Mean Little Deaf Queer Analysis

Despite a clear emphasis on Terry Galloway’s “little-d” deaf identity in Mean Little deaf Queer, her intersectional identity is just as pertinent, as demonstrated by the title of the text. Nearing the end of the memoir, Galloway establishes her “crippled” and “queered” identity yet again, claiming that her path to understanding her place in society is by “[surrounding herself] with stories that tell [her] who [she] is” (212). This statement bolsters Mean Little deaf Queer’s position as an identity-specific memoir, reaching out, not only to deaf or queer folk, but to those who may share both identifiers. The author’s in-text reflections match this assumption, through a conjuration of a past Galloway who struggles to confront, not only her disability, …show more content…
Her “queer impulse,” just like her deafness, is something she had been stifling since she was a young child, yet, even in the face of her sexual experiences, she continually pushes her insistent belief that “lesbianism … was [simply] a passing thing” (90-133). In light of her consecutive breakdowns mid-text, this is ultimately deemed false. “I was bound to come undone,” Galloway writes, referring to both the strain of her hearing guise, as well as her “scarily pent-up sexuality” (103). She notes the crux of her struggles as being in her sophomore year of university, having to spend “three days in the university clinic, crying like a baby” after bursting out into tears during a biology exam for what seemed to be no explicit reason (103). It was at this specific point in time that Galloway admits she gave up one portion of her act. She was going to “make a start,” meaning she would no longer try to pass as hearing in a world where she was clearly struggling (103). However, as the audience is painstakingly aware, Galloway would still be stifling another portion of her person past this sacrifice. In a breakdown that eerily parallels that of her sophomore year, Galloway notes an instance where, after spending a night with another woman, she “started to weep, because … that meant [she] was a lesbian and [she] wasn’t sure [she] had the guts to be one” (134). Galloway’s incessant attempts at denying her self-conceptualization as a deaf, queer individual are met with paralleling breakdowns, forcing her to push past the “protective silence that denied [Galloway her] complexity” to view herself as a multi-faceted human being (101). It is through these realizations that Galloway breaches past one level of her narrated self’s