Signs of Disability, Disclosing

Stephanie L. Kerschbaum, University of Delaware[1] 

(Published November 12, 2019)

Disclosure entails that perspectives/concepts/theories matter—that they are our means of accessing reality. But disclosure also entails that we do not constitute that reality with our concepts, but rather portray it in varying ways. An important aspect of this understanding is that the reality, like the object in the photograph or the subject of the scientist’s experiment, is agentic. It pushes back, it effects the result.

—Susan Hekman, The Material of Knowledge: Feminist Disclosures 

Six years ago, this yellow diamond-shaped sign appeared on a busy street that I drive down on my way to work every day (along with a second, identical, sign facing the other direction that I passed on my way home). I say “appeared” because I don’t know exactly when it showed up and whether or how often I might have passed it without even noticing it was there. Not long after that, I wrote a conference presentation about disability disclosure. In that talk, I argued that the sign was a metaphor for how most people think disability disclosure works: you announce, loudly, “Deaf Person in Area!” and, well, that’s about it. Only nobody knows what to do when they are told “Deaf Person in Area.” Do they drive faster? Drive slower? Honk their horn? Avoid honking their horn? Stick their hand out the window? Wave vigorously? Flash their lights? Or nothing at all?

Over the last few years, this sign has worked on and through me in numerous ways: I’ve talked about this sign in a lot of places with a lot of people. I’ve taken pictures of more yellow diamond-shaped signs. I’ve asked others to share pictures of signs. I discovered two additional “Deaf Person in Area” signs near the first ones: one off a side street and another directly in front of a neatly-trimmed suburban house. I used the picture at the start of this article as the background for my computer’s desktop, as the cover image for a Facebook group, and as a recurring image on my academic website. Not only was I moving past the original Deaf Person in Area sign on a regular basis, but its images were circulating in numerous spheres of my life.

As these images might suggest, the sign disclosed to me, again and again, as I encountered—and kept encountering—it in numerous forms and in different contexts. My use of “disclosed” follows Susan Hekman as she urges a new feminist ontology to address the problems of over-emphasizing epistemology and orienting to reality as (almost entirely) discursively constructed. She writes, “We must be able to account for the material reality of our social existence without losing sight of the discursive dimension of that reality” (90). Hekman’s response to this challenge is disclosure. Her understanding of disclosure is one that “presupposes an external reality that is the object of discursive practices. But the external reality presupposed is not fixed. Rather, it is a product of agents’ interaction in a shared environment with a world that emerges through that interaction” (91). The Deaf Person in Area sign, through its influence on the ways that people move, notice, interact, and engage, enacts disclosures that emerge through our perceptions of and responses to it. For instance, drivers who notice the sign might adjust their driving behavior. Or they might think to themselves, “I should request a similar sign for my own neighborhood.” They could also, as I do here, wonder about the sign and what it conveys. Each of these reactions is a form of disclosure enacted by the sign as it participates in the emergence of reality.

In this article’s epigraph, Hekman explains that humans access reality through “perspectives/theories/concepts” (92) but those concepts are portrayals of reality, not constitutive of it. Thus, as people move with and around the Deaf Person in Area sign, new disclosures emerge and with them, new perspectives, theories, and concepts. In concert with Hekman’s concept of disclosure, I take up cultural rhetorics scholarship that emphasizes “the making of cultures and the practices that call them into being as relational and constellated” (Riley-Mukavetz in Powell et al.), highlighting the ways that cultural practices are created by people moving in relation with one another. The metaphor of a constellation, Powell et al. write, explicitly acknowledges and honors “different meaning-making practices and their relationships” and “allows for different ways of seeing any single configuration within that constellation, based on positionality and culture.” In this article, I turn to the Deaf Person in Area sign (and others like it) to understand how interactions around and with the sign disclose orientations to disability, as people and their material surround constellate in dynamic relationships. In asking about the signs of disability that we attend to in the world around us, I suggest we can build a sense of how and when disability is noticed, cued, and engaged. Such noticing will help us build a collective understanding of what meanings are associated with disability and thus contribute to our noticing (or erasures) of it.

Signs of Disability

Before moving further, it is important to define some key terms, beginning with signs and disability. The yellow diamond-shaped “Deaf Person in Area” sign may be the exemplar I offer here of the concept of signs of disability, but my use of the word sign is not limited to the paper, metal, and wood signs that populate the environments we move through on a daily basis. Here, I draw on the definition of sign offered by Ron Scollon and Suzie Wong Scollon in their work on geosemiotics. They write that “[i]n geosemiotics, as in all branches of semiotics, the word ‘sign’ means any material object that indicates or refers to something other than itself” (3), although I do not limit signs of disability to material objects. Thus, signs of disability can be understood as perceptual cues that point to disability in some way, shape, or form. My definition of disability takes as a central tenet that disability is an indeterminate and messy category, and is strongly influenced by Elizabeth Barnes’s suggestion that we might define disability in terms of “whatever the disability rights movement is promoting justice for” (43). Such a definition is necessarily shifting, contingent on circumstances, contexts, and particular experiences, relationships, and bodily configurations. While Barnes carefully limits her definition to physical disability, my own thinking about signs of disability takes a capacious orientation to disability, attending to the ways that disabilities of all kinds are signaled and taken up by others. The framework of activism and justice that Barnes identifies is important for the way it points to disability as shaped by people, material artifacts, and environments that make claims about access, about the presence (or absence) of disability within an interaction or a space, and about the ways that all kinds of beings can or should move.

Despite its messiness as a category, disability makes itself perceptible and is made perceptible through all kinds of cues. With perceptual cues, I intend the many forms of embodied perception that people perform, using the full range of their sensory capabilities. Thus, signs of disability can be embodied, behavioral, affective, material, and/or discursive, and their perceptibility is intimately tied to the constellations (Powell et al.) between environments, beings, and artifacts. Perception is a carefully-chosen word here, one that I began using in Toward a New Rhetoric of Difference (Kerschbaum) to describe the sorts of things people might notice as they interacted with others: seeing lips moving, hearing voices, smelling scents (soap or shampoo, someone’s lunch, cigarette smoke), feeling textures of clothing or skin, tasting food or beverages—and more. These perceptions influence interactions even when they are not explicitly raised in conversation, and as rhetoric scholars, we need to cultivate ways of engaging such elements in our data generation and analysis processes.

Signs of disability as a concept gradually emerged as I worked to build on theorizing markers of difference. In Toward, I defined markers of difference as dynamic, emergent, and relational rhetorical cues deployed by interlocutors to point to or engage difference between themselves. Paying attention to markers of difference meant focusing on the interactional choices that people make as they interact with others. These choices involve recursive feedback loops whereby what is salient and/or significant to call attention to, what is assumed and/or can go without saying, as well as differences in how people interpret and orient to rhetorical cues emerge over the course of an interaction and inform later interactions. And yet, one challenge that markers of difference present for analysts is their emphasis on discursive means of marking. For instance, in Toward, which showcased analyses of students performing small-group peer review, I could only attend to material artifacts or forms of embodied presence as markers of difference if students directly remarked or commented upon them. In other words, unless a student explicitly named or described their own or another person’s race/ethnic or gender identification, I had to be exceptionally careful in pointing to what that student might be perceiving from or about their peer review partners. In a similar vein, while I recognize that clothing and other material accoutrements play significant roles in identity performances and social negotiations, the articulation of markers of difference and the data available within the book—taken from one semester in a writing classroom—made it difficult for my analyses to engage students’ uptake of those elements of a scene unless they did so discursively.

Signs of disability help us better engage a broader range of the perceptual work happening within interactional encounters by enabling attention to the ways that material artifacts as well as forms of behavior, embodiment and presence can be included in analytic scenes alongside discursive elements. My approach to signs of disability builds on work in semiotics—especially Scollon and Scollon’s geosemiotics as well as Gunther Kress’s work on multimodality—but is distinguished from semiotics in that I incorporate greater attention to narrative constructions of reality in my methodological and analytic approach. My attention to narrative coalesces through my articulation of disclosure, which draws from scholarship in feminist materiality. I understand narratives as one form of what physicist and feminist materialist scholar Karen Barad in Meeting the Universe Halfway terms an “agential cut.” As Barad explains, an observational apparatus intra-acts with objects being perceived. The result is the materialization of perceived phenomena. Such phenomena do not themselves constitute reality but are the emergent result of an intra-action between perceptual apparatus and material reality. To tell a story, then, is to make an agential cut, to materialize phenomena through intra-action, to enact disclosures.

Disclosing

To study signs of disability and how they matter (literally and figuratively), I take up Hekman’s concept of disclosure to generate data and move analytically with that data. More specifically, I understand disclosure in terms of an orientation to particular perceptions and meanings that constellate at a specific time and in a specific space, in different ways for different objects and beings. This definition should be distinguished from what is perhaps a more conventional understanding of disclosure as an act of making perceptible something that might not be immediately apparent to another person, as when someone reveals a disability diagnosis or a need for accommodation. As I use it, disclosure is intended to represent the emergence of a perception (and perhaps, but not always, an interpretation) as a result of intra-actions (Barad) in the world. That is, signs and other material objects intra-act with perceiving beings to participate in acts of disclosure. These acts of disclosure contribute to emerging and dynamic cultural orientations to disability.

To identify some of these cultural orientations, disability studies scholars have studied how people attend to and behave toward disability in public space. Bodies in public are relentlessly surveilled, followed, and watched, and some bodies receive much more scrutiny than others. Critical disability scholar Aimi Hamraie illustrates this by highlighting what they call a post-ADA narrative. They offer the example of a Google-sponsored mural that was painted on the steps around the National Mall in celebration of the 25^th anniversary of the signing of the ADA, noting that such post-ADA narratives suggest that now that the ADA has been passed, the problem of accessibility has been solved. However, they note, placing the mural on the built form of a staircase meant that “the murals hid in plain sight (and without a hint of irony) the persistent architectural, attitudinal, and economic barriers that disabled people continue to face in the post-ADA world” (3). Indeed, as disability historian Susan Schweik documents in The Ugly Laws, disabled people have a long history of violent mistreatment in public. Such mistreatment has long been documented by disability justice activists tracing what happens when disabled, queer, trans, indigenous people of color encounter police officers (see, e.g., Abdelhadi; Elman; Moore et al.; Sanchez; Vest). Disability justice activists, Abla Abdelhadi explains, explicitly center intersectional experiences in order to “understand violence against and criminalization of disabled people in more critical ways.” In turn, strategies for moving in response and in resistance to these forms of oppression must attend to the specificities of as well as patterns in experience across and within groups of disabled people.

Experiences of disability in public are entwined with and reinforced by everyday rhetorical practices that frame disability as a threatening or dangerous difference, presumed threats that are often amplified when disability intersects with other forms of discrimination, oppression, and violence against minoritized bodies. Such identities are both material and discursive: histories of discrimination create real effects on people and influence how they move, interact, and are engaged by others. What people perceive off of one another’s embodied and enminded presence—what Scollon and Scollon might describe as the “social actor” and the “interaction order” (14-17)—impacts how they move interactionally. Too, material artifacts and environments—what Scollon and Scollon might orient to in terms of visual semiotics and place semiotics (17-20)—actively participate in these interactions. In all of this, discursive histories, language practices, framing, self-presentation and self- and other-construction play key roles. This article follows the Deaf Person in Area sign disclosing to bring together the material and discursive elements of identity construction and negotiation around disability.

In closely attending to this sign, my goal is twofold. First, I forward a theory of signs of disability that enables attention to both the material and discursive aspects of interactions, and which might usefully be extended to other forms of identity construction. Second, I suggest that signs of disability are necessary to understand because of how they shape everyday perceptions of disability. Such efforts are urgently needed at a time when being disabled in public is often dangerous, particularly for multiply minoritized disabled people, as documented through the Disability Justice movement launched by Leroy Moore and Patty Berne (Sins Invalid). Moore and Berne’s work underscores the exigence of probing how the everyday spaces that we move through contribute to the persistent dehumanization and violence performed upon queer, trans, and indigenous disabled people of color. While I draw particularly on encounters in public spaces given my focus on the yellow diamond-shaped Deaf Person in Area road sign, these perceptions also matter to our own classrooms and everyday institutional spaces as beings and material objects constellate within these environments. Studying such constellations help us understand how people are enculturated towards disability in public, revealing how interactions within various environments teach, through mundane, everyday lived experiences, what disability means and how to orient to it. This might also be understood as cultivating a geosemiotics of disability, in a sense. This geosemiotics of disability and the constellations that emerge disclose how links are built (as well as frayed or reinforced) between disability and cultural narratives taking shape through various forms of attention to disability. Ultimately, I hope this work will enable us to better-attend to the constellations always in flux (Edbauer) around us and the meanings for disability that we are continually absorbing, responding to, and (re)shaping in our daily lives.

The Deaf Person in Area Sign Disclosing

When I first encountered the Deaf Person in Area sign, it revealed itself to me as funny. I thought things like, “It’s a good thing I live in the neighborhood, so that there actually is a Deaf Person in Area!” Other deaf people have reported similar reactions: in a blog post about a “Deaf Pedestrians” sign complete with flashing lights near Gallaudet University, Tonya Stremlau writes, “When I drive by, I do sometimes irrationally feel like I should get out and walk by the sign, just to give it a raison d’etre.” Similarly, in “How Not to be a Dick to a Deaf Person,” Kelly Dougher captions a photo of a “Deaf Child in Area” sign with: “This sign is still on my street even though I turned 18 ages ago. This is the first time it has made itself useful.” But as I engaged more widely with the sign, it disclosed to me in quite different ways. Most people I talked to didn’t experience the sign as funny or ridiculous. These were occasionally difficult conversations. Sometimes I would feel a bit indignant: “Really? Do you think I should have a Deaf Person in Area sign in front of my house? Should I have one at the door to my office? Should I carry one everywhere I go so that everyone always knows that there’s a Deaf Person in Area?” “No, no, no,” people would respond, “You don’t need a sign, but there are lots of other deaf people who do. You’re not like them. You’re different.”

I don’t know that I’m all that different from other deaf people in the ways that these comments presume, but there are lots of ways I already carry Deaf Person in Area signs wherever I go. I wear large behind-the-ear hearing aids. The sound of my voice can reveal me as a deaf person. I often sign with others. I stare intently at people’s faces while they are speaking, and if they move around a room, I sometimes stand and move too in order to maintain line of sight. Each of these features of my physical presence and of my behavior within social spaces are forms of disability disclosure. And yet, there is a great deal of ambiguity behind the signs of disability I’ve just named.

Sociologist and disability theorist Tanya Titchkosky defines disability as “a way of perceiving and orienting to the world” (4) which entails “knowing that we are a part of and apart from—that we are made by and we make—the space where we find ourselves” (21). The emergence of disability within an environment is, of course, no one single thing: our relationships to and experiences with disability, as well as the cultures and spaces in which we live and move, all lead us to notice differently, in ways that are singular to us as individuals with particular life trajectories, lived knowledges, and ways of moving in the world. How a “Deaf Person in Area!” sign discloses—whether it is a yellow diamond-shaped sign, hearing aids, the sound of a voice, hands flying in communication, or particularities of gaze and eye contact—can be deeply idiosyncratic, even when immersed within specific cultural beliefs and attitudes. And yet, as Titchkosky and others have repeatedly shown, perception and attention are highly culturally motivated (Friedman Blind; “Cultural”; Zerubavel, Hidden; Taken; Citton). We learn what to pay attention to through the relationships we build, the encounters we have, the messages that environments reveal about who belongs and who doesn’t, the types of encounters we are likely or unlikely to have, what needs to be said and what is or can be left unsaid. These are forms of collective attention.

Collective attention is a sociological concept that excavates how people learn to build perceptual apparatuses that enable them to navigate their world and move through and within material and discursive environments. Perceptual apparatuses built through forms of collective attention enable attending to some things while ignoring or obscuring others. Sometimes collective attention means disability is highly visible and marked, while other times disability may be erased or unrecognized in conjunction with other identifications. For instance, disability scholars Nirmala Erevelles and Andrea Minear have suggested that “individuals located perilously at the interstices of race, class, gender, and disability are constituted as non-citizens and (no)bodies” (p. 129) and Eunjung Kim has analyzed how persistent narratives around sexuality and disability erase possibilities for disabled people to affirmatively claim asexual identities. Such erasures are enacted in many ways through the perceptual filters and forms of attention paid to particular kinds of bodies and minds, and they often reinforce institutional and structural violences. As such, we need to critically examine forms of collective attention as well as develop attentional practices that push back against damaging forces.

One place to launch such an inquiry is to attend to the signs of disability around us and the stories we tell about those signs, including signage and iconography in public spaces. There is rich scholarship in disability studies on how icons and symbols disclose and enculturate. Unsurprisingly, the nearly-ubiquitous wheelchair logo/International Symbol of Access (ISA) has received the greatest attention. In her book Designing Disability, Elizabeth Guffey performs an extended historical analysis of the ISA, and others have probed the various functions performed by this icon (Ben-Moshe and Powell), including how it conveys messages about mobility (Hendren), affective valences of disability (Fritsch), and attitudes towards access (Titchkosky). The ISA is not the only public sign to receive significant attention: Alison Kafer and Eli Clare each uncover problematic subtexts behind seemingly innocuous motivational messages featured on billboards across the United States, and Najma al Zidjaly shows how the use of a universal access symbol effectively erases representations of individual disabled people in Oman. Many less-explicit signs of disability are embedded within built environments, as Hamraie writes in Building Access: “From a doorframe’s negative space to the height of shelves and cabinets, inhabitants’ bodies are simultaneously imagined, hidden, and produced by the design of built worlds” (19). Taken together, these analyses underscore various forms of meaning-making that coalesce around physical signs, and they frequently take the methodological approach of telling and analyzing stories.

It is through stories that we learn how signs disclose. These disclosures are not static; they are made and remade as we move within rhetorical ecologies (Edbauer). Attending to the ways that disability manifests in daily experience means recognizing that that our perceptual terrain is always shifting depending on identities, forms of embodiment and enmindment, past experiences, relationships emerging within particular spaces, affective modalities and reactions, and material artifacts that surround and shape movement. What we are noticing—and what the signs are disclosing to us through our encounters with them—emerges in our storying and is not always, or even often, at the forefront of our awareness or consciousness. One way to build an understanding of what and how we notice is through sociologist Asia Friedman’s work with perceptual filters (Blind). Friedman uses the concept of a filter to explain how different cues are deemed important or relevant to the perception of male and female bodies. For instance, hairstyles or the presence/absence of facial hair tend to be actively noticed and thus pass through a gender filter while other information, such as the size and shape of someone’s shins or their elbow, may be deemed irrelevant and thus filtered out.

Friedman describes gender as a foundational filter, pointing to the fact that, for most people living in the United States, it is (almost) impossible to not notice gender. Put another way, because of the binary perception of gender into which they are culturally socialized, Americans are taught that sorting people into male and female is highly relevant information (see also Ridgeway on gender). With regard to disability, however, cultural expectations around noticing others in the United States generally do not compel Americans to seek out information about disability status or relationships to disability, perhaps at least in part because of the messiness of disability as a category. In asking about the signs of disability that we attend to in the world around us, I suggest we can build a sense of how and when disability is noticed, cued, and engaged. Such noticing will help us build a collective understanding of what meanings are associated with disability and thus contribute to our noticing (or erasures) of it. This emphasis on storying is perhaps the biggest departure in my approach to signs of disability from other semiotic approaches to signs (Scollon and Scollon; Kress): I spend less time unpacking the signs’ emplacement and signaling and more time zeroing in on the signs’ disclosure through stories. The sections that follow unpack some of the stories that have emerged as I’ve moved with and around the Deaf Person in Area sign in my neighborhood, showing how these stories reinforce problematic orientations to disability. 

Yellow Diamond Shaped Road Signs and Their Disclosures

While the Deaf Person in Area sign disappeared from my neighborhood about three years ago, it maintains an active presence in my academic and personal life. To convey a broader sense of the genre of yellow road signs of disability, let me share some of the various terms, images, and phrasings on the signs that I’ve collected thus far. Many of the signs are diamond-shaped, some are rectangular, and sometimes there is both a diamond and a rectangle.

On the nearly fifty signs that I have images of appear the following phrases, many multiple times: “Deaf Person in Area,” “Deaf Child Area,” “Deaf Child,” “Caution Deaf Child in Area,” “Deaf Pedestrians” with flashing yellow lights above and below the sign, “Watch for Deaf Child,” “Autistic Child,” “Autistic Child Area,” “Autistic Child in Area,” “Blind Pedestrian X-ing,” “Blind Ped X-ing,” “Blind Pedestrian,” “Vision Impaired Person,” “Blind,” “Blind Child,” “Blind Persons Crossing,” “Deaf Blind Children X-ing,” “Caution Deaf Blind Child in Area,” “Handicap Child,” “Handicap Child Area,” and a wheelchair icon.[3] This collection includes a relatively short list of disabilities: deafness, deaf-blindness, blindness, mobility impairments, and autism. Too, in my sample, the words “Autistic”, “Handicap”, and “Deaf Blind” always co-occur with “Child” or “Children. Most of the images of signs I have are from suburban residential developments or along winding rural roads, with only a small handful from densely populated and highly trafficked urban settings.

The signs are placed by local municipalities, often by specific request from residents with final implementation and decision-making performed by city or state Department of Transportation employees. A Google search turns up many examples of online forms, downloadable PDFs and other means by which residents can put in a request for a sign in a specific location.[4] These forms are themselves a genre worthy of further analysis, although they fall outside the scope of this particular article. The behind-the-scenes maneuvers and structures that lead to the placement of a Deaf Person in Area sign certainly rely on many of the cultural orientations to disability that I detail in this article, but my attention here is fixed on intra-actions (Barad) once a sign is placed, particularly the stories that emerge as people make sense of the signs.[5]

The Deaf Person in Area Might Not Hear Cars Coming

Perhaps the most common rationale given for the sign is “It’s good that there’s a sign because the Deaf Person in Area might not be able to hear cars coming.” It is commonsense, unquestioned, that this caution is needed because a Deaf Person in Area who (presumably) can’t hear an approaching car might step into the road unexpectedly. As a consequence, motorists need to be vigilant, need to be warned. The sign discloses as valuable and important for protecting the Deaf Person in Area. I sometimes respond to this by pointing out that as a Deaf Person, I never assume that I can cross the street without looking. “In fact,” I say, “because I know that I won’t hear a car coming, I always look.” My interlocutor may then say that while I might look, lots of other deaf people might not. Sometimes they add to this comment the mention of another (real or imagined) Deaf Person who would definitely need this sign. They might also/instead say, “you can’t always see a car coming,” challenging my (over)reliance on sight to determine when it is appropriate to cross a street. Underneath these comments lurks a sort of disability exceptionalism (Dunn) that casts successful disabled people as exceptions and positions an (often-imagined) other group as those for whom the signs need to exist.

Now, of course, my own embodied experiences as a deaf person are not representative of how all deaf people move through the world. And certainly, some of my non-deaf interlocutors have significant experiences interacting with deaf people. But there’s something very telling about people who are not deaf assuming that they know what deaf people need in order to move safely through an environment. As the sign discloses these beliefs about the need to hear in order to walk safely around a neighborhood or to follow traffic signals, it also exposes some of the limits of hearing people’s ability to understand what it means to not assume that they will hear cars approaching or what it means to always be vigilant with one’s eyes or other kinds of sensory input. It also discloses the presumption that the only safety risk is disability, ignoring the fact that presumptions of safety are largely reserved for the bodies that are already expected within a space.  

Indeed, notions about what constitutes safety vary not only according to individuals’ disability identification, but also their perceptible race/ethnic identification, their gender and sexual identity, their relationships in and around an environment, and more. For example, recent events in the United States have highlighted stark differences in how different bodies are treated in public, as a pattern of White people calling the police to report on people of color doing everyday actions that would ordinarily attract no scrutiny (napping in a common area, barbecuing in a park, election canvassing, working as a real-estate agent, or taking a college tour) has been given national prominence (Molina). Thus, we can ask who is likely to believe or assume that a yellow diamond-shaped sign calling attention to a Deaf Person in Area will enhance the safety of said Deaf Person, particularly if the Deaf Person is not read as White. The recent case of Magdiel Sanchez, a deaf Latino man who was shot and killed by Oklahoma City police responding to a call about a hit-and-run (Doubek; Sanchez), makes such questions deeply pertinent to any exploration of the Deaf Person in Area sign. It is through such questions that the signs disclose presumptions of perceptible embodied privilege.

Not only do my interlocutors generally presume embodied privilege for the Deaf Person in Area, they also draw stark contrasts between hearing ability and deaf inability. When I point out that in my college town people regularly walk around with earbuds or large headphones over their ears, I am presented with a generous belief in the ability of those people to perfectly apprehend their surroundings. These defenses of hearing ability co-occur with presumptions of deaf inability to move safely through a neighborhood, necessitating the sign. Here again, the sign discloses a persistent cultural orientation to disability as a threat, in this case, to the presumed wholeness of a hearing identity.

Drivers Need to Know about the Deaf Person in Area So That They Will Drive More Carefully

A second common explanation for the Deaf Person in Area sign is that “Drivers need to know there is a Deaf Person in Area so that they will drive more carefully.” Instead of centering the Deaf Person in Area’s presumed inability to hear, this rationale centers on assumptions that drivers may make. If drivers assume that all the pedestrians or bicyclists and people in their vicinity can hear, they may then expect those pedestrians to stay out of the car’s way. Conversely, if those drivers are reminded of a Deaf Person in Area, they may drive more carefully, now expecting that those in the vicinity may not hear a car. In fact, getting drivers to drive more carefully is the focus of many (if not all) road signs, especially those that feature children (e.g., “Children Playing”; “Keep Kids Alive, Drive 25”). However, this comment once again assumes that deaf people are not using any other sensory input to try and determine the presence of a car, and it ignores the fact that in the absence of specific guidance, most drivers do nothing at all to change their behavior.[6] Indeed, a 2007 Wisconsin Department of Transportation review of existing research indicates that “Children at Play” and other warning signs do not change drivers’ behavior. The report specifically calls out the intractability of people’s belief in the signs’ efficacy: “A common theme is the ongoing struggle to explain to members of the public that their requests for these types of signs are based on faulty assumptions about their effectiveness.”

One such faulty assumption might be that such signs would not exist without Good Reasons. But Department of Transportation employees, who ultimately construct and place the signs, do not necessarily have expertise around disability. Yellow diamond-shaped road signs that warn about dangerous curves or road conditions may fall squarely within their skillset, but the danger posed by (or to) a Deaf Person in Area is less clearly a topic about which DOT staff can (or should) claim professional expertise. And even when DOT employees may resist placing warning signs, as advocated in the Wisconsin DOT report, residents can and do draw on their own personal experiences to challenge the authority conveyed by the DOT (e.g., Brownlee). These residents may fear that a driver might not see the Deaf Person in Area or might not drive carefully enough through their neighborhood. Regardless of the process or the human agents involved in the signs’ placement, the general perception of the signs’ efficacy largely relies on non-disabled people’s orientations to disability and its significance for moving in public space. These orientations often solely emphasize disability and tend to ignore intersections between disability, gender, sexuality, race and ethnicity, and other forms of oppression and/or privilege.

A Deaf Person in Area Might Not Follow Traffic Rules

Finally, a third common rationale is that “A Deaf Person in Area (especially if they are a Deaf Child) might not follow traffic rules.” Fears of an accident may be amplified for many parents of disabled children because their children can take longer to learn expected traffic rules and behaviors. As typically framed, the problem is that because of their disabilities, these children may have an especially hard time following traffic rules. This final logic requires some additional parsing. To do that work, we need to zoom out a bit and consider the broader genre of yellow road signs.

The things on yellow diamond-shaped road signs are quite varied and include road hazards (e.g., “Slippery When Wet,” “Bridge Ices Before Road”); various areas or spaces (e.g., bus stop; “Rock Slide Area,” “Correctional Facility Area”); upcoming road shapes or conditions (e.g., “Lane Ends Merge Left,” traffic signal, intersection, sharp curve); vehicles (e.g., fire engine, tractor, bicycle, horse and buggy, school bus); and animals (e.g., deer, alligator, bear, cougar, moose, bison, armadillo, rattlesnake, cow, duck[7]). The yellow color and (usually) diamond shape associate these signs with warning or caution. Within the broader ecology of yellow road signs, people are not typically indicated. In fact, disabled people, children, and pedestrians, including an immigration pedestrian sign, are the only people I have encountered on yellow diamond-shaped caution signs.[8] What does this disclosure reveal to us?

One way to answer this question is to parallel the common responses to the “Deaf Person in Area” sign with rationales for other things on yellow diamond-shaped signs. For example, one reason we have yellow diamond-shaped signs with different kinds of vehicles on them is because those vehicles move differently than do cars. As a consequence, drivers need to behave differently when one of these vehicles—a fire engine, a bicycle, a horse and buggy, a school bus, a tractor—is in the road. Similarly, being warned of an upcoming change in the road (a sharp turn or an intersection), a road hazard, or an environmental condition can enable motorists to take appropriate driving measures. All of these things involve caution, encouraging drivers to be attentive to things that they might not otherwise anticipate. These logics overlap significantly with rationales for the Deaf Person in Area sign.

But then we come to what is, arguably, the most varied—and for our purposes, interesting—sub-category of “things that are on yellow diamond-shaped signs”: animals. The logics that explain why we have yellow diamond-shaped signs featuring an armadillo, deer, duck, moose, kangaroo, alligator, bison, big cats, cow, or rattlesnake in many ways are the same logics that explain why disabled people need to be on the signs. First, there is a presumption that animals won’t follow the rules of the road, whether this is because they are not cast as intelligent enough, or because they are unreliable and unpredictable, or because they fall outside the boundaries of human rules of behavior. As a consequence, it is drivers who need to be responsible for watching out: they cannot assume that an armadillo (deer, duck, moose etc., etc.) in the vicinity will stay out of the way of their vehicle. There’s also the argument that drivers need to know an animal is in the vicinity so they will proceed more carefully. This argument presents the sign as there for both drivers and animals: drivers will take in the information on the sign—the knowledge that a specific animal is (likely to be) in the area—and adjust accordingly. As a consequence, the sign helps support ecosystems that have been disrupted by a thick winding ribbon of black asphalt in their midst: if motorists take more care, then the road, the cars, the people, and the animals may be able to co-exist.

A third cultural logic also explains why animals appear on yellow diamond-shaped signs. That is: a threatening animal is in the area and drivers should exercise caution. All of the animals on yellow diamond-shaped signs can be interpreted in terms of threat—whether the threat is to the animals (by a car hitting or running into them), or to a car (a large animal like a deer or moose can damage a vehicle), or to people in the car (an accident can cause injury, some animals can harm humans). This threat also calls into being other types of threats presented by yellow diamond-shaped signs. This is the flip side to the paternalistic narrative of disability centered in the earlier discussion of responses to the “Deaf Person in Area” sign. While we can read the yellow diamond-shaped sign as an invitation to take extra care, perhaps in the spirit of “it takes a village,” the choice to convey this need for additional care on a yellow diamond-shaped sign (and not, say, on another color or shape of sign[9]) communicate that these are intended as warnings.

What does it mean to connect disabled people with these other concepts on yellow diamond-shaped signs? One answer comes through Mel Y. Chen’s theorizing of animacy. Chen notes the linguistic definition of animacy as the “quality of liveness, sentience, or human-ness of a noun or noun phrase that has grammatical, often syntactic, consequences” (24) and then uses this concept to show how “the ‘animal’ is relentlessly recruited as the presumed field of rejection of and for the ‘human’” (23-34). Chen identifies the stickiness of animal-like properties to some categories of humans through animacy, a move that ultimately separates them from having full humanity while preserving humanity for those who are not-disabled, not-queer, not-female, not-children, not racial and/or ethnic minorities, and so on.

Thus, it is no coincidence that the logics used to explain why we need animals on yellow diamond-shaped signs overlap with the logics used to explain why disabled people and disabled children need to be on the signs. Because (some kinds of) disabled people as well as (deaf, blind, and autistic) children are not presumed to have appropriate cognition or behavior or understanding, they need to be warned about. Others around these (disabled) people and (deaf, blind, and/or autistic) children need to be reminded of the presence of disability in order to avoid harm to themselves or to others. This dehumanization is achieved by comparing (some kinds of) disabled people and children with non-human animals. Chen writes, “The sentience of a noun phrase has linguistic and grammatical consequences, and these consequences are never merely grammatical and linguistic, but also deeply political” (55). The political nature of these yellow diamond-shaped signs comes into focus when considering the sorts of animacy—that is, the liveliness, movement, and activity—of groups identified on the signs.

I have numerous examples (and variations) of “Blind Child,” “Deaf Child,” and “Autistic Child.” I have numerous examples of “Blind Pedestrian” and “Deaf Pedestrian” as well as blind and deaf “students.” I do not have any examples of an “Autistic Pedestrian” sign or an “Autistic Student” or “Autistic Person in Area” sign. Autism, at least within the genre of yellow diamond-shaped signs that I have collected, is only and always attached to children. The question of disabled personhood and subjecthood, then, is limned through the grammar and genre of yellow diamond-shaped signs. Again and again, these yellow diamond-shaped signs confirm Chen’s observation that

vivid links, whether live or long-standing, continue to be drawn between immigrants, people of color, laborers and working-class subjects, colonial subjects, women, queer subjects, disabled people, and animals, meaning, not the class of creatures that includes humans but quite the converse, the class against which the (often rational) human with inviolate and full subjectivity is defined. (95)

Let me return to the common responses I get when I raise the topic of the yellow diamond-shaped “Deaf Person in Area” sign. The sticky links between disability and animals that I have been discussing are underscored in the observation that people wearing headphones or earbuds may not hear everything in their surroundings. The (surprisingly fierce) defenses I experience of these pedestrians’ ability to hear cars coming, paired with justifications for a Deaf Person in Area to have a sign announcing their presence resonates with the adherence of animacy to Deaf Persons. The de-humanized “Deaf Person” (etc., etc.) is not presumed to have competency and agency in the way that the presumed perfectly-intact, fully-human hearing person with headphones does. The fully-human person is often akin to the normate (Garland-Thomson), a mythical figure that nobody actually lives up to but which is imagined as embodying and enminding every form of privilege: white, male, cisgendered, able-bodied, heteronormative, wealthy, and so on. When a real figure is revealed, that figure’s departure from or relationship to each of these forms of privilege can then become material for dehumanization, for asserting that anything that happens to them is an individual occurrence rather than squarely set within a nexus of intersecting discriminations and patterns of exclusion and violence aimed directly at particular kinds of bodies and minds.

The signs thus operate according to an animate hierarchy that places adult humans with full sensory capacity at the top, while children, disabled people, and disabled children fall lower down the scale, simultaneously de-subjectifying and objectifying them (Chen 40). Being understood as something that would be placed on a yellow diamond-shaped caution sign is effectively to have a comparison made between you and other road hazards, between you and other animals that either don’t know or won’t follow the rules of the road, or between you and things that are dangerous to drivers. We also can identify a hierarchy whereby autism would arguably be placed below deaf and blind because of its consistent association with childhood and its lack of association with the identities of “Pedestrian” or “Student.”[10]

These associations do not emerge out of thin air. We must also ask after the background—what environments or support systems make these dehumanizations so sticky, so persistent in our cultural attention (Chen). For example, as I noted earlier, many of the images of yellow diamond-shaped signs that I’ve collected are from suburban locations, largely featuring neatly trimmed yards and single-family homes. This might seem to suggest that disability is an unusual presence within such environs, as well as reinforcing links between (presumed) whiteness and assumptions around safety and risk and disability. The logic of yellow diamond-shaped signs discloses assumptions about disability as inability, disability as threat, and disability as requiring protection. The signs, through dehumanization and objectification of disability, disclose ableist logics of humanity that deny full agency and subjecthood to disabled people. By revealing the operations of animacy that play out on yellow diamond-shaped signs, then, rhetoricians and community-members can intervene in these structures of meaning-making by challenging and addressing the oppressive logics that perpetuate these cultural narratives of disability, race, gender, class, and more.

Signs of Disability Disclosing Differently

In this article, I’ve explored how yellow diamond-shaped signs disclose disability within public spaces. Attention to such disclosures can help rhetoric scholars understand what people perceive and pay attention to as they negotiate everyday environments and encounters. In the course of such encounters, the material world and environment discloses meanings and possibilities and orientations. The rhetorical analyses performed in this article aim to deepen our understanding of the meanings of disability that emerge as people move among material artifacts and environments. The disclosures effected through these movements significantly shape the orientations people take towards disability and in turn, their engagement with cultural logics that shape perceptions of and interactions with disability.

These cultural logics are not unique to the yellow diamond-shaped signs that I’ve focused on in this article, of course. Yellow diamond-shaped signs that index (some kinds of) disability owe to their very existence already-circulating cultural logics of disability that enable such signs to “make sense.” Titchkosky calls attention to the separation between disability and humanity observed within the yellow diamond-shaped signs as she muses on justifications for person-first language. These justifications, she argues, suggest that “[w]e should cautiously move disability to the rear and move personhood to the front with the hope of removing, or at least minimizing, the danger that disability is” (54). While her focus is not yellow diamond-shaped caution signs, she presciently uses the word “caution” to indicate the relationship formed with disability through person-first language. In this way, the yellow diamond-shaped signs come into contact and interact with other linguistic moves around naming and pointing to disability, creating amplifications and resonances that seep into and shore up collective orientations to disability-as-threat that have material and discursive consequences for disabled people.

My intention with this critique is for rhetoricians of everyday life to analyze and surface cultural logics that stigmatize and diminish disability by making them more perceptible and thus available for critique. When cultural logics operate at the level of common sense or assumption, they erase the range and variation of lived experiences and can subsume disabled people into paternalistic narratives that presume their inability and incompetence—or deny their humanity and perpetuate violence upon them. This article has shown how rhetoricians can access these signs’ disclosures through the stories people tell about interactions with the signs.

Signs of disability enable close, patterned attention across interactions for what perceptual cues different kinds of signs make available for examination. The framing of disclosure in this article contributes to new materialist rhetorical scholarship by demonstrating how rhetoricians can gather data about and analyze people’s interactions with their material surround generally and with signs of disability specifically. Hekman reminds us that “[t]o disclose is not to reveal the true objective reality of an object. Rather, it is to engage in a complex practice in which multiple elements interact, or intra-act, to produce an understanding of the reality that we share” (93). This broader awareness of and attention to signs of disability can help rhetoric scholars unpack disability as it is disclosed and takes shape interactionally. Rhetorical analysis will then be better-poised to intervene in discourses that amplify violences against disabled people, particularly those who experience multiple forms of marginalization and oppression. Through such work, the signs of disability around us can disclose differently.