Octavian Robinson: Respectability Politics in American Deaf Cultural History: Campaigns Against Deaf Peddlers...

Through the lens of the anti-peddling campaigns undertaken by a group of elite deaf people during the late nineteenth until the mid-twentieth century, we understand how whiteness, class, masculinity, disability and ability converged with language politics in attempts to influence American public policy governing the presence of disabled bodies in public spaces while addressing economic (or class in relation to hearing able-bodied white Americans) inequity. Those same campaigns also illustrate fallacies in the oft-proclaimed view of deafness by Deaf Studies scholars as an encompassing identity where the shared experience of deafness trumps intersectional identities. Instead, those campaigns reveal a complex, nuanced demographic that mirrored but yet struggled with dominant American attitudes.  Dr. Robinson holds the College of the Holy Cross' first tenure-track position in Deaf Studies. He has chapters in three collections from Gallaudet University Press in addition to published work with Sage Publications, Facts on File Press, and Sign Language Studies. He has a Ph.D. in History from The Ohio State University