Since the creation of American Sign Language, deaf community activists in the United States have fought to sustain Deaf culture and language in face of an unreceptive—or even hostile—hearing majority. In Signs And Wonders: Religious Rhetoric and the Preservation of Sign Language, Tracy Ann Morse argues that religious rhetoric has been central to those efforts, by providing the American “deaf community with a powerful language to convey its authority in its struggles to preserve sign language” (4). Morse historically traces the centrality of religious rhetoric in the “locations of schools, the sanctuary, and the social activism of deaf people” from the early 19th century until the present (9). Morse positions her project at the nexus of disability, religious, and rhetorical studies—disciplines that, she observes, are rarely in dialogue and have yet to critically examine “many facets of the deaf community’s activism” (87).
A Journal of Community-Engaged Writing and Rhetoric