Linguagem visual e cultura surda: desenho e discurso na obra de Nancy Rourke

Abstract

This study focuses on Deaf culture as manifested in Deaf Art, a visual language presented through drawing and discourse in the reinterpretations of artworks by Nancy Rourke, the leading artist of the De’VIA movement (Deaf View/Image Art). Founded in 1989, the De’VIA movement continues to produce and circulate narratives that confront clinically biased discourses aimed at normalizing Deaf bodies and medicalizing deafness, using oralism as a model. Although sign language and bilingual education are rights guaranteed by law, Deaf people continue to be influenced by a "hearing ideal" throughout their history. In response, they produce cultural artifacts within the Deaf community (Strobel, 2008) through which they can exist and resist. Among these artifacts is Deaf Art, visual arts whose central theme is deafness. In choosing to analyze Nancy Rourke's reinterpretations, the central criterion for selection was paintings that redesign famous compositions widely used in Art History to leverage the general public's familiarity with these images. While it is not the objective of this research to exhaustively analyze all reinterpretations produced by Rourke between 2010 and 2025—due to the time constraints of the master's program—specific works were chosen that portray stages of rupture in the life of a Deaf person. These narratives are identified in five works: the first experiences of control through the oralization process in Hearing Test Room (2010) and Paternalism (2012); the modes of subjectivation of the deaf and the oralized subject in Two Sides (2014); and finally, the practices of resistance, affirmation, and freedom of Deaf culture in Deaf Girl with an Eye Earring (2024) and Our Deaf Lady of Language Rights (2024). The theoretical-methodological perspective combines the description of iconographic elements in the artworks, through colors, figures, and symbols based on Panofsky (1986) and Moreira (2018), along with the analysis of these elements through archaeology of knowledge and genealogy of power and ethics of Foucault (2004c; 2008), which constitute the archaeo-genealogy of Foucaultian Discourse Studies (Navarro and Sargentini, 2022). This approach proposes a methodology for the discursive reading of images (Borges, 2023) and engages with the notion of intericonicity (Courtine, 2013; Milanez, 2013) applied to artworks reinterpretations. As a result, this study aims to contribute to Deaf Studies (Skliar, 2016) through the arts and the archaeo-genealogy of discourse, investigating the symbolic mediation of images and giving voice to narratives of Deaf people drawn by Deaf people themselves.