Biopolitics in Modern Romania

Romanian society experienced great challenges after World War I (WWI). Romania had enormous casualties; every town and village lost men at the front. Many civilians also died, and the number of people with disabilities grew significantly. While the country doubled in size and population, it also became a much more complex set of institutions, traditions, beliefs, understandings of citizenship, belonging, and health. Before the war, the country was more than 90% ethnically Romanian and Christian Orthodox. Afterwards, this percentage went down to around 70%.Footnote ¹⁰ The Bucharest authorities responded to the growing presence of minoritized ethnic and religious groups by developing institutions that supported the “national unitary” framework of the state. Populations in the newly acquired territories, including some ethnic Romanians, resisted these actions. But the government continued to push against local autonomy and cultural diversity in education and public administration, including public health and disability policies. With one exception, the ten schools for children with disabilities during this period used Romanian exclusively, even when, in the case of Cluj, a sizeable proportion of the regional population were not native Romanian speakers.Footnote ¹¹

Doctors played a growing role in public policy after Romania became a state in 1864.Footnote ¹² But it was not until after 1918 that public health became an area of core policy interest with the founding of the Ministry of Labor in 1920.Footnote ¹³ Medical research was gaining ground during this period and began to strongly influence legislation around military conscription, work accident insurance, education, and public health.Footnote ¹⁴ Eugenicist perspectives on public health gained both academic and wider public support. Eugenicist doctors had regular columns in mainstream dailies, introducing and constantly reiterating vocabulary that insisted on connecting individual health to the body of the nation, understood in bio-essentializing terms.Footnote ¹⁵

Doctors, policy makers, and educators, started to define disability as a range of “abnormal” and “subnormal” biological conditions that required state rehabilitation or policing. For war veterans, the terminology “invalid” was used as way to signal the loss of physical function that veterans had experienced and to distinguish their disabilities from other populations.Footnote ¹⁶ As men who sacrificed their health to double the size of Romania, they were framed as an elite group of citizens deserving exclusive rights, from economic to educational and medical.Footnote ¹⁷ But “invalid” also appears in references to illness or disability present in the general population, generating confusion about the specific relationship between impairments and the category of people who lived with them, as well as the specific rights “invalids” were entitled to.Footnote ¹⁸

The eugenicist medical discourse gaining ground in the 1920s and becoming state policy in the 1930s framed disability as a burden on the family, society, and the state, in relation to lack of participation in economic life, with specific gendered and ethnic or racial components that referred to moral dimensions of disability.Footnote ¹⁹ Below I offer examples of prominent studies that used such definitions to discuss criminality in a bio-essentialist framework. These works were reviewed in the popular press across the political spectrum as valuable scientific contributions to understanding social problems in Romania at that time.

Deafness by Numbers in the Press: A Few Quantitative Parameters

In this dynamic environment, newspapers functioned as an important force for disseminating the ethnonationalist perspective of the political elites as well as debating the value of specific cultural, political, and economic changes Romanian society was undergoing. Disability became an arena of discussion and contestation, framed by overlapping public discourses and state policies, together with divergent popular understandings of disability.Footnote ²⁰ The result is a wide spectrum of possible understandings, a cacophonous epistemic framework.

Before delving into the use of the terminology, a few quantitative parameters are necessary. The 1899 census counted a little under 5000 deaf people in Romania, 0.08% of the total population.Footnote ²¹ The 1930 census counted 20,836 deaf persons, or 0.11% of the total population.Footnote ²² Deafness was not something most people experienced firsthand or in their families. Their understanding of the condition was based on indirect sources that included newspapers.Footnote ²³

To make sense of these elements, I focus on references to deafness in a database of thousands of publications from Romania from 1920 to 1939.Footnote ²⁴ The database includes the most prominent national dailies, as well as regional papers from the entire country. It covers subject-specific periodicals, like sports and cultural dailies and magazines. It represents the most comprehensive online collection of the Romanian press.Footnote ²⁵ The database offers trends from year to year. I am a qualitative analyst, but seeing trends represented in quantitative terms so starkly as they appear here, I examined all 3278 articles, however brief, including advertisements, to figure out what this statistic, of roughly one reference every two days, signifies regarding trends in the meaning attached to the word “deaf.” The examples I offer below are purposefully selected from a variety of newspapers, to show that political orientation, size of the readership, location of the paper, and other individuated particularities do not corelate with differences in attitudes. They provide vivid illustrations of language and subtext that appear recurrently throughout the period. The only significant consistent difference in the use of normativizing language and purpose is between publications put out by deaf editors versus the rest.

The number of references to deafness in relation to previous periods of time is starkly greater: In the nineteenth century, there are around 700 references to the key term “surdo mut” (deaf mute), with around 600 grouped in the last two decades of that century; the number of references goes up to nearly 1000 between 1900 and 1920, and peaks at 3287 between 1920 and 1939. Between 1940 and 1960 it goes down to a little less than 1300 and then 930, 760, and 644 for each two following decades. At three times more than the previous two decades, and 2.5 more than the next two decades, the interwar years stand out as the period of greatest attention to this topic and with the most varied and intensely represented set of references. In short, to understand what “deafness” came to mean in public discourse after WWI, examining the rhetorical uses of the word over the interwar period is essential.

This is also a period of uneven literacy, with an average of 69% for men and 45.5% for women, and with a predominantly rural population (80% of the total) with lower levels of literacy than the urban.Footnote ²⁶ What follows is rhetoric that had a greater impact in urban areas, with rural populations more likely to be affected by these publications indirectly: rural professionals, such as teachers, priests, and the local administration, were the likely readers of newspapers and contributed to disseminating news about deafness to the rest of the inhabitants. For instance, announcements about places available at schools for the deaf, which appeared regularly in most newspapers, would have been items to mention to parents with school-age deaf children.Footnote ²⁷ To what extent such news was communicated to all such parents is another matter. I cannot even speculate on the extent to which minoritized populations, like Roma families, were informed about such educational opportunities.

There is also the matter of fluency in Romanian, which for 30% of Romania’s interwar period is still not clear. Newspapers in Hungarian and German printed announcements about places available at schools for the deaf. But other references to deafness do not replicate the Romanian language press and therefore I limit myself to references in Romanian, the official language that also provides specific uses of the terminology in terms of law, policy making, and academic expertise.

The themes presented below emerged from my reading of all the references to deafness. They emerged from the frequency with which they were represented in the press. I group my analysis along several basic tropes that scholars identify as prevalent in news reporting.Footnote ²⁸ The extent to which “deaf” is used metaphorically versus descriptively is one set of considerations. Metaphorical use both deploys existing discursive tropes and rearticulates them, helping us understand what connotations are most associated with the term in the Romanian context of the time.Footnote ²⁹ What sort of archetypal characters the deaf represent in news stories is another important consideration. Whether they are protagonists—hero, villain, or victim—or secondary players helps us understand what typologies are built and what sort of affective reaction the papers elicit from readers.Footnote ³⁰ Finally, who gets to speak for whom—hearing journalists in relation to deaf subjects and activists, in particular—is an important element of how stereotypes circulate and are challenged.Footnote ³¹

Deafness as Metaphor

In many references “deafness” is used metaphorically, always with a negative connotation, something by no means unique to Romania or the interwar period.Footnote ³² Stereotypes about deafness abound in the form of crass derogatory humor, suggesting meanings the authors assumed were shared by the readers. There are hundreds of references to deafness as a metaphor for selective hearing/attention, rather than a given condition, in cartoons or in describing political parties and politicians: these people are not to be trusted because they choose not to listen and remain deaf to our concerns. Deafness is represented as a sign of irresponsible behavior on the part of elected officials. It is used to describe villains.Footnote ³³

Such allusions are strongly gendered. In newspaper pages dedicated to humor, there are recurring references especially to women practicing selective hearing when it came to listening and especially taking direction from their husbands. Uppity women pursuing their own agenda with no regard for the wishes or commands of their husbands were depicted as vectors of emasculation.Footnote ³⁴ In these rhetorical uses, deafness becomes a villainous power held over a man, humiliated by the lack of respect on the part of his wife.

In other representations, domestic violence is normalized as a subject for laughter through the lens of metaphoric deafness. In the image below, the neighbors discuss a domestic dispute. A visible physical altercation is rendered funny because it’s only “the deaf-mute talking with his wife” (Figure 1). What might be construed as the act of a violent protagonist (the husband) becomes defanged as sign language. Metaphorical uses thus render the meaning of “deaf” very plastic and linked to other stereotypes, in this case about gender.

Figure 1.

“Un fel de a vorbi,” Universul literar 43, no. 14, April 5, 1925, 8. The full exchange is: “What’s with this ruckus Mrs. Roza? It’s the deaf-mute upstairs, he’s talking with his wife.”

Figure 1 Long description

The illustration depicts two people standing outside a house, engaged in conversation. One person is wearing an apron and holding a broom, while the other is wearing a hat and coat. They are looking towards a window where a couple is visible. The couple inside appears to be communicating, with one person gesturing towards the other. Above the scene, the text reads 'Un fel de a vorbi.' Below the image, a dialogue is written: '- Ce e scandalul ăsta, madam Roza? - La surdo-mutul de sus, dă cuțit cu nevasta-sa.'.

“Deafmute” Victims

There are hundreds of brief mentions in every newspaper to “deafmute” individuals who are either victims or perpetrators of crimes. I want to start by drawing attention to the use of “deafmute.” In Romanian the words deaf and mute are sometimes hyphenated and sometimes mashed together. There are occasionally references to just “deaf” and just “mute,” but in the descriptive articles I refer to here, it is always deaf-mute or deafmute.

This terminology reinforced the more general assumption that a person who was deaf was also physically incapable of speaking. It was used by virtually everyone, including deaf activists. This was a common presumption in both popular belief and among the medical professional at that time, so Romania is not unique by any means.Footnote ³⁵ At the same time, deaf children entering special schools were understood to be unable to speak not necessarily because of impairments of the vocal chords, but only as related to the deafness they were born with or acquired.Footnote ³⁶ Therefore, for such institutions the term “deaf-mute” in their name was a reflection of the contingencies that linked deafness to the inability to speak, rather than the name of a condition irremediably entwined.

In the mainstream press, given the lack of explanation about the relationship between deafness and the inability to speak, “deafmuteness” was, by nature of its inaccuracy, never just a descriptive term but an ascriptive, normativizing one. It contributed to confusion about the actual causes of person’s inability to communicate verbally according to ableist norms and to essentializing the misunderstanding of the impairment. It helped cement stereotypes that associated deafness with mental disability. I return below to considerations on why the deaf community used this term as well. I refrain from using it except when quoting directly.

In most brief news items, deaf becomes a descriptive adjective of distinction in relation to other persons mentioned in the same news. The lack of reference to other individuals’ specific particularities suggests that this descriptive use is itself part of a larger normative framework that the periodical assumed was already understood and did not need to be further explained; an innuendo rather than information sharing for purpose of providing relevant facts. “Deafness” serves not to recognize someone in a crowd, but to set them apart from others by virtue of their disability, understood implicitly to be meaningful, though each reader could plug in whatever stereotypes they harbored about deafness. Able-bodiedness, with all the presumptions about what is “normal,” was allowed to stand rhetorically as the unmarked discursive center, undefined and thus unchallenged.Footnote ³⁷

A recurring item are notices about the deaths of deaf persons killed by a fast-moving vehicle.Footnote ³⁸ They sometimes just name the person and add the “deafmute” adjective to fully describe the victim: The deaf victim was struck by a train passing by. Sometimes a newspaper takes the same story and turns it into something slightly longer, with “the misfortune of a deaf-mute” or “poor victim could not hear” added for affective flavor.Footnote ³⁹ The name of the mechanic/driver who struck the victim is rarely mentioned. The exact spot of the accident is seldom mentioned. The time of day is never mentioned.

A man-made rapid instrument of possible destruction controlled by a person kills an innocent victim and all the readers are to take away is that a tragic accident happened. Deafness is rendered relevant as descriptor of the victim, but that adjective is implicitly offered to signal a likely explanation for the accident. Questions such as “How fast was the train going?” and “How visible was the victim to the driver of the vehicle?” are never posed, much less answered. By offering no details about the vehicle that struck the victim or the larger context, these news items drive attention away from the person and vehicle that struck the victim and towards victim-blaming.

There were at least a dozen such accidents reported during the interwar period, enough to be considered a public problem. But no newspaper or other social investigation followed. In the specialized press that focuses more directly on work safety or work accidents, as well as protecting victims of accidents, there is not a single discussion of this problem.Footnote ⁴⁰ Implicitly, the press and experts suggested that there was nothing to be done for the victims other than name them and their impairment. Though some articles evince pity for the victim (“the unfortunate victim”), it is a fleeting moment followed by no sustained attention to possible underlying problems, such as the safety record of the conductor/driver, or the absence of signs to let drivers know about the presence of deaf people in the areas where those folks lived.Footnote ⁴¹ While not fully voyeuristic, these articles represent deafness as an impairment that renders people prone to accidents, while hearing readers can feel both pity and relief that they are not likely to suffer the same fate.

There are other articles that dwell on the victimhood of deaf persons by again adding “deafmute” to a someone who was raped, for instance. In one article the victim is an elderly woman.Footnote ⁴² The grotesque spectacle of the details stands out in contrast with the blandness of other news around it. It has a peacock quality, a perverse voyeurism rendered more intense by the “deafmute” detail. How does such information better educate readers about an issue of public relevance? What does “deafmute” communicate as a descriptor? A means for the reader to fully access the horror of the victim? For what purpose? I consider this sort of article a form of sensationalizing disability, with deafness as the additional element that renders a crime more vivid and scandalous, but also “other.”

Famous People: Heroes and Victims of Deafness

Deafness appears recurringly in stories about famous people who are deaf or with deaf connections. Here deafness describes either heroic protagonists or problems that heroes have difficulty overcoming. They all focus on foreign places, projecting local stereotypes about deafness onto them. But they also serve to suggest that such views about deafness are held in countries considered models of civilization and thus reaffirm the stereotypes as legitimate and universal.

Hellen Keller is one such hero.Footnote ⁴³ Her story is narrated in sensational human-interest articles. The unique qualities of Keller’s life are the focus of these narratives; she is presented as extraordinary and in no way typical of deaf persons. Her case does not become a conduit for better understanding how a person who is deaf learns to communicate and function among the able-bodied. In essence, though heroic in terms of her extraordinary achievements, she is presented as a freak, whose “almost normal” life is described as “miraculous.”

Another series of news items focused on the Spanish king, whose dynastic succession became a focus of international speculation, due to disabilities among his children, one of them deaf.Footnote ⁴⁴ The articles are never long or a cause for much commentary. At most, one might sense sympathy for the hard choice of the father, the tragic hero of the story: his child’s deafness creates a problem, a stain on the reputation of the royal house, whose superiority comes under question. No such sympathy is extended to the children. They remain unnamed vectors of tragedy rather than fully fledged characters. And no explanation follows as to why deafness would preclude a person from ruling Spain in the twentieth century. Justifications seem unnecessary or redundant, once the disability has been named. These articles underscore the tragedy of deafness as something that brings about suffering for a hearing (read “normal”) family. But they never question the underlying presumption that the deaf person generated this problem or that deafness is an actual problem when it comes to discharging one’s monarchical role. More than in any other lower social rank, at the very top, legitimacy and able-bodiedness seem essentially intertwined.

Born Criminals: Deafness as Moral Deviance

At the other end of the spectrum of sensationalizing disability are the multiple articles that announce the deeds of a “deafmute” criminal. If the rhetorical pairing of deafness with victimization in the instances above was meant to elicit pity or relief, the image of the “deafmute criminal” took on more ominous dimensions. These articles rendered visible the stereotype of the deaf person as having inborn criminal predispositions in the familiar narrative archetype of the villain.

“A Deaf-Mute Leader of a Gang of Minors in Iași” appears on page two of the popular daily Dreptatea (The Right).Footnote ⁴⁵ The fourteen-year-old boy is named and his criminal actions referred to in future tense. No criminal acts prompted the police to apprehend the youth. But the author implies the boy intended to steal. How could the newspaper be so sure of this? Could it be that, given the eugenicist literature on “moral deviants” and born criminals, journalists saw a sensational story that could both titillate and read like an actual news account?

The same young man, Neculai Sava, had been the subject of a front-page article in another major newspaper, Cuvântul (The Word), two years earlier.Footnote ⁴⁶ Here the reporter offered a photo of the boy, in a style most easily identifiable as a mug shot—the face of a troublemaker and alleged criminal. Accompanied by a sensationalizing title, “The Adventures of a Deaf-Mute Minor,” the article presents Sava as a skilled escape artist—resourceful in getting out of an institution to which he had been forcibly confined as an orphan. Readers are offered a lot of information about Sava in terms of personal background and current circumstances. At the very least, the fact that both of his parents died before he turned twelve provides a dire story of pain and abandonment. The boy was educated and narrated his life in both sign language and written words. Within this context of a tragic familial background and obvious signs of abandonment, Sava’s resourcefulness is described as “devilish.” To a reader who still believed in the oral tradition that disability was caused by evil spirits and needed to be cast out, such terminology was not metaphorical. It represented a real warning of a terrible threat.

This lively depiction of young Sava’s escapes and re-institutionalization makes for a voyeuristically entertaining story, which lacks any signs of empathy. One can wonder at or be repelled by the young man’s ability and energy to escape the confinement to which he was forced by circumstances out of his control. Information deemed irrelevant for understanding his actions includes: the living conditions in the Timișoara Institute for deaf persons where he was confined; living conditions in the Prince Nicolae juvenile colony where he was also forced to live; and the treatment of deaf persons by the police, whose personnel had no training in sign language and overall communicating with the deaf.Footnote ⁴⁷ Instead, his photograph is offered to remind readers what a criminal vagabond (the subtitle of the article is “From the Life of Vagabonds”) looks like.

“Vagabond” has a pejorative meaning and in the interwar period was becoming closely connected to hereditary criminality.Footnote ⁴⁸ In contemporary articles in some of the same periodicals, eugenicist conferences by Gheorghe Banu and fawning book reviews of that author communicated similar ideas with a tone of uncontested scientific authority, never disputed in any Romanian newspaper. The fascist Țara Noastră declared Sănătatea poporului român, Banu’s massive 1935 treatise, “exceptional” in terms of research and thoroughness.Footnote ⁴⁹ Banu’s racist extreme version of the Romanian “pure” race placed deafness in the category of inborn illnesses or illnesses connected to alcoholism in parents.Footnote ⁵⁰ Even the left-wing Lupta had nothing but positive things to say about Banu and his contributions to Romanian medical research.Footnote ⁵¹ Banu’s claims reinforced stereotypes about deafness as not just sensorial impairment, but rather a moral inborn disability, a hereditary defect that signaled degeneracy.

Other prominent Romanian eugenicists included psychologist Florian Ștefănescu Goangă and his Cluj school.Footnote ⁵² They published books, some reviewed in Romanian dailies, that correlated actions considered criminal with “mental retardation” and “moral deviance,” and connected them with deafness.Footnote ⁵³ Articles about “criminal deafmutes” could easily be read within the medicalized framework about “normal” and “deviant” biology and disabilities, as proof of “abnormal” heredity. The Cluj school offered a scientific basis for confirming such negative stereotypes. In a pedagogy periodical, Școala vremii, Ștefănescu Goangă was cited on the accuracy of intelligence tests meant to enable teachers to pre-select children on a scale from “subnormal” to “exceptional.”Footnote ⁵⁴ Hereditary deficiencies included deafness and, as a matter of classification, it was endorsed and reproduced by the Teachers’ Association. This vocabulary reinforced the correlation of deafness with lower intelligence and moral deviance.

Legalizing Discrimination through Special Schools: Deafness as “Abnormality”

The meaning of deafness filtered through eugenicist frameworks is revealed most forcefully in the publication of new laws and policies. The 1924 Education Law defined and codified “special education” for the first time to explicitly include education for children with sensory, physical, and mental disabilities. References to deafness in that and subsequent laws were under the category “special classes and schools for feeble and abnormal children.”Footnote ⁵⁵ The law was published in all major newspapers, providing readers with clear language for understanding disability as abnormality.Footnote ⁵⁶ While one might read these references to deafness as describing specific forms of recognized impairment, “deafmute” is explicitly tied to moral meanings and therefore cannot be considered just factual descriptions of a sensory condition, but rather as ascriptive moral and legal norms.

Those norms and the language attached to deafness, such as “abnormality” and “deficiency,” reflected the emerging epistemic status of the medical profession in Romania, of psychology, and of medicine in relation to education. Medicine had already become a gatekeeping profession around legal definitions of fitness and disability in military conscription laws in the nineteenth century.Footnote ⁵⁷ In the interwar period, additional public-facing professions (educators, sociologists, lawyers) became empowered to name deafness “deafmuteness” and to link it to mental disability (the term was “feebleness”), criminality, and overall as “social subvalue,” or as “abnormal” and at times “subnormal.”Footnote ⁵⁸

These newly minted legal terminologies with profound normativizing implications became frequently used in other types of public speech, with newspapers acting like conveyer belts for public information, when making editorial decisions to report on: public talks by prominent eugenicist doctors; interviews with directors of asylums where persons with disabilities were kept; brief summaries of medical or educational conferences that articulate bio-essentialist ableist ideas about abilities and behavior; memoranda from doctors and educators regarding special education; and reviews of publications by prominent eugenicist doctors and philosophers.Footnote ⁵⁹ Newspapers of every political orientation utilized the terminology “abnormal” and “subnormal” in relation to disability, legitimating their use as mainstream practice. Through selective reporting of primarily eugenicist perspectives, the press elevated the legitimacy of these “expert” voices, while ignoring the perspective of deaf educators and activists.

Deafness in relation to these other normative rhetorical devices (abnormal and subnormal) appears repeatedly in these articles, each reference by a scientist reinforcing the previous one. An article signed by a Dr. P. in the most widely read interwar newspaper, Universul, discusses “deafmutes” under the subtitle “Abnormal Children.” The author provides a summary of medical research published in France, a legitimating factor as well, to suggest that deafness can be dealt with starting at age two. While he separates deafness from mental disability, both fall squarely under the rubric “abnormal.”Footnote ⁶⁰ In these articles, deafness is presented as a deficiency, a tragedy, or a burden. At best, doctors and policy makers speak of means to integrate the deaf and render them useful and less of a burden to the rest of society. Seldom do hearing voices write contrary to these norms in any of the press.

On a couple of occasions, in the mid-1920s and a decade later, when new education laws generated more specific language and directives about special education, newspapers made room for disability advocates to present their perspective in the press. Newspapers published texts of memoranda these educators presented to the Ministry of Education to request better administration, better resources, and more respect and care for special schools.Footnote ⁶¹ Here we find nuance in the association between deafness and “abnormality” and public attempts at destigmatizing the deaf.

But these requests were never successful, and special education did not grow significantly in Romania, with fewer than 25% of the deaf population served by the five schools for the deaf by the end of the interwar period.Footnote ⁶² There was no follow-up to these flares of attention to ask the government why it refused to engage with the memoranda. The readers did not have a chance to fully understand the hierarchies of interest in public policy regarding special education. In fact, such silences had the potential to conspire towards misleading the able-bodied public and parents of able-bodied school age children into thinking that special education was in fact in good shape in Romania.

Every fall, newspapers published announcements of spots for new students in schools for the deaf.Footnote ⁶³ They never stated how many such spots existed and only vaguely hinted at the cost of attendance, especially for those who lived away from the five urban centers where the schools operated (Focșani, Iași, Timișoara, Cluj, and Cernăuți [Chernivtsi]). The announcements mention scholarships based on “hardship,” with no details. The ads are dry and nearly identical, replicating what the Ministry of Education dictated.

These articles would have been a great boon to an interested parent of a deaf child, while for the average reader they might have raised awareness about the very existence of schools for the deaf and scholarships for attending. How far that funding stretched and the difficulties these special schools were having in maintaining the teachers and serving all who needed these services was not visible in these advertisements. Only by reading the few criticisms mentioned above, which came from teachers of special education, might someone have looked more critically at these annual announcements. But these very ads also associated “disability” with “abnormal,” the language in the education law. Schools for the deaf had to advertise themselves as being for the “abnormal” as a matter of course, normalizing this association for all families with deaf children.

There is another type of article that suggests again, somewhat misleadingly, that special education was receiving significant state support. Over the years, job openings for teachers at deaf schools appeared annually. They list basic qualifications and pay, but not the pedagogical skills necessary in deaf schools. They do not signal to potential applicants whether they favor oralism (the preferred method), sign language, or both. From specialized publications, such as Our Dawn, we know a lively debate over these methods was taking place inside special schools.Footnote ⁶⁴ The absence of a public information campaign beyond the publications of the deaf over an essential component of the approach to teaching deaf children how to communicate strikes me as a combination of ignorance and disinterest on the part of education officials and the press. When able-bodied journalists reached out to deaf interlocutors, they found it difficult to communicate with them. With a single exception, that realization was not followed by an exploration of the issue and clarification for the readers. Such lack of clarity continued to cloud in mystery and confusion the quality of education offered in such schools.Footnote ⁶⁵

Sign Language as Mystery

References to sign language in news items are rare.Footnote ⁶⁶ In an interview I discuss below, the paper draws attention to the need for a hearing child to interpret for his father, deaf activist Vasile Dimitriu Leorda.Footnote ⁶⁷ But even there, how father and child communicated with each other is not described, reinforcing the impression that sign language is a mysterious form of communication, rather than a language with its own rules, which can be mastered. The deaf interlocutor is rendered an object of the gaze of the hearing narrator, whose own discomfort takes center stage.

The sign language alphabet once made it into the mainstream media. But the hearing journalist again rendered himself the knowing narrator and underscored the experiential strangeness of being in a space where sign language was the main form of communication: “These [vigorous] conversations take place in a deadly silence. Everyone’s eyes are fixated on the one who speaks through signs, to make sure no sign and thus the sense of the phrase is not lost.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Beyond that, there are almost no discussions about communication among the deaf. A few attempts to educate the wider public about differences between sign language and oralism show a clear preference for oralism.Footnote ⁶⁹

Deaf publications made a continuous effort to discuss the benefits and drawbacks of the two methods. Our Dawn featured many articles dedicated specifically to these issues, addressed to both the wider hearing public and policy makers.Footnote ⁷⁰ The publication started with a passionate manifesto about the need to be understood and supported by the able-bodied to acquire the same rights as all other citizens “according to the norms of civilized foreign countries.”Footnote ⁷¹ And in order to arrive at such understanding, Leorda, the deaf editor, offered the perspective of fellow deaf educators and activists, together with those of hearing allies.

That both deaf activists who defended sign language and hearing journalists who praised oralism referred to western methods and traditions as “civilized” gives us a good idea of how international contexts became relevant in these internal discussions. Hellen Keller, already mentioned above, was offered as one example of an unusual, unlikely model for successful communication between the deaf and hearing. Alexander Graham Bell’s support for oralism appeared in several references as proof of the superiority of that method, leaving aside any discussion about the preferences of the deaf people on whom his ideas were pushed.Footnote ⁷² Such descriptions were present in mainstream papers and came from hearing journalists and observers. When Leorda equated civilization with full support for the needs and abilities of deaf people, he attempted to move beyond the embrace of oralism and to suggest deaf people needed to be empowered to communicate in any way that made sense for them. They needed to be accommodated; not made to fit into ableist forms of communication.

Normalizing Deafness: Military Service and Soccer

In the two deaf publications of the period, we encounter “deaf” not as a sign of weakness, inability, or victimization. Deaf people are the protagonists of the stories, they take center stage in performing intellectual, service, military, and other work: “We are full of thirst for life with the same intensity, even when the dregs of civilization throws at us, out of atavism, their murderous cloth.”Footnote ⁷³ Flipping the narrative about what was “normal,” Leorda celebrated deaf creativity and humanity, while naming ableism “atavism.” However, the passionate advocacy on the pages of Our Dawn and The Deaf-Mutes’ Courier did not reach a wide audience, and both periodicals folded within a few of years of their initial publication.

Leorda, however, was undaunted by such obstacles and persisted. In the second half of the 1930s, in a frequent repetition of the term, deafness became just a name, purely descriptive rather than ascriptive: the name of a soccer team. The deaf descriptor provided insight into a sensory particularity, but it was a name that the team chose to describe themselves. The name appeared in the newspaper every time the team played in any championship that major newspapers covered. When the national Romanian deaf soccer team plays the Bulgarians and wins big, it achieves a non-derogatory, even patriotic meaning.Footnote ⁷⁴ This is, in my opinion, the most novel and meaningful finding of my research: a change from the demeaning definition most often attributed to “deaf” in the media to a neutral signification was 100% enacted by members of the deaf community. It is an extraordinary achievement, one that I consider unique among various communities of disabled persons in interwar Romania.

Throughout the interwar period deaf activists—teachers, writers, artists, athletes—made efforts to render the experience of their deafness a point of awareness, concern, and support from the hearing majority. Their tools were those that the media offered: platforms where the editors chose what stories to tell and the language to use; and narratives that presented deaf people as archetypal heroes.

The use of inaccurate terminology, “deafmuteness,” was baked into the official discourse through legislation and policy. Deaf activists used it to reach out to the readers in terms familiar to the hearing public. Their aspirations were strongly integrationist. Sometimes their self-representation highlighted difference when addressing deafness: we are deaf, but we can be productive members of this society.Footnote ⁷⁵ Other times, self-representation pointed towards sameness: as deaf men, we have the same obligation to serve our country in the military as everyone else, despite legislation that states we are not fit to do so.Footnote ⁷⁶ Throughout, deaf activists offered narratives that placed deaf people as heroic protagonists of the stories, emplotted in recognizable ableist frameworks.

Leorda and Nicolae Cernăuțeanu, the publisher of The Deaf-Mutes’ Courier, led deaf activists in printing reactions to political, educational, legal, medical, and eventually sports activities that placed the deaf community at a disadvantage in relation to the hearing.Footnote ⁷⁷ Whether they debated oralism versus sign language; the need to integrate the deaf in the military as regular recruits; or to perform medical research on the purported hereditary nature of deafness, the authors in Our Dawn and The Deaf-Mutes’ Courier made a continuous effort to educate their readers about the needs and abilities of deaf children and adults. Given the tiny run and distribution of the newspapers, it is no wonder that few knew of these efforts beyond the community of deaf activists. But running Our Dawn taught Leorda to use print media for educational and advocacy efforts. With this knowledge, he turned his attention towards the mainstream media, where he strenuously attempted to educate the ableist larger society about the deaf.

As the leader of the Association of Deaf-Mute People, Leorda participated in discussions in the media and with the Ministry of Education about educational policies, training teachers, curricular frameworks, and funding for disabled children overall and deaf children in particular.Footnote ⁷⁸ He lead the initiative to develop the House of Silence, a headquarters for his Association, including fund raising campaigns and an architectural competition.Footnote ⁷⁹ In 1936, he organized an art exhibit that featured both prominent names among the deaf community, such as Prince Henry Ghica, as well as less known painters and sculptors. The presence of an active ad for the exhibit in the main Bucharest newspapers for several months reflects Leorda’s strategies and passionate dedication to rendering both his work (he was a sculptor) and that of his fellow artists visible and valued by the wealthy Romanian circles. The purchase of a work from the exhibit by Queen Marie, the patron of the Association of Deaf-Mute People, served as both advertisement for the exhibit and an invitation to collect this art.Footnote ⁸⁰

Leorda had his eye on the interests of the deaf community in a different area of public interest: soccer. As a street sport that many boys grew up with in Romanian cities, soccer was accessible to most children, who might improvise as needed in terms of equipment and terrain. Cans instead of balls, streets when there were no cleared fields, and two rocks to mark the goal is all that was needed.Footnote ⁸¹ By the mid-1930s, Romania had a soccer federation and three divisions for professional teams. Deaf boys and men were as caught up in soccer mania as the hearing. Leorda became their tireless advocate in the mainstream media, calling for full integration of the deaf teams into the regular championships.

Between 1935 and 1939, there are 153 news articles about “deafmute” soccer in the two major sports newspapers, or one every ten days at a time when internal league and international games took place at most once a week. For the readers of these papers, especially soccer fans who were loyal and enthusiastic, the reference to “deafness” in the press was most frequently to soccer teams’ performance on the field, with “deafness” rendered meaningful only as a name (not unlike something like “University” Football Club, in short purely descriptive). What was meaningful to the readers was the actual performance rather than deafness: how many goals, who scored, how many red or yellow cards, and what were the stats in the larger competition.

The pinnacle of this shift in self-representation of deafness in the media via sports is the participation of the Romanian deaf soccer national team in international matches with the Bulgarian team in 1938 and 1939. In addition to announcements ahead of the games, not only the sports papers started to report on the games in the typical kick-by-kick replay, with photos. Images that in the past showed deaf people as victims or criminals were replaced by images of vigorous soccer players in action.Footnote ⁸² I see these photographs as some of the most powerful rhetorical arguments against the normative language about deafness as “abnormality” (Figure 2).

Figure 2.

Image from the Romania-Bulgaria Deaf Soccer Match, Universul Sport 1, no. 203, October 8, 1938, 5.

Figure 2 Long description

Two men are on a soccer field during play. One man wears a light shirt and light shorts and is running with one leg extended forward. A soccer ball is on the ground in front of him. The second man wears a dark shirt and light shorts and is running behind him with one arm raised. Stadium seating spans the background.

The descriptive uses of “deafness” in sports reportage are accompanied by the first attempt to educate the able-bodied about the specific forms of discrimination that deaf people faced in trying to do the same thing as all other soccer players: play in an official competitive game. In a February 1938 article in Gazeta Sporturilor (Sports Gazette), Leorda recalled that he had been asking the Romanian Soccer Federation for four years to allow the Deaf-Mute team to play in the regular league.Footnote ⁸³ His arguments were bolstered by the performance of the deaf national team against other European teams and the invitation to participate in the 1939 Deaf-Mute Olympics in Sweden. He stated that the invitation represented an “obligation” and asked: “How can we play with foreign teams that have the right to participate in the official league games and we can only play friendly matches?”Footnote ⁸⁴ In other words, how could the national team become competitive in this most important international competition, if not by engaging in competitive matches like all other soccer teams? His arguments were framed in the nationalist rhetoric in favor at that time, but he basically just asked for the deaf to be treated the same as all other soccer players.Footnote ⁸⁵

The mainstream media paid little attention to this integrationist nationalist rhetoric of “patriotic duty.” The most extended reporting on this matter appeared in the popular Universul Sportiv (Sport Universe) a year later, in March 1939, through a half page interview with Leorda, president of the Deaf-Mute Sports Club in Romania. He was empowered to become the narrator and present deaf athletes as positive protagonists. In a staged set of questions aimed to educate the hearing about the deaf, he patiently explained basic aspects of how the deaf played, watched the game, and interacted with the referee.Footnote ⁸⁶ Leorda hinted at the difficulties deaf players were having in training for the Olympics without the ability to participate in regular league games, and highlighted the extent to which other countries’ soccer federations did not exclude deaf teams from official games. He cast the Romanian authorities as villains failing deaf players and out of sync with the larger context of European soccer.

Leorda emplotted the interview to normalize deafness as everyday reality for a particular category of players and fans, otherwise similar to the hearing.Footnote ⁸⁷ He underscored the extraordinary commitment of the deaf players and their coach by explaining their finances. The team raised funds by selling postcards and their excellent coach worked for free. His only reward, other than the performance of the team and adulation of the fans, was a bronze statue decorating the deaf community’s offices.

But not all reporting about these soccer games was positive. “The Deaf-mute Iliad. Or the Romanian-Bulgarian War on the Venus Arena” opted for a jocular tone, accompanied by the author’s caricatures.Footnote ⁸⁸ Giving his voice narrative authority, the author focused on the strangeness of his experience as a hearing spectator at a soccer match where the action was silent and the audience seemed interested in the circus-like quality of the event, rather than the actual game. With almost no details about the game, readers were not invited to imagine the protagonists on the field. There are just a few soccer related details: the referee used a whistle, confusing hearing fans about the actual deafness of the people on the field; fans recognized one of the players on the Romanian team from a hearing team in the Romanian league; and referees stood by the goalie with flags to signal the various plays. The last bit of information is accompanied by a cartoon that makes fun of this form of refereeing. In the combination of images and words, the message for the hearing is that deaf people are strange and ridiculous, rather than excellent athletes (Figure 3).

Figure 3.

Neagu Rădulescu, “Iliada Surdo-muților. Sau Războiul Româno-Bulgar de pe Arena Venus,” România 1, no. 130, October 9, 1938, 4.

Figure 3 Long description

A cartoon depicts a referee holding a sign that says 'Stop' and standing on stilts. Next to the referee is a goalkeeper inside a goal, holding a megaphone. The caption below the image reads: 'Atenție, e goal!'.

Equally troubling in terms of dispelling negative stereotypes about the deaf community are the details about players not being deaf and therefore the game being “fake” in its pretense to take place among deaf players. In addition to noting that one of the players on the Romanian team was in fact hearing and known to soccer fans from an able-bodied team, the author implied that the Bulgarian goalkeeper was hearing. Reactions of the public included statements such as: “They fooled us! I am convinced not even one was deafmute!” and “Actors, sir, actors!” Even though this perspective is disputed by other spectators, the author’s insistence in both describing this disbelief and satirizing the game and players through stigmatizing representations does nothing to better educate the readers about the reality of living with deafness.

A Community that Embraced Deaf Students: Cernăuți

While Leorda and the Deaf Association’s efforts to destigmatize deafness in the popular imagination continued to face such obstacles, there is one other example of a non-stigmatizing, recurrent use of the term “deafmute” in the press. The school for the deaf and blind in Cernăuți was greatly respected by the local citizens. It had received support from the Habsburg authorities and the local population more than a decade before Bukovina was incorporated into Romania. Glasul Bucovinei (Bukovina’s Voice) has 279 references to deafness, and they are almost exclusively about the school and its activities.Footnote ⁸⁹ In addition to announcements about spots for students and job opportunities in the school for the deaf, similar to other newspapers, Bukovina’s Voice regularly featured items about: donations to the school, naming the donors and amounts (or types of in-kind donations); public performances by the students; pedagogical activities by the school’s administration and teachers, including participation in national and international congresses of the deaf community; and items of need from the school’s administration.Footnote ⁹⁰

The tone and type of information present in these news items suggests a great deal of attention on the part of the newspaper and pride in the work the school was doing. The students and faculty are presented as “ours,” in overall positive terms and as protagonists of good works. Absent from these notices are expressions of pity or derogatory references to disability. The only exception are the official notices that include terminology like “abnormal” when referring to spots open for deaf children, which was dictated by the Bucharest authorities.

The interwar Romanian press offers a broad spectrum of meanings associated with deafness. Most mainstream dailies used the term in ways that invited pity, fear, or ridicule. In these news reports, deaf people did not narrate their stories: they were cast as sidekicks, villains, or victims. Occasionally, advocates for deaf education dwelled on the importance of education for and about deaf people, insisting on their humanity and rights. To counter the stigmatization of deafness, activists presented deaf people as protagonists of stories of talent, grit, patriotism, and skill. They recast deafness as either impairment that could be overcome, or as a particularity without negative connotations. These varying representations coexisted on the pages of many Romanian dailies and readers had to make up their own mind about the meaning of deafness.

But representations of deafness as “abnormal” and “subnormal” were frequent and tied to the eugenicist discourses about public health and special education, which made their way into legislation, ads for schools for the deaf, and for teachers in those schools. Publications of every political orientation praised the work of eugenicists like Gheorghe Banu, who tied deafness to moral delinquency, lower intelligence, and degeneracy. By depicting deafness as a threat to the common good, they reinforced negative stereotypes and led to further confusion and misunderstanding about deafness.

Except for Cernăuți, where newspapers presented the deaf as integral to the city’s fabric, the Romanian press offered few opportunities to destigmatize deaf people. Two deaf publications tried to change the rhetoric, but both folded due to lack of support, primarily from hearing readers and advertisers. Instead, most newspapers reinforced confusing and demeaning associations with deafness that continue to dominate much of the media today. The able-bodied remained ensconced in an epistemic framework that understood deafness as deficit and abnormality, ascribing moral and bio-essentialist negative connotations to deafness, from victimization and burdening the able-bodied to criminality and inability to take on “normal” roles in society.