Deaf education from the perspective of Black Feminism

Abstract

This article aims to investigate how the theme of gender has been treated in research aimed at the education of the deaf. To this end, a bibliographic survey was carried out in the Scientific Electronic Library Online - SciELO and Google Scholar databases. We searched texts published between 2008 and 2018,  using the following search words: “deaf,” “deafness,” “gender,” “sexuality,” and “sex.” We found that research in the area of ??deafness tends to consider only the linguistic aspects of the deaf. Even when discussing deaf identity, issues such as ethnicity/race, gender, sexuality and social class are left in the background or are not even mentioned. The deaf population is still moving towards being recognized and having their language respected; probably for this reason, these themes in the scope of educational research have proved to be little discussed. It is necessary to consider, however, that the deaf community is not homogeneous. There are intersectionalities that can affect the lives of the people who are part of this population. The discrimination suffered by being a deaf person is aggravated if added to racism, sexism and LGBTphobia. It is necessary to study the overlap between deafness-ethnicity/race - gender and sexuality in the list of interests of researchers in Special Education and Inclusion in order to redefine concepts and practices aimed at the deaf population, which for a long time was stripped and curtailed of their rights.