My Role in the "Linguistic Awakening" of the Deaf in France

Abstract

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

• My Role in the "Linguistic Awakening" of the Deaf in France
• Marie-Thérése L'huillier (bio)

Born deaf, I was immersed in the treasures of LSF (Langue des Signes Français), thanks to my deaf parents. At school, LSF was banished in favor of oralism. During my childhood, the status of my sign language was dichotomous: it existed at home as a mother language and was forbidden at the boarding school in Asnières. At the age of sixteen, I left school with a diploma in sewing.

This article briefly traces my career path, which was initially influenced more by my personal experience than by academic studies, although I did complete studies for a BA and an MA later in my career. By chance, in 1977, the unexpected knocked at the door of my office at the Ministry of Labor, where I was working as a typist. It was my first meeting with Alfredo Corrado, an American deaf actor, and Jean Grémion, a French hearing actor, who led me to a new world at the International Visual Theater (IVT), which they founded that year. My first awareness of the historical banning of LSF dates back to when I became part of the original IVT group. This experience changed my career path and inspired me to become involved in the defense of the linguistic rights of LSF signers. [End Page 376]

Now, considering LSF to be a real language, I dedicated myself to jobs linked to LSF and Deaf culture. Being a young deaf militant woman of deaf parents, I fully participated in the emancipation and the mobilization of the Deaf community of France to defend LSF in Paris, as well as in the provinces, being inspired by the American Deaf movement (France 5 TV 2011). While being a pioneer, I led several professional lives, sometimes overlapping, over forty-three years, notably as teacher (1979–2008), storyteller on the television program Mes mains ont la parole (My Hands Have the Word, 1979–1985), producer of the adult television program L'oeil et la main (The Eye and the Hand, 1994–2003), and teacher, lecturer, and researcher in LSF (2008–2018).

Emergence of Individual and Collective Awareness in the Deaf Community

I will now describe the personal and professional stages of my linguistic and metalinguistic awareness of my mother tongue (LSF) and of written French.

On a visit to France in the early 1970s, the American deaf actor Alfredo Corrado noticed that French deaf people were much more isolated than American deaf people in terms of accessibility. That is why he and Jean Grémion, a French hearing actor, created a theater for the deaf at the Château de Vincennes in Paris in 1976—the International Visual Theater (IVT). They explained that theater is a way to change the way the hearing world looks at deaf people in France and is thus a way to defend our linguistic and cultural rights.

Prior to the creation of the IVT, deaf people—including my parents and me—lived in great misery and faced all kinds of obstacles to accessing knowledge, media, and means of communication. We were unaware of the true linguistic status of our own sign language, which had been prohibited for a long time. Deaf and hearing people have always lived side by side, and yet exchanges remained limited. Each group was unaware of the cultural and linguistic richness of the other.

As soon as I entered the working world in 1976, I felt a linguistic and cultural gap between LSF and French. I had acquired a solid knowledge of the social and cultural context of my mother minority [End Page 377] language, but I lagged behind in understanding the social and cultural context of the majority language.

At that time, the signs for referring to or conceptualizing LSF had not yet emerged, and the notion of Deaf culture was still abstract for many. Corrado and Grémion IVT productions touched on the theme of the colonization of different cultures and languages of the world, and how this led to new discoveries. For me, there was no going back after I left IVT. I decided to dedicate...