Austria's hidden conflict: hearing culture versus deaf culture

Authors: Franz Dotter, Ingeborg Okorn

In: Many Ways to Be Deaf: International Variation in Deaf Communities, Gallaudet University Press, 2003

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"The goal of this chapter is to examine the situation of deaf people from an Austrian perspective and to compare this situation to general patterns of social behavior.

A key characteristic of the situation is the conflict between hearing and deaf culture, rarely perceived by the larger Austrian society. We see only its result: the suffering of the people in a weaker position-deaf people themselves, many times hearing parents of deaf children, and sometimes interpreters and teachers.

The effects of this conflict include inadequate access to the benefits of hearing society, ostracization, illness, and frustration. This conflict has deep-seated, partially tabooed, multifaceted causes. In many hearing and deaf people-possibly also in ourselves, one hearing and one deaf researcher-there are at least residues of thought patterns and behaviors that promote these problems instead of solve them.

Before we discuss how this conflict manifests itself today, however, we will look at its origins by considering the history of deaf people in Austria."