Restorying Deaf Representations Through #OwnVoices Comics

• In Event: Multimodality and Translanguaging: Critical Perspectives

Abstract

Deaf children and young adults, especially those with minoritized, intersectional identities, rarely see themselves or their cultural communities represented in books. Furthermore, existing representations are predominately created by hearing authors and perpetuate deficit views. In this paper, I describe a popular framework—models of deafness—for analyzing portrayals of deaf individuals in multimodal texts. I analyze two comics by a deaf creator, drawing on social semiotic (Kress, 2003) and critical discourse (Gee, 2011) analyses to explore how the possibilities and tensions of the models live in the comics. I conclude with a discussion of a more critically heteroglossic framework (Rosa & Flores, 2017; Gutiérrez & Rogoff, 2003; Morrison, 1998; Pratt, 1991) to explore representations of deaf people in children’s and young adult literature.

Author

• Betsy Beckert, Boston University