern Rebellion did the Elizabethan government begin to implement fully the 1559 religious settlement in the north, and to take firm action against those who persistently flouted religious laws by continuing to practise the traditional religion of their forefathers. In the Northern Province, serious efforts to enforce conformity and to evangelize did not begin until the arrival of Edmund Grindal as Archbishop of York in 1571. He was joined a year later by the Puritan sympathizer Henry Hastings, Earl of Huntingdon, as President of the Council of the North and together they spear-headed the region’s first real evangelical challenge to traditional religion. 1571 also saw the enactment of the first real penal law against Catholics, although only in 15 81 was the term ‘recusant’ coined. Grindal and Huntingdon formed a powerful team committed to Protestant evangelization and the eradication of Catholicism in the North, however, in Yorkshire, their mission was not entirely successful. The North Riding consistently returned high numbers of recusants in the Elizabethan period, and was home to some well-established Catholic communities. In the West and East Ridings recusancy was not so widespread, although religious conservatism persisted, and Catholicism remained a much more significant force across Yorkshire than elsewhere.

AbstractBy reconstructing the multiple contexts that prompted the production, in 1601, of a single tract, this article evokes and analyses the febrile political atmosphere of the Elizabethan fin de siècle, produced by the spectre of regime change consequent upon the death of the queen, and by the visible connections between central elements in the regime and certain Catholic loyalists involved in the notorious Archpriest Controversy. Certain men, most notably Sir Francis Hastings, who were used to regarding themselves as insiders and believed that they were some of the Protestant state's most trusted agents in the struggle against popery, now found themselves typed as ‘puritans’ and thus, at least potentially, on the outs with a regime engaged in a (to them) extraordinarily dangerous flirtation with allegedly ‘loyal’ papists. Adopting the politique hermeneutic mode of the Jesuit Robert Parsons, Hastings all but outed the guilty men and did so via a thoroughly self-conscious exercise in public politics. Throughout, the full range of contemporary media was in play, with printed polemic framing parliamentary debate, that debate in turn feeding into the pamphlet press, which prompted yet more rumours, in London and on the continent, before provoking the state's recourse to those ultimate forms of official publicity, a royal proclamation, treason trials, and the gruesome performativity of the scaffold.

‘Sobriety and restraint are not fashionable today.’ So Claire Cross chose to introduce her first major work, The Puritan Earl: the Life of Henry Hastings, Third Earl of Huntingdon, 1536-1595, completed in the King’s Manor at York in September 1965. Over thirty years, and many, many publications later, the relevance of that sentiment for her own distinctive qualities as a historian of the sixteenth-century Church seems more obvious than ever. Claire’s many admirers are, of course, well aware of how prepared she can be to abandon restraint herself when confronted with either blatant scholarly inaccuracy or serious injustice to the academic causes she holds most dear. Nevertheless, Claire Cross’s exceptional influence as a historian throughout her many years at the University of York has probably owed more than anything else to the value she sets upon the exercise of what she once called the ‘deliberately unexciting’ virtues. As she herself suggested, Hastings and his fellow godly peers may well have had a more enduring effect upon English life and English moral standards than did their more obviously dazzling Elizabethan contemporaries. If so - and who would find it altogether easy to deny the force of that argument? - how hard it is to resist the thought that Claire’s own contributions to English Reformation Church history may well outlast those of many of her own contemporaries. In a field of scholarship noted for the brilliance and iconoclasm of its recent practitioners, Claire has long been the mistress of those who know.

Elizabeth Wilmot, Countess of Rochester, is best known to most modern readers as the woman John Wilmot, Earl of Rochester, abducted and later wed. As Samuel Pepys memorably records in his diary entry for 28 May 1665:Thence to my Lady Sandwich’s, where, to my shame, I had not been a great while before. Here, upon my telling her a story of my Lord Rochester’s running away on Friday night last with Mrs Mallet, the great beauty and fortune of the North, who had supped at Whitehall with Mrs Stewart, and was going home to her lodgings with her grandfather, my Lord Haly, by coach; and was at Charing Cross seized on by both horse and footmen, and forcibly taken from him, and put into a coach with six horses, and two women provided to receive her, and carried away. Upon immediate pursuit, my Lord of Rochester (for whom the King had spoke to the lady often, but with no success) was taken at Uxbridge; but the lady is not yet heard of, and the King mighty angry and the Lord sent to the Tower. (http://www.pepysdiary.com/)Here Pepys provides an anecdote that offers what Helen Deutsch has described in another context as “the elusive possibility of truth embodied by ‘things in themselves,’ by the things, that is, preserved in anecdotal form” (28). Pepys’s diary entry yields up an “elusive possibility” of embodied truth; his version of Wilmot’s abduction solidifies what he perceives to be the most notable features of her identity: her beauty, her wealth, and her sexual trajectory.Pepys’s conclusion that “the lady is not yet heard of” complicates this idea of anecdotal preservation, for he neatly ties up his story of Wilmot’s body by erasing her from it: she is removed, voiceless and disembodied, from even this anecdote of her own abduction. Pepys’s double maneuver demonstrates the complex set of interactions surrounding the preservation of early modern women’s sexual and textual selves. Written into Pepys’s diary and writing in conversation with her husband, Wilmot has generally been treated as a subordinate historical and literary figure—a character rather than an agent or an author. The richness of Wilmot’s own writing has been largely ignored; her manuscript poetry has been treated as an artefact and a source of autobiographical material, whereas Rochester’s poetry—itself teeming with autobiographical details, references to material culture, and ephemera—is recognised and esteemed as literary. Rochester’s work provides a tremendous resource, a window through which we can read and re-read his wife’s work in ways that enlighten and open up readings rather than closing them down, and her works similarly complicate his writings.By looking at Wilmot as a case study, I would like to draw attention to some of the continued dilemmas that scholars face when we attempt to recover early modern women’s writing. With this study, I will focus on distinct features of Wilmot’s sexual and textual identity. I will consider assumptions about female docility; the politics and poetics of erotic espionage; and Wilmot’s construction of fugitive desires in her poetry. Like the writings of many early modern women, Wilmot’s manuscript poetry challenges assumptions about the intersections of gender, sexuality, and authorship. Early Modern Women’s Docile Bodies?As the entry from Pepys’s diary suggests, Wilmot has been constructed as a docile female body—she is rendered “ideal” according to a set of gendered practices by which “inferior status has been inscribed” on her body (Bartky 139). Contrasting Pepys’s references to Wilmot’s beauty and marriageability with Wilmot’s own vivid descriptions of sexual desire highlights Wilmot’s tactical awareness and deployment of her inscribed form. In one of her manuscript poems, she writes:Nothing ades to Loves fond fireMore than scorn and cold disdainI to cherish your desirekindness used but twas in vainyou insulted on your SlaveTo be mine you soon refusedHope hope not then the power to haveWhich ingloriously you used. (230)This poem yields up a wealth of autobiographical information and provides glimpses into Wilmot’s psychology. Rochester spent much of his married life having affairs with women and men, and Wilmot represents herself as embodying her devotion to her husband even as he rejects her. In a recent blog entry about Wilmot’s poetry, Ellen Moody suggests that Wilmot “must maintain her invulnerable guard or will be hurt; the mores damn her whatever she does.” Interpretations of Wilmot’s verse typically overlay such sentiments on her words: she is damned by social mores, forced to configure her body and desire according to rigorous social codes that expect women to be pure and inviolable yet also accessible to their lovers and “invulnerable” to the pain produced by infidelity. Such interpretations, however, deny Wilmot the textual and sexual agency accorded to Rochester, begging the question of whether or not we have moved beyond reading women’s writing as essential, natural, and embodied. Thus while these lines might in fact yield up insights into Wilmot’s psychosocial and sexual identities, we continue to marginalise her writing and by extension her author-self if we insist on taking her words at face value. Compare, for example, Wilmot’s verse to the following song by her contemporary Aphra Behn:Love in Fantastique Triumph satt,Whilst Bleeding Hearts a round him flow’d,For whom Fresh paines he did Create,And strange Tyranick power he show’d;From thy Bright Eyes he took his fire,Which round about, in sports he hurl’d;But ’twas from mine, he took desire,Enough to undo the Amorous World. (53) This poem, which first appeared in Behn’s tragedy Abdelazer (1677) and was later printed in Poems upon Several Occasions (1684), was one of Behn’s most popular lyric verses. In the 1920s and 1930s Ernest Bernbaum, Montague Summers, Edmund Gosse, and others mined Behn’s works for autobiographical details and suggested that such historical details were all that her works offered—a trend that continued, disturbingly, into the later half of the twentieth century. Since the 1980s, Paula R. Backscheider, Ros Ballaster, Catherine Gallagher, Robert Markley, Paul Salzman, Jane Spencer, and Janet Todd have shown that Behn’s works are not simple autobiographical documents; they are the carefully crafted productions of a literary professional. Even though Behn’s song evokes a masochistic relationship between lover and beloved much like Wilmot’s song, critics treat “Love Arm’d” as a literary work rather than a literal transcription of female desire. Of course there are material differences between Wilmot’s song and Behn’s “Love Arm’d,” the most notable of which involves Behn’s self-conscious professionalism and her poem’s entrenchment in the structures of performance and print culture. But as scholars including Kathryn King and Margaret J. M. Ezell have begun to suggest, print publication was not the only way for writers to produce and circulate literary texts. King has demonstrated the ways in which female authors of manuscripts were producing social texts (563), and Ezell has shown that “collapsing ‘public’ into ‘publication’” leads modern readers to “overlook the importance of the social function of literature for women as well as men” (39). Wilmot’s poems did not go through the same material, ideological, and commercial processes as Behn’s poems did, but they participated in a social and cultural network of exchange that operated according to its own rules and that, significantly, was the same network that Rochester himself used for the circulation of his verses. Wilmot’s writings constitute about half of the manuscript Portland PwV 31, held by Hallward Library, University of Nottingham—a manuscript catalogued in the Perdita Project but lacking a description and biographical note. Teresa D. Kemp has discussed the impact of the Perdita Project on the study of early modern women’s writing in Feminist Teacher, and Jill Seal Millman and Elizabeth Clarke (both of whom are involved with the project) have also written articles about the usability of the database. Like many of the women writers catalogued by the Perdita Project, Wilmot lacks her own entry in the Dictionary of National Biography and is instead relegated to the periphery in Rochester’s entry.The nineteen-page folio includes poems by both Rochester and Wilmot. The first eight poems are autograph manuscript poems by Rochester, and a scene from a manuscript play ‘Scaene 1st, Mr. Daynty’s chamber’ is also included. The remaining poems, excluding one without attribution, are by Wilmot and are identified on the finding aid as follows:Autograph MS poem, entitled ‘Song’, by Elizabeth WilmotAutograph MS poem, entitled ‘Song’, by Elizabeth WilmotAutograph MS poem, entitled ‘Song’, by Elizabeth WilmotMS poem, untitled, not ascribed Autograph MS poem, entitled ‘Song’, by Elizabeth WilmotAutograph MS poem, untitled, by Elizabeth WilmotAutograph MS poem, untitled, by Elizabeth WilmotAutograph MS poem, untitled, by Elizabeth Wilmot Autograph MS poem, untitled, by Elizabeth WilmotTwo of the songs (including the lyric quoted above) have been published in Kissing the Rod with the disclaimer that marks of revision reveal that “Lady Rochester was not serving as an amanuensis for her husband” yet the editors maintain that “some sort of literary collaboration cannot be ruled out” (230), implying that Rochester helped his wife write her poetry. Establishing a non-hierarchical strategy for reading women’s collaborative manuscript writing here seems necessary. Unlike Behn, who produced works in manuscript and in print and whose maximization of the slippages between these modes has recently been analyzed by Anne Russell, Wilmot and Rochester both wrote primarily in manuscript. Yet only Rochester’s writings have been accorded literary status by historians of the book and of manuscript theory such as Harold Love and Arthur Marotti. Even though John Wilders notes that Rochester’s earliest poems were dialogues written with his wife, the literariness of her contributions is often undercut. Wilders offers a helpful suggestion that the dialogues set up by these poems helps “hint … at further complexities in the other” (51), but the complexities are identified as sexual rather than textual. Further, the poems are treated as responses to Rochester rather than conversations with him. Readers like Moody, moreover, draw reflections of marital psychology from Wilmot’s poems instead of considering their polysemic qualities and other literary traits. Instead of approaching the lines quoted above from Wilmot’s song as indications of her erotic and conjugal desire for her husband, we can consider her confident deployment of metaphysical conceits, her careful rhymes, and her visceral imagery. Furthermore, we can locate ways in which Wilmot and Rochester use the device of the answer poem to build a complex dialogue rather than a hierarchical relationship in which one voice dominates the other. The poems comprising Portland PwV 31 are written in two hands and two voices; they complement one another, but neither contains or controls the other. Despite the fact that David Farley-Hills dismissively calls this an “‘answer’ to this poem written in Lady Rochester’s handwriting” (29), the verses coexist in playful exchange textually as well as sexually. Erotic Exchange, Erotic EspionageBut does a reorientation of literary criticism away from Wilmot’s body and towards her body of verse necessarily entail a loss of her sexual and artefactual identity? Along with the account from Pepys’s diary mentioned at the outset of this study, letters from Rochester to his wife survive that provide a prosaic account of the couple’s married life. For instance, Rochester writes to her: “I love not myself as much as you do” (quoted in Green 159). Letters from Rochester to his wife typically showcase his playfulness, wit, and ribaldry (in one letter, he berates the artist responsible for two miniatures of Wilmot in strokes that are humorous yet also charged with a satire that borders on invective). The couple’s relationship was beleaguered by the doubts, infidelities, and sexual double standards that an autobiographical reading of Wilmot’s songs yields up, therefore it seems as counterproductive for feminist literary theory, criticism, and recovery work to entirely dispense with the autobiographical readings as it seems reductive to entirely rely on them. When approaching works like these manuscript poems, then, I propose using a model of erotic exchange and erotic espionage in tandem with more text-bound modes of literary criticism. To make this maneuver, we might begin by considering Gayle Rubin’s proposition that “If women are the gifts, then it is men who are the exchange partners. And it is the partners, not the presents, upon whom reciprocal exchange confers its quasi-mystical power of social linkage” (398). Wilmot’s poetry relentlessly unsettles the binary set up between partner and present, thereby demanding a more pluralistic identification of sexual and textual economies. Wilmot constructs Rochester as absent (“Thats caused by absence norished by despaire”), which is an explicit inversion of the gendered terms stereotypically deployed in poetry (the absent woman in works by Rochester as well as later satirists like Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope often catalyzes sexual desire) that also registers Wilmot’s autobiographical contexts. She was, during most of her married life, living with his mother, her own mother, and Rochester’s nieces in his house at Adderbury while he stayed in London. The desire in Wilmot’s poetry is textualised as much as it is sexualised; weaving this doublebraid of desires and designs together ultimately provides the most complete interpretation of the verses. I read the verses as offering a literary form of erotic espionage in which Wilmot serves simultaneously as erotic object and author. That is, she both is and is not the Cloris of her (and Rochester’s) poetry, capable of looking on and authorizing her desired and desiring body. The lyric in which Wilmot writes “He would return the fugitive with Shame” provides the clearest example of the interpretive tactic that I am proposing. The line, from Wilmot’s song “Cloris misfortunes that can be exprest,” refers to the deity of Love in its complete context:Such conquering charmes contribute to my chainAnd ade fresh torments to my lingering painThat could blind Love juge of my faithful flameHe would return the fugitive with ShameFor having bin insenceable to loveThat does by constancy it merritt prove. (232)The speaker of the poem invokes Cupid and calls on “blind Love” to judge “my faithful flame.” The beloved would then be returned “fugitive with Shame” because “blind Love” would have weighed the lover’s passion and the beloved’s insensibility. Interestingly, the gender of the beloved and the lover are not marked in this poem. Only Cupid is marked as male. Although the lover is hypothetically associated with femaleness in the final stanza (“She that calls not reason to her aid / Deserves the punishmentt”), the ascription could as easily be gendering the trait of irrationality as gendering the subject/author of the poem. Desire, complaint, and power circulate in the song in a manner that lacks clear reference; the reader receives glimpses into an erotic world that is far more ornately literary than it is material. That is, reading the poem makes one aware of tropes of power and desire, whereas actual bodies recede into the margins of the text—identifiable because of the author’s handwriting, not a uniquely female perspective on sexuality or (contrary to Moody’s interpretation) a specifically feminine acquiescence to gender norms. Strategies for Reading a Body of VerseWilmot’s poetry participates in what might be described as two distinct poetic and political modes. On one hand, her writing reproduces textual expectations about Restoration answer poems, songs and lyrics, and romantic verses. She crafts poetry that corresponds to the same textual conventions that men like Rochester, John Dryden, Abraham Cowley, and William Cavendish utilised when they wrote in manuscript. For Wilmot, as for her male contemporaries, such manuscript writing would have been socially circulated; at the same time, the manuscript documents had a fluidity that was less common in print texts. Dryden and Behn’s published writings, for instance, often had a more literary context (“Love Arm’d” refers to Abdelazer, not to Behn’s sexual identity), whereas manuscript writing often referred to coteries of readers and writers, friends and lovers.As part of the volatile world of manuscript writing, Wilmot’s poetry also highlights her embodied erotic relationships. But over-reading—or only reading—the poetry as depicting a conjugal erotics limits our ability to recover Wilmot as an author and an agent. Feminist recovery work has opened many new tactics for incorporating women’s writing into existing literary canons; it has also helped us imagine ways of including female domestic work, sexuality, and other embodied forms into our understanding of early modern culture. By drawing together literary recovery work with a more material interest in recuperating women’s sexual bodies, we should begin to recuperate women like Wilmot not simply as authors or bodies but as both. The oscillations between the sexual and textual body in Wilmot’s poetry, and in our assessments of her life and writings, should help us approach her works (like the works of Rochester) as possessing a three-dimensionality that they have long been denied. ReferencesBartky, Sandra Lee. “Foucault, Femininity, and the Modernization of Patriarchal Power.” In Writing on the Body: Female Embodiment and Feminist Theory. Ed. Katie Conboy, Nadia Medina, and Sarah Stanbury. New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. 129-54.Behn, Aphra. “Song. Love Arm’d.” The Works of Aphra Behn. Volume 1: Poetry. Ed. Janet Todd. London: William Pickering, 1992. 53.Clarke, Elizabeth. “Introducing Hester Pulter and the Perdita Project.” Literature Compass 2.1 (2005). ‹http://www.blackwell-compass.com/subject/literature/article_view?article_id=lico_articles_bsl159›. Deutsch, Helen. Loving Doctor Johnson. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005.Diamond, Irene, Ed. Feminism and Foucault: Reflections on Resistance. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1988.Ezell, Margaret J. M. Social Authorship and the Advent of Print. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999.Farley-Hill, David. Rochester’s Poetry. Totowa: Rowman and Littlefield, 1978. Greene, Graham. Lord Rochester’s Monkey. New York: Penguin, 1974. Greer, Germaine, Susan Hastings, Jeslyn Medoff, and Melinda Sansone, Ed. Kissing the Rod: An Anthology of Seventeenth-Century Women’s Verse. New York: Noonday Press, 1988. Kemp, Theresa D. “Early Women Writers.” Feminist Teacher 18.3 (2008): 234-39.King, Kathryn. “Jane Barker, Poetical Recreations, and the Sociable Text.” ELH 61 (1994): 551-70.Love, Harold, and Arthur F. Marotti. "Manuscript Transmission and Circulation." The Cambridge History of Early Modern English Literature. Cambridge, England: Cambridge University Press, 2002. 55-80. Love, Harold. "Systemizing Sigla." English Manuscript Studies 1100-1700. 11 (2002): 217-230. Marotti, Arthur F. "Shakespeare's Sonnets and the Manuscript Circulation of Texts in Early Modern England." A Companion to Shakespeare's Sonnets. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007. 185-203.McNay, Lois. Foucault And Feminism: Power, Gender, and the Self. Boston: Northeastern, 1992.Moody, Ellen. “Elizabeth Wilmot (neé Mallet), Countess of Rochester, Another Woman Poet.” Blog entry 16 March 2006. 11 Nov. 2008 ‹http://server4.moody.cx/index.php?id=400›. Pepys, Samuel. The Diary of Samuel Pepys. 23 Aug. 2008 ‹http://www.pepysdiary.com/archive/1665/05/28/index.php›. Rubin, Gayle. “The Traffic in Women: Notes on the ‘Political Economy’ of Sex.” Feminist Literary Theory and Criticism: A Norton Reader, ed. Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar, 392-413. New York: Norton, 2007.Russell, Anne. “Aphra Behn, Textual Communities, and Pastoral Sobriquets.” English Language Notes 40.4 (June 2003): 41-50.———. “'Public' and 'Private' in Aphra Behn's Miscellanies: Women Writers, Print, and Manuscript.” Write or Be Written: Early Modern Women Poets and Cultural Constraints. Ed. Barbara Smith and Ursula Appelt. Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001. 29-48. Sawicki, Jana. Disciplining Foucault: Feminism, Power and the Body. New York: Routledge, 1991.Seal, Jill. "The Perdita Project—A Winter's Report." Early Modern Literary Studies 6.3 (January, 2001): 10.1-14. ‹http://purl.oclc.org/emls/06-3/perdita.htm›.Wilders, John. “Rochester and the Metaphysicals.” In Spirit of Wit: Reconsiderations of Rochester. Ed. Jeremy Treglown. Hamden: Archon, 1982. 42-57.Wilmot, Elizabeth, Countess of Rochester. “Song” (“Nothing Ades to Love's Fond Fire”) and “Song” (“Cloris Misfortunes That Can Be Exprest”) in Kissing the Rod. 230-32.

It seems clear that people who are deaf ... struggle continually against the meanings that others impose on their experience, and the way that this separates them from others. They struggle for acknowledgement of the way they see their lives and wish to live them, and aspire to connection?with other people, to share and belong. (David Moorhead. Knowing Who I Am. 1995. 85.) Nga Tapuwae and Before I am deaf but, before that part of my life started, I was hearing and worked for many years as a librarian in New Zealand. My first job was in a public library located within a secondary school Nga Tapuwae Secondary College in South Auckland. Its placement was a 1970’s social experiment to see if a public library could work within the grounds of a community college (and the answer was no, it could not). The experience was a great introduction for me to the Maori and Polynesian cultures that I had not previously encountered. Until then, I was wary of both groups, and so it was a revelation to realise that although there were many social problems in the area including low literacy, many of the children and teenagers were bright, talented individuals. They simply did not connect to the Anglo-Saxon reading materials we offered. Years later, my interest in the social dynamics of literacy led to my enrolment in a post-graduate literacy degree in Melbourne. This action may have saved my life because at the end of this course, a minor ailment resulted in a visit to the university doctor who diagnosed me with the life-threatening medical condition, Neurofibromatosis Type 2 (NF 2). NF2 is a late onset genetic condition in which one’s body grows tumours, always on both hearing nerves, sometimes elsewhere as well. The tumours usually cause deafness and can cause death. I was told I needed to have my tumours removed and would probably become fully deaf as a result. This is how my life as I knew it changed direction and I started the long journey towards becoming deaf. Diagnosis and Change Predictably, once diagnosed, friends and colleagues rallied to comfort me. I was told things probably weren’t as bad as they sounded. Helen Keller was mentioned several times as an example of someone who had succeeded despite being deaf and blind. ‘Really,’ my friends asked, ‘how bad can it be? ‘Inside myself however, it couldn’t have been worse. A day later the enormity of it all hit me and I became inconsolable. A friend drove me back to the doctor and she did two things that were to change my life. She referred me to the University’s counselling services where, happily, I was counselled by Elizabeth Hastings who later went on to become Australia’s first Disability Services Commissioner. Secondly, the doctor organised for me to visit the HEAR Service at the Victorian Deaf Society (VDS). Again by happy accident, my friend and I stumbled into the ‘wrong building’ where I ended up meeting John Lovett, who was Deaf and the CEO there, via an interpreter. When I met John Lovett I was distraught but, unlike other people, he made no attempt to stop me crying. He simply listened carefully until I realised he understood what I was saying and stopped crying myself. He said my fears that I could end up alone and lonely were valid and he suggested the best thing I could do for myself was to join the ‘Deaf community’; a community. I had never heard of. He explained it was made up of people like him who used Australian sign language (Auslan) to communicate. He was so engaging and supportive that this plan sounded fine to me. By the time we finished talking and he walked me over to the HEAR Service, I was so in his thrall that I had enrolled for a Deaf awareness workshop, an Auslan class, and had plans to join the Deaf community. Had I stayed on and learned Auslan, my life may well have followed a different path, but this was not to be at that time. Becoming Hearing Impaired (HI) Across at the HEAR service, an alternate view of my potential future was put to me. Instead of moving away from everything familiar and joining the Deaf community, I could learn to lip-read and hopefully use it to stay in the workforce and amongst my hearing friends. I had a cousin and aunt who were late deafened; my cousin in particular was doing well communicating with lip-reading. I discussed this with friends and the idea of staying with the people I already knew sounded far less confronting than joining the Deaf community and so I chose this path. My surgeon was also optimistic. He was confident he could save some of my hearing. Suddenly learning Auslan seemed superfluous. I phoned John Lovett to explain, and his response was that I should do what suited me, but he asked me to remember one thing: that it was me who decided to leave the Deaf Community, not that the Deaf community had not wanted me. He told me that, if I changed my mind, I could always go back because the door to the Deaf community would always be open and he would be still be there. It would be a decade before I decided that I wanted to go back through that door, and around that time this great man passed away, but I never forgot my promise to remember our conversation. It, and a few other exchanges I had with him in the following years, stayed at the back of my mind, especially as my residual hearing sank over the years, and the prospect of total deafness hung over me. When I had the surgery, my surgeon’s optimism proved unfounded. He could not save any hearing on my left side and my facial and balance nerves were damaged as well. The hospital then decided not to operate again, and would only attempt to remove the second tumour if it grew and threatened my health again. Consequently, for close to a decade, my life was on hold in many ways. I feared deafness—for me it signalled that my life as I knew it would end and I would be isolated. Every hearing test was a tense time for me as I watched my remaining hearing decline in a slow, relentless downward path on the graph. It was like watching the tide go out knowing it was never going to come in as fully again. My thinking started to change too. Within a week of my diagnosis I experienced discrimination for the first time. A library school that had offered me a place in its post graduate librarianship course the following year made it clear that they no longer wanted me. In the end it did not matter as I was accepted at another institution but it was my first experience of being treated less favourably in the community and it was a shock. After the surgery my life settled down again. I found work in public libraries again, rekindled an old relationship and in 1994 had a baby boy. However, living with a hearing loss is hard work. Everything seemed tiring, especially lip-reading. My ears rejected my hearing aid and became itchy and inflamed. I became aware that my continual hearing problems were sometimes seen as a nuisance in work situations. Socialising lost a lot of its appeal so my social world also contracted. Around this time something else started happening. Outside work, people started expressing admiration for me—words like ‘role model’ and ‘inspiring’ started entering the conversation. Any other time I might have enjoyed it but for me, struggling to adapt to my new situation, it felt odd. The whole thing reminded me of being encouraged to be like Helen Keller; as if there is a right way to behave when one is deaf in which you are an inspiration, and a wrong way in which one is seen as being in need of a role model. I discussed this with Elizabeth Hastings who had helped me prepare mentally for the surgery and afterwards. I explained I felt vulnerable and needy in my new situation and she gave me some useful advice. She thought feeling needy was a good thing as realising one needs people keeps one humble. She observed that, after years of intellectualising, educated people sometimes started believing they could use intellectualisation as a way to avoid painful emotions such as sadness. This behaviour then cut them off from support and from understanding that none of us can do it alone. She believed that, in always having to ask for help, people with disabilities are kept aware of the simple truth that all people depend on others to survive. She said I could regard becoming deaf as a disability, or I could choose to regard it as a privilege. Over the years the truth of her words became increasingly more evident to me as I waded through all the jargon and intellectualisation that surrounds discussion of both deafness and the disability arena, compared to the often raw emotion expressed by those on the receiving end of it. At a personal level I have found that talking about emotions helps especially in the face of the ubiquitous ‘positive thinking’ brigade who would have us all believe that successful people do not feel negative emotions regardless of what is happening. The Lie Elizabeth had initially sympathised with my sadness about my impending deafness. One day however she asked why, having expressed positive sentiments both about deaf people and people with disabilities, I was saying I would probably be better off dead than deaf? Up until that conversation I was unaware of the contradictions between what I felt and what I was saying. I came to realise I was living a lie because I did not believe what I was telling myself; namely, that deaf people and people with disabilities are as good as other people. Far from believing this, what I really thought was that being deaf, or having a disability, did lessen one’s worth. It was an uncomfortable admission, particularly sharing it with someone sitting in a wheelchair, and especially as up until then I had always seen myself as a liberal thinker. Now, faced with the reality of becoming deaf, I had been hoist by my own petard, as I could not come to terms with the idea of myself as a deaf person. The Christian idea of looking after the ‘less fortunate’ was one I had been exposed to, but I had not realised the flip side of it, which is that the ‘less fortunate’ are also perceived as a ‘burden’ for those looking after them. It reminded me of my initial experiences years earlier at Nga Tapuwae when I came face to face with cultures I thought I had understood but did not. In both cases it was only when I got to know people that I began to question my own attitudes and assumptions and broadened my thinking. Unfortunately for deaf people, and people with disabilities, I have not been the only person lying to myself. These days it is not common for people to express their fears about deaf people or people with disabilities. People just press on without fully communicating or understanding the other person’s attitude or perspectives. When things then do not work out, these failures reinforce the misconceptions and these attitudes persist. I believe it is one of the main reasons why true community inclusion for deaf and people with disabilities is moving so slowly. Paying for access is another manifestation of this. Everyone is supportive of access in principle but there is continuous complaint about paying for things such as interpreting. The never-ending discussions between deaf people and the wealthy movie industry about providing more than token access to captioned cinema demonstrate that the inclusion lie is alive and well. Until it can be effectively addressed through genuine dialogue, deaf people, hard of hearing people and people with disabilities will always be largely relegated to life outside the mainstream. Collectively we will also continue to have to endure this double message that we are of equal value to the community while simultaneously being considered a financial burden if we try to access it in ways that are meaningful to us. Becoming Deaf In 2002 however all this thinking still lay ahead of me. I still had some hearing and was back living in New Zealand to be close to my family. My relationship had ended and I was a solo mother. My workplace had approved leave of absence, and so I still had my job to go back to in Melbourne if I wanted it. However, I suspected that I would soon need the second tumour removed because I was getting shooting pains down my face. When my fears were confirmed I could not decide whether to move back to Melbourne or let the job go, and risk having trouble finding one if I went back later. I initially chose to stay longer as my father was sick but eventually I decided Melbourne was where I wanted to be especially if I was deaf. I returned, found temporary employment, and right up to the second surgery I was able to work as I could make good use of the small amount of hearing I still had. I thought that I would still be able to cope when I was made fully deaf as a result of the surgery. It was, after all, only one notch down on the audiogram and I was already ‘profoundly deaf’ and still working. When I woke up after the surgery completely deaf, it felt anti-climactic. The world seemed exactly the same, just silent. At home where I was surrounded by my close family and friends everything initially seemed possible. However, when my family left, it was just my seven-year-old son and myself again, and on venturing back into the community, it quickly became clear to me that at some level my status had changed. Without any cues, I struggled to follow speech and few people wanted to write things down. Although my son was only seven, people communicated with him in preference to me. I felt as if we had changed roles: I was now the child and he was the adult. Worse was soon to follow when I tried to re-enter the workforce. When I had the surgery, the hospital had installed a gadget called an auditory brainstem implant, (ABI) which they said would help me hear. An ABI is similar to a cochlear implant but it is attached to the brainstem instead of the cochlear nerve. My cochlear nerve was removed. I hoped my ABI would enable me to hear enough to find work but, aside from clinical conditions in which there was no background noise and the staff knew how to assist, it did not work. My most humiliating moment with it came when it broke down mid job interview and I spent half the time left trying to get it going again in full view of the embarrassed interview panel, and the other half trying to maintain my composure whilst trying to lip-read the questions. The most crushing blow came from the library where I had happily worked for seven years at middle management level. This library was collaborating with another institution to set up a new library and they needed new staff. I hopefully applied for a job at the same level I had worked at prior to becoming deaf but was unsuccessful. When I asked for feedback, I was told that I was not seen as having the skills to work at that level. My lowest point came when I was refused a job unpacking boxes of books. I was told I did not have experience in this area even though, as any librarian will attest, unpacking boxes is part of any librarian’s work. When I could not find unskilled work, it occurred to me that possibly I would never work again. While this was unfolding, my young son and I went from being comfortable financially to impoverished. My ex-partner also decided he would now make childcare arrangements directly with my son as he was annoyed at being expected to write things down for me. My relationship with him, some family members, and my friends were all under strain at that time. I was lost. It also became clear that my son was not coping. Although he knew the rudiments of Auslan, it was not enough for us to communicate sufficiently. His behaviour at school deteriorated and one night he became so frustrated trying to talk to me that he started to pull out his own hair. I calmed him and asked him to write down for me what he was feeling and he wrote down ‘It is like you died. It is like I don’t have a Mum now’. It was now clear to me that although I still had my friends, nobody including myself knew what to do. I realised I had to find someone who could understand my situation and I knew now it had to be a Deaf person. Fortunately, by this stage I was back learning Auslan again at La Trobe University. The week after the conversation with my son, I told my Auslan teacher what had happened. To my relief she understood my situation immediately. She told me to bring my son to class, at no cost, and she would teach him herself. I did and my life started to turn around. My son took to Auslan with such speed and application that he was able to not only converse with her in one month but immediately started using Auslan with me at home to get the things he wanted. We were able to re-establish the mother/son relationship that we both needed. I was also able to help my son talk through and deal with all the changes that me becoming deaf had foisted upon him. He still uses Auslan to talk to me and supplements it using speech, copious finger spelling, notes and diagrams. More than anything else, this relationship has kept me anchored to my long-term goal of becoming a clear signer. Encouraged by my son’s success, I put all my energy into learning Auslan and enrolled in a full time TAFE Auslan course. I also joined a chat group called ‘Here to Hear’ (H2H). The perspectives in the group ranged from strongly oral to strongly Deaf but for me, trying to find a place to fit in any of it, it was invaluable. Almost daily I chatted with the group, asking questions and invariably someone responded. The group acted as a safety net and sounding board for me as I worked out the practicalities of living life deaf. The day of my fateful interview and the ABI humiliation, I came home so shaken that I used the Irish remedy of a couple of swigs of whisky, and then went online and posted an account of it all. I can still remember the collective indignation of the group and, as I read the responses, beginning to see the funny side of it . . . something I could not have done alone. I also made use of easy access to Deaf teachers at TAFE and used that to listen to them and ask advice on situations. I found out for example, that if I instructed my son to stand behind me when people in shops insisted on addressing him, they had no alternative but to talk to me; it was a good clear message to all concerned that my son was the child in this relationship. About this time, I discovered the Disability Discrimination Act (DDA) that Elizabeth Hastings had worked so hard on, filed my first DDA complaint, and received my first apology at the mediation session that followed. My personal life also improved, relationship by relationship as everyone adjusted. Slowly the ice melted in most of my relationships; some relationships faded and were replaced with new ones with signing people, and eventually hearing people again. My life moved forward. Through a member of ‘Here to Hear’, I was invited to apply for my first post deaf job—covering holiday leave at a Deaf sports organisation. I practically finger-spelt my way through the interview but not only did they offer me the job, they were delighted to have me. I was able to buy a few things with the money I earned, and suddenly it felt as if everything was possible again. This acceptance of me by Deaf people had a profound impact on me. I mixed with people more, and it was not too long before I was able to use my basic signing skills to use Auslan interpreters and re-enter the workplace. I have discovered over time that living in silence also has advantages—no more noisy parties or rubbish trucks clanging at dawn and in its place a vastly heightened visual awareness that I enjoy. Before I was deaf I thought it would be lonely in the silence but in fact many of life’s best moments—watching rain hit and then run down a window, swimming in the sea, cooking and being with good friends—do not rely upon sound at all; they feel the same way they always did. Sometimes I have felt somewhat of an outsider in the Deaf community. I have sometimes been taken aback by people’s abruptness but I have learned over time that being succinct is valued in Auslan, and some people like to come straight to the point. At crisis points, such as when I asked for help at the Victorian Deaf Society and my Auslan class, it has been a huge relief to talk to Deaf people and know immediately that they understand just from reading their eyes. Having access to an additional world of deaf people has made my life more enjoyable. I feel privileged to be associated with the Deaf community. I can recall a couple of Christmases ago making dinner for some signing friends and suddenly realising that, without noticing, everything had become alright in my world again. Everyone was signing really fast – something I still struggle with; but every now and then someone would stop and summarise so I felt included. It was really relaxed and simply felt like old times, just old times without the sound thrown in. Le Page and Tabouret-Keller, two ethnographers, have this to say about why people communicate the ways they do: The individual ... creates for himself the patterns of his linguistic behaviour so as to resemble those of the group or groups with which from time to time he wishes to be identified, or so as to be unlike those from whom he wishes to be distinguished ... . We see speech acts as acts of projection; the speaker is projecting his inner universe, implicitly with the invitation to others to share it ... he is seeking to reinforce his models of the world, and hopes for solidarity from those with whom he wishes to identify. (181) This quote neatly sums up why I choose to communicate the ways I do. I use Auslan and speech in different situations because I am connected to people in both groups and I want them in my life. I do not feel hugely different from anyone these days. If it is accepted that I have as much to contribute to the community as anyone else, becoming deaf has also meant for me that I expect to see other people treated well and accepted. For me that means contributing my time and thoughts, and advocating. It also means expecting a good level of access to interpreters, to some thought provoking captioned movies in English, and affordable assistive technologies so I can participate. I see this right to participate and engage in genuine dialogue with the rest of the community as central to the aspirations and identity of us all, regardless of who we are or where others think we belong. References Le Page, R.B., and Andree Tabouret-Keller. Acts of Identity: Creole-Based Approaches to Language and Ethnicity. London: Cambridge University Press, 1985. Moorhead, D. “Knowing Who I Am.” In S. Gregory, ed., Deaf Futures Revisited. Block 3, Unit 10, D251 Issues in Deafness. Open University, 1995.

Introduction: How Do We Learn What We Know? “Deaf.” How do we learn what we know about being deaf and about deafness? What’s the difference between “being deaf” and “deafness” as a particular kind of (non) hearing? Which would you rather be, deaf or blind: children commonly ask this question as they make their early forays into imagining the lives of people different from them. Hearing people cannot know what it is like to be deaf, just as deaf people cannot know what it is like to hear ... or can they? Finally, how can we tell fresh and authentic stories of “being deaf” and the state of “deafness” that disrupt our familiar—perhaps even caricatured—patterns of understanding? In this special “deaf” edition of M/C Journal we wanted to create a body of work in which deaf writers and thinkers would have their say. Mindful that "Deaf history may be characterized as a struggle for Deaf individuals to 'speak' for themselves rather than to be spoken about in medical and educational discourses" (Bauman 47), we were particularly keen to place the contributions of deaf writers and thinkers alongside the mainstream hearing culture. This is why we have chosen not to identify each writer in this edition as deaf or hearing, preferring to leave that biographical auditory detail to the writers themselves. We already knew that "there isn't a large body of literature about the deaf by the deaf" (Henry Kisor 3). Thomas Couser writes that "this should not be surprising, for a number of factors militate against deaf autobiography ... making them unlikely and rare entities" (226). And so we welcomed the diversity of topics and range of genres to this edition: they included a playful ficto-critical exploration of deafness; personal reflections on deafness (ranging from regarding it as a condition of hearing loss to a state of being); poetry; a filmography; and several fresh analyses of representations of deafness, hearing technology and deaf people’s lives in theatre, film and television (this was a particularly popular theme); the poetics of embodiment (indeed, embodiment was a recurring theme across many of the submissions); a commentary on the role of interpreters in deaf-hearing relationships; and an analysis of the role of the Web 2.0 and other technology in deaf people’s communications. However, we noted that most of the uncommissioned submissions in response to our call for papers came from hearing people. We had to seek out contributions from deaf writers and thinkers and wondered why this was so. Mainstream publication avenues for writing by deaf people on the topic of deafness are rare in Australia: perhaps deaf writers lack the necessary confidence or belief that they would be read? In this edition, they certainly reveal that they have much to say ... and inspire us to lean in and think carefully about their words. A Deaf Knowingness In writing her poem “The Triton”, Sandra Hoopman was inspired by her frequent visits to her deaf grandmother at her old Lambert Street, Kangaroo Point home, where she had a huge triton on her wrought iron veranda. Her grandmother would put the triton up to her ear and show Sandra how to 'listen' to it so that she could ‘hear’ the sea. Her poetry recalls to mind Robert Panara's most-quoted poem, “On His Deafness”, in which he imagined that he might even hear 'the rustle of a star!' Following Sandra Hoopman’s poem, we are pleased to feature the essay “Body Language” by Jessica White, shortlisted for the ABR 2010 Calibre Prize, and Sydney Morning Herald Best Young Novelist for 2008 for her first novel A Curious Intimacy (Penguin 2008). In her essay, Jessica playfully explores the idea of not having a singular fixed identity by traversing a dialogue between the imagination and the character of Jessica, showing different selves at play and in conversation, and again in conversation with others at the ficto-critical room and with the ideas articulated by different authors. As with post-structuralist explorations, the essay emphasises the active and formative nature of language, story and ideas, which help us to deconstruct and reformulate versions of our lives and its possibilities. Play is a device that enables people to move beyond the confines of the social world. The joyful spirit of White’s essay is signalled when she writes: For example, there are still immense possibilities thrown up by theorising a jouissance, or pleasure, in the disabled body. As Susan Wendell points out, “paraplegics and quadriplegics have revolutionary things to teach us about the possibilities of sexuality which contradict patriarchal culture’s obsessions with the genitals” (120). Thus if there were more of a focus on the positive aspects of disability and on promoting the understanding that disability is not about lack, people could see how it fosters creativity and imagination. White’s essay is a ‘picaresque’, following a traveller who narrates her adventures and encounters. It is a wonderful model for narratives of difference as it departs, refreshingly, from mainstream Hollywood-style plot conventions, i.e of progress through conflict towards a climax and resolution. Instead, the picaresque allows for a variety of roles, settings and pathways for the wanderer, multiple characters and illuminating dialogues. It demonstrates literally as well as figuratively, productive encounters with the Other, jolting us into new understandings, ways of knowing and possibilities of being. In this way, White’s essay “Body Language” sets a thematically rich tone for this special “deaf” issue of M/C Journal. Through her essay and the following narratives, commentaries, articles and essays, we are immersed in the theme of the importance (and liberating possibilities) of contesting fixed and limited images, disrupting the representations and labels that are so readily assigned to the deaf or deafness. Different strategies and styles are employed, from figurative creative writing or life narrative to the critical essay or media analysis. Yet all contributions emphasise shifting perceptions, commence from a position of not being comfortable with the given representations or ideas that surround deaf identity. The personal narratives and essays assert a strong sense of disjuncture between deaf reality and common representations and ideas of deafness. Reading these contributions, we gain an acute sense of not being at one with the image or idea of a deaf person, not being at one with the social world, not being any one thing but rather many different and varying things and roles. The conditions of possibility are touched upon in the personal reflective pieces, resonating with the critical essays in their exploration of the possibilities of destabilizing hegemonic representations. For example, in “Becoming Deaf”, Karen McQuigg’s personal reflective essay, she describes several stages of the deaf experience. Her description of her son’s responses and adaptations is moving, and Karen mines a range of emotional responses to deafness. She shares with the reader the advice and support she received from other people: some readers will remember with affection the role of Elizabeth Hastings and John Lovett in the Australian Deaf community. McQuigg’s reflections sharply highlight the fluid nature of our individual experience and understanding of deafness. She (and we do too) shifts from what was experienced and understood initially as a blank, a not-comprehending—a ‘blank’ that is linked with loss and constraints, grief, suffering and isolation—to a discovery of how those views and experiences can change, along with changing environment and opportunities. This comes across also in Christy L Reid’s piece “Journey of a Deaf-Blind Woman”: possibilities are linked with where the narrator is living, with life events as varied as training and job opportunities, changes in health, marriage, the birth and development of children, child rearing, and of personal triumphs. Michael Uniacke’s personal essay “Fluid Identities: A Journey of Terminology” has much in common with Jessica White’s essay as he too engages playfully with his ideas. He uses language and figurative play to challenge the reader’s understandings of deaf identity, and to demonstrate the fluid and multiple nature of identity. For example, his opening anecdote about the Hearing Impaired Businessman plays to an embodiment of the idea that many people have, through categories and labels, of a deaf person, as Other, a caricature figure with no interiority or humour or nuanced life. Uniacke engages with this figure in a kind of dialogue, making him surreal, highlighting his typecast nature. By the end of his essay, Michael has shown us how identity can be context-specific and composed of many parts. In “Interpreters in Our Midst”, Breda Carty takes us on a jaunty, personal and engaging commentary that provokes the reader into taking a fresh look at the role of interpreters in mediating/translating relationships between deaf and hearing people. She asks, ‘When interpreters are in our midst, whose interests are they representing? And why are those interests not always clear to the observer?’ Originally written as a short piece for the Australian Sign Language Interpreters' Association (ASLIA), the article is informed by Breda’s immersion in particular professional and personal communities and experiences. While the tone of her commentary is light-hearted, using film screen representations of interpreters to illustrate her points, Breda nevertheless succeeds in politicizing the subject of interpretation and interpreters. She makes us aware of the social assumptions and hierarchies that structure our understanding of interpreting, which, if left unexamined, might seem a neutral and apolitical practice. Rebecca Sánchez makes an exciting contribution to the field of poetry. In her paper “Hart Crane's Speaking Bodies: New Perspectives on Modernism and Deafness”, Rebecca writes about looking for ideas about deafness in unexpected places, namely the poetry of hearing modernist Hart Crane. Taking up the theme of embodiment, evident in several other papers in this edition, Rebecca offers an interesting connection between a poetics of embodiment—Crane was influenced by Walt Whitman, a trail-blazer in embodied language in American poetry—and the more literal embodiment of manual languages. Although Hart Crane was not writing about deafness per se, his work explores the potential of embodied languages to alter the ways in which we interact with one another. When asked to define deafness, most people’s first response is to think of levels of hearing loss, of deficiency, or disability. By contrast, Crane’s non-literal approach provides a more constructive understanding of what communicative difference can mean, and how it can affect our und,erstanding of language itself. Rebecca’s essay's strength arises from its demonstration of Crane's desire to imagine the possibility of a language that lives within the body as rich and enabling, as are manual languages. Miriam Nathan Lerner’s professional training as a librarian is evident in her filmography “The Narrative Function of Deafness and Deaf Characters in Film”. During 2010, she is collaborating with a technical support faculty member at the Rochester National Technical Institute of the Deaf to design a website with quick-time windows so that the reader can click on and watch film clips of the works she references in her filmography. A lively, chatty introduction to some forty-three films with deaf characters and deafness, in which she provides her admittedly quirky approach to categorisation, Miriam Lerner’s filmography will one day be recognised in the same breath as Jonathon Miller’s “Rustle of a Star: An Annotated Bibliography of Deaf Characters in Fiction.” (Miller was also a librarian: they obviously possess the requisite skills of categorisation!) Pamela Kincheloe’s article “Do Androids Dream of Electric Speech? The Construction of Cochlear Implant Identity on American Television and the ‘New Deaf Cyborg’” offers an important analysis of popular (mis)conceptions of deafness and ‘assistive technologies’ as is evident from American television representations of deaf people with Cochlear Implants. She notes the prevalence of cochlear implants in television drama, identifies a couple of very limited narrative frames that dominate such representations, and discusses their implications. In her discussion of the ‘abject’ horror associated in television series with the cochlear implant recipient (often already a corpse) Kincheloe asserts that the Cochlear Implant technology is increasingly used in such narratives to convey intensified anxieties, not only about the deaf Other, but also about technology and the emergent ‘cyborgs’, humans modified by technology. Sharon Pajka-West’s well-researched article “Deaf Characters in Adolescent Fiction”, excerpted from her doctorate thesis, originated in a request from a young deaf reader for a book with which she could connect. Pajka-West takes us on her pursuit to fulfil this request, giving us many fascinating insights along the way. Her blog is essential reading not only for anyone interested in the field of adolescent literature, but also for those who understand the significance of providing young deaf readers access to literature in which the multiple possibilities for deaf lives, deaf identities, and deafness are canvassed. In her article “Marginalising the Mainstream: A Signed Performance of The Miracle Worker”, Caroline Heim places deaf issues centre-stage. Her thesis is that a way needs to be found to increase access to theatrical events for the deaf. She tackles this by viewing a Crossbow Production performance of The Miracle Worker (the story of the teaching relationship between Helen Keller and Annie Sullivan from different perspectives: accessibility, funding, plot construction and actors’ interpretation, the detail of production design (sound, colour and tactile) and the use of theatrical device, and post performance discussion. Arguably, Heim’s article might have benefited from more focus on the concept of inclusion, rather than exclusion. The claim that not enough money is given to providing ‘access’ for the deaf to mainstream productions may be difficult to uphold as a stand-alone argument when the budget of the majority of Australian theatre companies would highlight the fiscal difficulty they have just getting productions on the stage. All the same, Heim’s article provokes us, the reader, into investigating the many layered meanings of ‘access’ and also reminds us, yet again, of theatre’s potential magic in engaging audiences across all spheres of life. In her essay “Looking across the Hearing Line”, Nicole Matthews has written a stimulating paper on youth, Deaf people, and new media. Her paper is especially interesting as an exploration of the intersection between disability and Web 2.0 technologies. In particular, Matthews picks up a thread of Web 2.0 technologies relating to visual communication and expression to provide some insights into the emerging, complex nature of Deaf users’ engagement with digital media in contrast with the continuing problems of inaccessibility and exclusion in the mainstream world. Conclusion: Learning Our Knowingness from What We Don’t Know This special “deaf” issue of M/C Journal is not a “project”, in the Modern sense of that word, i.e. a unified collective effort to define identity, in this case deaf identity, or to consolidate and express a unique world view. Nor does it seek to enlighten the public about what it is to be deaf. Such a totalising project would inevitably suppress heterogeneity and the specificities of people’s lives. Rather, this collection offers many different particular and localised accounts - some personal and poetic, some analytical, some working through critique - which explore the conditions of possibility for human subjects, and in particular, people who are deaf. The contributions highlight in very different ways the complex and shifting fields within which people’s lives and experiences are formed. These works give us insight into the varied and changing social and environmental conditions that not only shape our lives but are in turn shaped by who we are and by our practices and choices. The constraints and possibilities of people’s lives change significantly and differ widely. They are linked inextricably with where people are, in terms of geography or location, and with the circumstances they find themselves in or create for themselves: circumstances of gender, family, social networks, economics, education, work, lifestyle, health or illness, physical abilities, differences and limitations. These works stress the highly contingent nature of human social development and the fluidity of deaf experience rather than identity. Identity shifts and takes on meaning in relation to others and situations; we come to know who we are through a process of differentiating ourselves from others and from identities that we do not feel comfortable with. In almost all of these accounts here experiences of deafness are not the same those conjured up by labels or stereotypes. This act of disassociation from the usual notions of deafness, highlights that our received language and labels do not give us knowledge. Disavowal reminds us that we do not know, except through some disruptive encounter with the Other, whether that is the otherness of our own deafness or the deafness of others. These writings that demonstrate the particularity and detail of deaf people’s experiences, enable us to know the limits and inaccuracies of the labels and identities so commonly assigned to deafness and the deaf. Thus, we come back to the beginning and find our equivocal, tentative answers to the question, ‘how do we learn what we know about being deaf and deafness?’ We learn what we know in various ways, yet hearing or deaf, we are exposed to particular ideas of deafness, limiting labels and assumptions that reinforce ‘ableist’ values. These writings have demonstrated the proliferation of limited stereotypes; they recur in narratives, news stories, television and films, and have power regardless of their disconnection from the real, and from the lived experience of deafness. It is a significant starting point to recognise the limitations of what we think we already know, through our media and social institutions, of deafness. These essays and writings represent a different epistemology; they explore not what deafness is or how it can be defined, but different ways of knowing deafness. References Couser, G. Thomas. “Signs of Life: Deafness and Personal Narrative” Ch. 6 in Recovering Bodies: Illness, Disability, and Life Writing. Wisconsin: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. Bauman, H-Dirksen L. “Voicing Deaf Identity: Through the ‘I’s’ and Ears of an Other.” In S. Smith, and J. Watson, eds., Getting a Life: Everyday Uses of Autobiography. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989. 47-62. Kisor, Henry. What’s That Pig Outdoors? A Memoir of Deafness. New York: Hill and Wang, 1990.

Thesis (Ph. D.)--University of California, Riverside, 2009.<br>Includes abstract. Available via ProQuest Digital Dissertations. Title from first page of PDF file (viewed March 24, 2010). Includes bibliographical references (p. 339-360). Also issued in print.

This article examines the life and work of the elusive modernist writer Beatrice Hastings, Katherine Mansfield’s sometime friend, mentor and rival. Frequently, Hastings has been misrepresented or marginalised in accounts of the period. When we turn to the writings she produced when in Paris from 1914, however, Hastings emerges as a central, noteworthy figure in the avant-garde art scene during and immediately after the ‘crisis’ years of the First World War. This article considers the autobiographical ‘Impressions of Paris’ that Hastings published from 1914 in the British periodical The New Age, the surrealist novella that she recited in 1916 at a literary and musical matinee organised by Guillaume Apollinaire, and the hospital diary composed in 1920 in which she recounts details of her turbulent love affair with Amedeo Modigliani.