In Our Own Hands

This book examines the development of deaf people's autonomy and citizenship discourses as they sought access to full citizenship rights in local and national settings. The essays in this collection explore deaf peoples' claims to autonomy in their personal, religious, social, and organizational lives, and reveal how these debates overlapped with social trends and spilled out into particular physical and social spaces such as clubs, churches, and within families. The contributors demonstrate that as deaf people pushed for their rights as citizens, they met with resistance from hearing people, and the results of their efforts were decidedly mixed.