The deaf community could not have come into existence without places where socially isolated deaf people could gather and develop relationships based on common experiences and characteristics. Deaf clubs provided the hub of deaf community life and emerged from a number of local voluntary organisations set up to assist deaf people in their daily lives. In this chapter, the development of the deaf welfare organisations during the nineteenth century is outlined and set within the wider context of welfare provision during the Victorian era. An argument is made that the 1834 Poor Law Amendment Act was a major influence on the formation of deaf societies and independent welfare organisations. Deaf clubs developed as the social arms of these welfare societies and went on to play an integral part in bonding deaf people together as a community. Without the deaf clubs, the deaf community would have had no geographical focus and deaf people would have had nowhere to come together to socialise and enjoy a range of leisure and sporting activities.

Deaf clubs would have remained to some extent isolated, self-contained communities without some means of maintaining contact and sharing information with each other. The main form for this communication was provided by a series of publications aimed at deaf people, the most important being British Deaf News (BDN). These newspapers and magazines allowed deaf people to keep abreast of events outside their own club and helped to maintain contact across the British deaf community, with large sections of each issue devoted to the social activities of the various deaf clubs and their members from across the United Kingdom. Because of this, BDN provides a wealth of information on the social and leisure activities of deaf people. This chapter outlines the history of deaf newspapers, emphasising their importance as historical documents and defining the unique insight they provide into the lived experience of being a deaf sign language user in post-war Britain.

The end of twentieth century and the beginning of twenty-first century were marked by two phenomena, the increasing production of, and interest in biography and autobiography, alongside an intense (re)engagement with traditional, creative, craft-based labours, particularly cookery and horticulture. The arrival on the booksellers' shelves since 1990 of a number of autobiographic 'escape' narratives is testimony both to the act of migration and the act of writing about it. Richard Sennett claims in The Craftsman 'that the craft of making physical things provides insight into the techniques of experience that can shape our dealings with others'. A recent British Academy debate, Posterity: Present concerns with the future suggested that 'post-war social and economic debacles and looming ecological disaster have bred despair and anomie' and that 'without hope for posterity, life becomes bleak and society self-destructs'.

This chapter provides an overview of the types and frequency of leisure activities reported by deaf clubs in British Deaf News. The chapter includes a statistical analysis of reports taken from British Deaf News to determine types and popularity of leisure activity. Regional variations are highlighted together with patterns across the research period (1945-1995) as wider social trends developed and declined. Changes in communal deaf leisure which reflected changes in the nature of the British deaf community are also explored. This chapter provides a national context for the next section of the book, which comprises a case study of north-west England.

In relating narrative to identity, this chapter examines how a time-related structure forms a critical element of meaning when constant change and short-term market-driven goals deny the relevance of the past and make experience episodic rather than continuous. If the flexibility, fragmentation and impermanence characteristic of the new economy are corroding our character, the search may point to situations in which other more durable and desirable human qualities can be developed and demonstrated. When mankind, at the top of the evolutionary tree, hubristically assigns primacy of being to itself, the traditions, laws and heroes must be sought within society. In seeking escape from the workplace, migrants appear to take both a physical and spiritual journey in a move to recapture and espouse actions, values, attitudes and behaviours lost in the Anglo-American cultural model.

Public perceptions of deafness and deaf people have been heavily influenced by medical views that deaf people suffer from a disability. For a significant proportion of the deaf population, these negative perceptions are at odds with the way they see themselves. These deaf people regard themselves as members of a vibrant deaf community, based on shared language and a common culture. This chapter clarifies what is meant by the terms ‘deaf community’ and ‘deaf culture’ by unpacking various models that attempt to determine who belongs in the deaf community, and what the cultural aspects of that community involve. A closer examination of these theoretical models indicates that certain aspects do not sit easily with the reality of deaf life. These models will therefore be challenged in the light of the evidence of deaf people’s shared leisure activities which will be presented in later chapters. A case will be made for taking a much broader view of who actually constitutes the deaf community than is suggested by these models.

This chapter outlines the scope of the book, introducing historical concepts and perceptions of disability, the popular connections made between deafness and disability, and the more recent approaches of social and cultural historians to disability, minority and community histories. The Introduction also highlights the processes by which the data for this research was collected, making innovative use of deaf newspapers and the way these were produced to provide unique insights into the deaf experience in Britain. The introduction then moves on to illustrate how this information has been used to inform an analysis of deaf leisure and sport and the ways in which broader theories of leisure as a basis for community cohesion can be applied to deaf people.

This chapter examines how the migrant women navigate the patriarchal norms and cultural expectations that commodify them as objects of Chinese national desire, positioning the bodies of white women as social capital within the Chinese marriage market and immigration system. These women’s presence is valued as a means to enhance the social standing of their Chinese husbands and their families, with their reproductive potential seen as a resource for nurturing future Chinese citizens. I argue that, despite their roles as wives and mothers, foreign women often remain as guests within their own families, as their ‘uterine power’ isn’t sufficient to guarantee their inclusion and form of belonging. To protect themselves from patriarchal pressures, these women draw on maternal instincts, social networks and strategic navigation of citizenship policies and bureaucratic loopholes, creating a delicate balance of autonomy within a system that otherwise seeks to subsume.

This chapter contextualises deaf leisure within a wider understanding of the ways shared leisure activities underpin feelings of communion and community amongst groups of people. The chapter defines ‘leisure’ as it is used throughout this book, and addresses the ways in which shared leisure help define ‘insiders and outsiders’. The discussion moves on to consider the role of leisure and sport in the deaf community and investigates the ways in which these mirror and emphasise similarities and differences between mainstream leisure and the deaf community.

The Introduction frames the book’s research within the local histories and sociopolitical dynamics of the Chinese–Russian border region, which have fostered the creation and popularisation of the ‘Russian brides’ village myth in Northeast China. It explores how Chinese–Russian marriages have come to symbolise an idealised form of transnational union in Chinese media narratives. This chapter also outlines the book’s theoretical and methodological approaches, introducing the concepts of hyperreality and intimate and embodied geopolitics. It provides a roadmap for its central arguments, guiding the reader through its interdisciplinary analysis.