Akademik Veri Yönetim Sistemi
The 9th BAKEA (International Western Cultural and Literary Studies Symposium), Konya, Türkiye, 15 - 17 Eylül 2025, ss.12, (Özet Bildiri)
“The Abjection of Deafness: Sign, Silence, and the Politics of Language in Nina Raine’s Tribes”
Lecturer Dr Melike İrem ALHAS, TED University, irem.simsek@tedu.edu.tr, 0000-0002-1041-6988
Nina Raine’s Tribes (2010)
challenges the dominant fiction of deafness as lack, reconfiguring it instead
as a space of linguistic richness, cultural identity, and embodied
epistemology. The play centres on a hearing family who, while apparently
inclusive, impose assimilationist expectations on Billy, their deaf son, by
insisting on lip-reading and spoken language while refusing to learn sign. This
dynamic positions deafness as an absence to be corrected, reinforcing ableist
norms under the guise of familial cohesion. This paper argues that Tribes
exposes and critiques the abjection of deafness through both narrative and
dramaturgical strategies. Drawing on Julia Kristeva’s theory of abjection and
key insights from disability studies, it explores how the family’s rejection of
sign language marks the deaf body as disruptive to the symbolic order. Billy’s
encounter with Sylvia—a hearing woman fluent in sign and raised by deaf
parents—initiates a reclamation of deaf identity and gestures toward a
counter-discourse rooted in visual and embodied language. Raine’s integration
of untranslated sign, strategic silences, and fragmented communication
destabilises the audience’s reliance on auditory comprehension, unsettling the
privileged status of speech in both theatre and society. Thus, Tribes
dismantles the reductive association of deafness with deficiency by
foregrounding the structural marginalisation of the deaf subject, and reclaims deafness
as a site of resistance and alternative knowledge.
Keywords:
Deafness, abjection, disability studies, sign language, British drama.