Sign-deaf spaces The Deaf in Cape Town creating community, crossing boundaries, constructing identity.

The paper examines how adults in Cape Town who were born deaf or who became deaf as children and whose first language is South African Sign, strategise to deal with being marginalised in a hearing world. The paper draws on a long-term study (September 1995 to December 2001). Using ethnographic evidence, it demonstrates sign-deaf spaces as community. ‘Community’ entails networks of social relationships that function to create spaces of shared sign language, familiarity, sociability and communality in an often hostile hearing world. The boundaries of the sign-deaf spaces are difficult to determine. In sociable contexts signed language facilitates interactions across spoken language barriers, locally and internationally. Sign language proves to be a marker of Deaf identity in certain hearing contexts but importantly it serves to disperse identity in the sign-deaf space. The paradoxical outcome is that in the sign-deaf space the Deaf are rarely ‘deaf’, certainly not in any socially handicapped or deficit way. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]