Becoming and Potentiality

In India, discussions of cochlear implants and discussions of normality go hand in hand, often in an adverbial dance. This conjoining happens in multiple domains, including the state, the clinic, the school, the home, and popular media. A 2019 Hindustan Times article on the successful cochlear implantation of two children under the central government–funded Assistance to Disabled Persons for Purchase/Fitting of Aids/Appliances scheme in Pune, India, reported that Dr. Ajay Chandanwale, the dean of the hospital in which the surgeries were conducted, said that “with recent advances in medical science and technology doctors are able to help hearing impaired patients to lead a near normal life.” In an interview, a cochlear implant surgeon told me that implants can make children “normal se nazdik” (near to normal), and that a child who is implanted early enough can become “bilkul normal” (perfectly normal).

Consider this additional assortment of comments from state, medical, NGO, and family representatives: A Ministry of Social Justice and Empowerment official told me that cochlear implants prevent and remove deafness. After implantation, “a child is no longer deaf and is no longer a person with a disability. Slowly, through learning how to talk, he becomes totally normal.” Similarly, the director of an Indian NGO that funds cochlear implant surgery and re/habilitation decided to focus on implants because they are “truly a huge and life-changing intervention,” and after implantation “the children can go to normal schools and they can participate in mainstream society, they are talking and they are part of mainstream life.” He then commented that cochlear implants enable children “to live normal lives.” The director of the Rehabilitation Council of India, a government institute that oversees special education teacher training and curriculum, told me that children with cochlear implants do not need special education; they can work with “normal teachers and in normal classrooms, they become normal.” And a mother told me that she decided to implant her twin sons after audiologists told her that cochlear implants would make her sons “nearest to normal.”

Physicians, surgeons, government bureaucrats, and family members stressed that cochlear implants create a capacity that brings someone close to or near to normal or makes someone almost normal. In this line of thought (and line of flight; Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 3), cochlear implants create conditions of possibility for proximity or approximation to normal, with “normal” meaning and modifying an array of actions and ways of being: normally speaking, normally hearing, attending a normal school, having a normal job, and living a normal life, among other things. As a result of cochlear implantation and subsequent auditory and language training, deaf children potentially have the capacity—as evidenced through their performance in a sound booth—to move through life normally. Cochlear implants activate sensory normality and create potentiality for becoming normal in other aspects of life. They activate “magic,” as discussed by the mothers quoted in chapter 3. The magic of normality.

In another line of thought, also referenced above in some of my interlocutors’ comments, this period of potentiality is finite, in that deaf children eventually become what they are supposed to be. Postimplantation, some deaf children test with (near to) typical hearing in sound booths and/or attain age- or grade-appropriate language skills, which is the goal, and they can now live normal lives. These are the children who are, as the surgeon mentioned above put it, “bilkul normal.” Normal, however, is a fragile accomplishment, in that technology can fail and background noise might usurp. For such children, then, normality, once reached, is context dependent and always precarious. There is always the potential for normality to be derailed.

Gilles Deleuze (1997, 225–26) writes: “To become is not to attain a form (imitation, identification, Mimesis) but to find the zone of proximity, indiscernibility, or undifferentiation, where one can no longer be distinguished from a woman, an animal, or a molecule” (also see Deleuze and Guattari 1987, 238–39). In thinking about Deleuze’s oft-mentioned becoming-animal, becoming-woman, becoming-man, I attend to “becoming-normal,” the processes that catalyze becoming, and the possibilities opened up and foreclosed by such becoming. How might we empirically analyze becoming? As João Biehl and Peter Locke (2017a, 84) note in discussing the open-endedness and plasticity of the individuals with whom anthropologists work: “Moving away from the overdetermined and toward the unfinished, human beings intrude into reality, enlarging our sense of what is socially possible and desirable.” In their introduction to their edited volume on the anthropology of becoming, they call for “new kinds of imagination” and argue that “the concept of becoming destabilizes the primacy of being and identity” (Biehl and Locke 2017b, 29, 8).

While I appreciate this (hopeful) analytic attention to becoming, I am concerned that instead of “enlarging our sense of what is socially possible and desirable,” we are seeing a narrowing or contraction, because it is indeed increasingly possible—through biotechnologies such as cochlear implantation—to become normal.1 I argue that it is productive to think of becoming normal through and in relation to the concept of potentiality, or the idea that there is a teleological path with a distinct goal and clear outcomes. In the case of cochlear implants, these narrow outcomes include, as we have seen above, normal listening, normal speaking, attending a normal school, having a normal audiogram, and more broadly living a normal life.

Consider the narrowness of the measures used to determine successful outcomes with cochlear implants, such as the Categories of Auditory Perception Scale, the Speech Intelligibility Rating Scale, and the Meaningful Auditory Integration Scale. These are used to evaluate such things as how a person responds to sound, whether a person can repeat back closed sets of words, and the intelligibility of a person’s speech. David Pisoni et al. (2008, 53) point out that “the conventional battery of speech and language tests that is routinely administered to measure clinical outcome and benefit was developed by the CI manufacturers to establish efficacy as part of the clinical trials for U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) approval.” These tests therefore do not tell us anything about quality of life and relations outside the sound booth. Indeed, as Frank Iglehart (2016) argues, controlled sound booth results often do not reflect what audition through cochlear implants is like in noisy classrooms.

Deaf children’s malleability is what gives them potentiality. Without cochlear implants, they are considered to have far less or no potentiality. They might even have the wrong kind of potentiality, in that they could potentially become sign language speakers. Karen-Sue Taussig, Klaus Hoeyer, and Stefan Helmreich (2013, S5) note that “in biomedical practices, potentiality indexes a gap between what is and what might, could, or even should be.” They further suggest “that people appear to ascribe potentiality to those things they believe can be manipulated (or they desire to manipulate) and not to those perceived as being beyond human control (or seen as not in need of change)” (S7). In becoming-normal, the hyphen represents such a space of potentiality. In this context of cochlear implantation, deaf children are seen to have potentiality because there is a sense that they can be worked upon to become what they should be. They can become listening and speaking and thus normal.

Normal can refer to normal hearing, normal speaking, normal activities of everyday life, normal brain organization, and normal Indian Sign Language use.2 I analyze what normality means and does to and for different interlocutors and how it is a simultaneously prized and ambivalent subject position. I explore tensions between normal as a quality or experience of being in the world that is not fixed or stable and normal as related to normative, a statistical, prescriptive, and standardized category of analysis, here specifically in relation to hearing. Normal is both fixed and a moving target. (I am concerned about fixed targets; as I discuss in chapter 4, fixing can be problematic.) Disentangling these two ways of thinking about what it means to be normal is challenging, but I argue for more value to be placed on the former: for normal as an ever-expanding quality and experience, distinct from normative understandings of the senses, communication, and social relations.3 My argument has stakes for disability studies and deaf studies scholars as well as for lay disabled and deaf people in that they also often desire a differently normal becoming that is no less teleological: becoming-disabled or becoming-deaf in terms of identity and community formation.4 I attend to the ways that sensory infrastructures enable certain kinds of becoming while constraining others and to the active and ambivalent work that becoming normal entails. While throughout this book I analyze the ways in which the senses are relationally produced and distributed, here I attend to how potentiality and (ideas and ideals of) normality stick to individuals, their brains, and their practices, while also being moving targets.5 The individual person is both object and outcome.

From Passing to Becoming

On a cold winter evening in 2019, I sat with my mother in my living room in Chicago. I asked her what passed through her mind when she found out that I was deaf, all those years ago when she was a young mother in Queens, New York. She told me, plaintively, that she had wanted me to be normal. She wanted me to have a normal education and normal friends, a normal life. At that time, cochlear implants had been introduced, but they were not (yet) normalized. Thus, my mother did not mention wanting me to have normal hearing, because this was not a possibility known to her. In the absence of normal hearing, she wished for me to have a normal life. I wonder what would have been different if I had been born forty years later, what she and my father would have done, and if she might have said, when I asked about it as an adult, “I wanted you to have normal hearing”—because this could have been possible. What my mother wanted (and what she still wants) is not different from what my interlocutors in India desire, although she was able to imagine a so-called normal future in the absence of normal hearing. Imagining and creating this future took significant work, from arguing with school administrators to admit me to elementary school to pushing against an Individualized Education Plan that included a goal that I would independently use an ATM by the time I was in high school.6

My mother’s thoughts on normality remind me of an important point that Adam Geary (2010, 340) makes in his discussion of Biehl and Locke’s anthropology of becoming: “There is no necessary conflict among desire, normativity, and becoming.” Geary means that people can work toward the fulfillment of normative desires that uphold existing structures and value systems. He reminds us of Saba Mahmood’s (2005) discussion about how norms are learned in embodied ways, through practiced repetition, habituation, and eventual becoming. Mahmood notes: “I want to move away from an agonistic and dualistic framework—one in which norms are conceptualized on the model of doing and undoing, consolidation and subversion—and instead think about the variety of ways in which norms are lived and inhabited, aspired to, reached for, and consummated” (23). Mahmood’s approach is helpful for both parsing out the enactment of norms and excavating forms of agency that are oriented toward upholding norms. Her work on ethical self-fashioning and modes of subjectivation has much to offer those of us working on re/habilitation-related practices, in that re/habilitation involves the training of the (plastic) body through repetition, motivated by desire. What happens in cases in which desires for normativity exist but there is no, or less, plasticity and/or potentiality?

While I focus on becoming, disability studies and the anthropology of disability have devoted much analytic attention to the frame of passing. How do becoming and passing have different stakes? “Passing,” according to Erving Goffman ([1963] 1986, 73), refers to the ways that disabled people or people with other so-called stigmatized conditions conceal that which is stigmatized and engage in identity management in order to appear normal.7 Importantly, a stigmatized condition, in Goffman’s framing, is static and unchanging. Becoming, on the other hand, is about malleability and plasticity, about the potential to be proximate and indistinguishable, the blurring (and ultimate eradication) of the hyphen between becoming and normal. Becoming invokes and involves shifting capacities, embodiments, and identifications. Deleuze (1997, 225) differentiates becoming from “imitation, identification, [and] Mimesis,” which are processes and practices that are akin to passing.

Tobin Siebers (2004, 2) points out: “To pass or not to pass—that is often the question.” Analyzing passing has been productive for both disability studies scholars and disabled people in everyday life, as they negotiate concealment, fitting in, disclosure, and tensions around likeness, similitude, and proximity. Jeffrey Brune and Daniel Wilson (2013, 2) note that “passing is an act that blurs the lines between disability and normality, but those lines were not always sharp to begin with.” Alongside this, they state that “passing expresses, reifies, and helps create concepts of normality.” While analyzing interactions between those who are stigmatized and those who are normal, Goffman ([1963] 1986) never expands on or theorizes about what it means to be normal, and normality is an unmarked category.8 Passing, however, always maintains difference at some level. People do not become the thing that they are passing as, even if they perform or act in a certain way.9 Crucially, there is no potentiality with passing, at least not on what Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 248–49, 274–75) call a molecular level, the level of body plasticity and malleability.10

Disability studies scholars and disabled people have critiqued passing as an impossible and taxing empirical process and have emphasized passing’s harmful impacts on the development of self and identity. In 1997, Brenda Jo Brueggeman wrote, in an essay aptly titled “On (Almost) Passing,” about her experience negotiating the “multiply hyphenated” category of “hard-of-hearing” and how at different points in her life she had strived to inhabit the categories of “hearing” and “Deaf,” failing at both. Of her childhood and teenage years in rural Kansas, she wrote: “I found myself pressured into passing and then greatly pressured by my passing. Some days I could pass; some days I could almost pass; some other days the ‘almost’ got yanked out from under me” (650). As an adult, while completing a PhD and trying to pass as “H/hearing,” Brueggeman went to Gallaudet University in Washington, D.C., to conduct an ethnographic study of deaf student writers, and to experiment herself with trying to pass in another context, this time as a D/deaf person (647). As she matured, Brueggeman noted, she had become more willing to “unmask myself, my deafness, before others have the chance to” (659). In a follow-up essay titled “On (Always) Passing,” published in 2019, twenty-two years after the first, Brueggeman flipped the script to write about always passing—as a deaf person. Deaf studies scholars would argue that she became deaf, which she already and always was (Ladd 2003).

In Kristen Harmon’s (2013, 169) discussion about the trials of passing, she shares that her mother thought that her daughter would grow up to become hearing:

The notion of a deaf child who effectively grows up to become hearing is a compelling cultural fantasy, one that appears in the subtext of much of the discourse surrounding educational approaches for deaf children. For one, the continuing development of ever smaller and more powerful hearing devices (surgical and non-surgical) means that these are held out as the promise of an eternally deferred, just about hearing without actually being hearing, future.

Harmon argues, in an analysis of short videos of interviews with deaf children produced by an organization promoting listening and spoken language, that “passing is conditional and generally dependent on the silent practices of lip reading and observing . . . but for limited moments during the interviews, some children do look down and listen through cochlear implants and hearing aids. In those moments, the children could pass as hearing children” (175). While some of these children might have so-called normal hearing through cochlear implants, and as such might actually be hearing, Harmon points out both the impossibility of totally passing and the harms of trying—and she writes positively of her own experience when she finally stopped trying to pass and allowed herself to “become” deaf (despite and in opposition to her mother’s desires).

Brueggeman’s and Harmon’s accounts illuminate the active and ongoing work required of those endeavoring to pass. The work is physical—straining one’s eyes to read lips and reading more textbooks than required—and emotional in that one is always on guard to avoid being found out. Passing is a tenuous and impermanent achievement that can be destroyed at any time. For disability studies scholars and disabled communities there is often a teleological narrative through which one moves from passing as normal to becoming disabled. As part of this narrative, one often “comes out” as and becomes a disabled person (Samuels 2003). One realizes latent potentiality of a different sort and becomes a member of a disability community or culture.11 This teleological becoming is a well-trodden, well-documented, and well-theorized path in disability studies (Barnes and Mercer 2001; Brown 2002; Linton 1998) as well as in deaf studies (Ladd 2003; Lane, Hoffmeister, and Bahan 1996). This is a celebratory story (and counternarrative) of pride, community, and (re)clamation; it is also a story of potentiality of a different sort. I analyze the opposite of the happy story of becoming disabled or becoming deaf, although I acknowledge that for many people, like Harmon’s mother and my mother, becoming normal is also an accomplishment worthy of celebration.

Becoming normal is a process involving families as well as broader social, educational, and re/habilitative networks, although it is ultimately focused on the individual. Thinking about the stakes both reveals the paucity of audiological, identity, and experiential categories and raises questions about what we might call deaf hearers or hearing deaf people (with or without hyphens).12 Mara Mills (2015, 45) calls for an acknowledgment of a “deaf spectrum” or “deafnesses,” in the plural. As she notes: “A deaf spectrum has replaced the deaf/hearing binary in both the biomedical and cultural realms. At the same time, audiometric categories of hearing impairment do not map neatly onto deaf identities.” This spectrum is largely uncharted terrain, with no clear trajectories for becoming, unlike the normal trajectories sought after by many cochlear implant proponents and unlike the fixed communication categories and outcomes set out by the Alexander Graham Bell Association in its communication spectrum (as discussed in chapter 2).13

In India, the people I met who had cochlear implants called themselves “a cochlear implant person” or a machinewalla (a machine person, said both seriously and sarcastically), in addition to identifying as both normal and deaf. People expressed significant ambivalence and confusion, and had strong opinions, about whether implanted people were still eligible for education and employment under government reservations, or quotas, for deaf and disabled people because perhaps they were no longer deaf. An administrator at a well-known school for aural and oral deaf children in Mumbai said that her students were often denied discount railway identification cards because they spoke too well. (Too well compared to whom?) An audiologist wondered, with whom should implanted people be compared—deaf people without implants or hearing people? And there was always a question about whether implanted children should have their hearing tested with or without their implants as part of the disability certificate assessment process. The difference in audiogram between an aided test and an unaided one could be as much as a hundred decibels.

On an international Facebook group dedicated to cochlear implant experiences, people routinely pose the question, “Are you deaf when you have cochlear implants?” This question generates debate and an assortment of replies, as it does among stakeholders in India. I am reminded of an American Sign Language sign and concept for a deaf person who acts like a hearing person: such a person is considered “mentally hearing” or “think hearing,” and the sign for “hearing” is signed up on the forehead as opposed to on the mouth.14 The sign is meant to index a negative concept, in that it suggests that a deaf person is behaving, thinking, communicating, or acting like a hearing person (whatever that might mean). It foregrounds a deaf person who is trying to be something that he or she is not, as well as the idea that deaf and hearing are the only two categories that can exist, even together at the same time.

Normal Brains

While “think hearing” is meant pejoratively, I take it seriously and consider what it might mean for someone to be mentally hearing. Advocates of auditory verbal therapy and other re/habilitation approaches work toward making children and adults become mentally hearing. The current debates around deafness and language have largely crystallized for some in neurological studies about deaf children’s brains and what happens to them when they receive visual or auditory input. According to proponents of AVT (such as those discussed in chapter 2), a deaf child can have a hearing brain as long as the auditory cortex is not “taken over” by vision. The brain is always normal (or mentally hearing) but can potentially become otherwise without the right input. What does it mean to claim that a deaf child can or does have a hearing brain?

A turn to the brain, and the idea that the brain is or can “become” a hearing brain, moves a discussion about how implanted children and adults inhabit the world away from an analysis of passing to one of becoming, as discussed above. The brain, according to this line of thinking, is normal. Its normality just needs to be tapped into, trained, and protected with the support of cochlear implants or other technology. As AVT researchers Carol Flexer and Ellen Rhoades (2016, 24) note: “Historically, conversations about hearing loss have focused on the ear. But, due to neurobiological research, today’s conversations about sensory input focus on the brain. For example, we see with the brain; the eyes are the entryway to the brain for visual information. We smell with the brain; the nose is the pathway to the brain for olfactory stimuli. We hear with the brain; the ears are the doorway to the brain for auditory information.”

Surgeons, audiologists, and speech and language professionals hold up cochlear implants as an unquestioned good that the public sector should provide and families should invest in—regardless of a child’s age. However, the younger a child is when implanted, the more potential there is for a normal brain. During a presentation at the Cochlear Implant Group of India’s 2019 conference in Mumbai, a professional audiologist and speech and language therapist who worked for one of the major cochlear implant corporations stressed the importance of timing for maximizing this potential. She focused on critical periods for implantation and learning listening and spoken language. A chart in her PowerPoint deck clearly outlined the commonly accepted stakes: from birth to three and a half years old is the maximum critical period for a child’s learning language; from four years old to seven is the open critical period; and from eight to twelve is the questionable critical period. These neatly delineated periods map onto the “hearing potential” of a child (Estabrooks et al. 2016, 10) and represent a race against time, in which at any given point, plasticity is maximally, openly, or questionably present. The doorway to the brain—and to becoming normal—closes with age.

Flexer and Rhoades (2016, 27) emphasize that “identification of newborn hearing loss and other hearing differences should be considered a neurodevelopmental emergency.” They go on to stress that neuroplasticity is greatest in the first three years of life, and “the younger the infant, the more neuroplasticity the child has” (30). If audition is not introduced and the brain does not stay wired for sound, “sensory deprivation” will take place, leading to cross-modal reorganization in favor of vision (30). As a result of cross-modal reorganization, the brain’s “auditory neural capacity” will diminish (30). AVT advocates wish to foreclose another kind of becoming: becoming a deaf signer or someone oriented toward vision. AVT researcher and practitioner Elizabeth Rosenzweig (2011) notes, “The whole goal of the approach is that children with hearing loss should be given the skills necessary to leave and become whoever they want to be.” This comment brings up questions about what kinds of becoming are encouraged and permitted.15 Potential is pluripotent and can go or become wrong. As such, protecting potential involves being on guard against, and shutting down, the wrong pathways constantly.16

Like their counterparts internationally, Indian AVT practitioners and clinical audiologists increasingly focus on the brain in their marketing and other presentations, stressing that deaf children are “late” and experiencing “neurological emergencies.”17 In a presentation at the 2019 CIGI conference, Purnima, one of India’s foremost AVT experts, started her PowerPoint slide deck with images of neurons firing. She stated that deaf children are born “behind” because they are supposed to begin hearing at twenty weeks in the womb. They have until seven years of age to reach their potential. After that, it “becomes too late and neural pathways are no longer available because they have become reorganized.” Such comments about age, audition, and the potential of a child to utilize audition and thus to actualize a “hearing brain” are especially important in an Indian context, in which newborn hearing screening is not universal, and deaf children are typically diagnosed “late.” These children are thus considered always already behind and not on an ideal developmental trajectory.18

When I visited Purnima at her office, she was conducting training for audiologists and speech and language pathologists from around India. Discussion topics were written on butcher paper on an easel. I zoomed in on one topic: “Older children: Is there hope?” Intrigued, I asked Purnima about this question, and she replied that, yes, there is hope, but expectations must be managed. She said that an older child can benefit from an implant and achieve some auditory discrimination, such as the ability to distinguish traffic sounds. However, the child’s actual listening and speaking ability might not improve. Similarly, at a prestigious government hospital a clinician named Parvathi told me about an eight-year-old child who was just implanted, with whom she was working. She told the family: “See, your child has already crossed the age of plasticity. Though he will learn language, that will only be functional language, what he needs immediately. And if he doesn’t practice it over a period of time, he is going to forget it.” Purnima and Parvathi both stressed the importance of “managing expectations” while at the same time orienting families to futures for their children that would involve (limited or diminished) listening and spoken language opportunities. Potential was seen as a receding horizon as a child aged.

Why do families not intervene earlier? They might suspect that a child is not hearing but decide to wait before acting on their suspicion and seeking a hearing test; they may have a child’s hearing tested and disbelieve the results, and then wait a bit before going elsewhere; they might think that a child will grow out of what appears to be a hearing impairment; or sthey might simply consider the child to be normal. At both the private and government speech and hearing institutes that I visited, it was not uncommon to see children five to seven years of age coming in, sometimes for the first time, for hearing tests. In many of these cases, the motivation was school admission or the need for a disability certificate. The audiologists who conducted the exams often said things like “The family is not accepting,” although I had another interpretation, which was that the family was accepting but not intervening. They were not seeking diagnosis or actively trying to medicalize or change their children. Perhaps they had different ideas of their children’s potential or were measuring potential in ways not predicated on listening and spoken language or language in general. Once they visited audiologists, families learned new ways of evaluating their children and thinking about goals and outcomes. Late diagnosis (although families might not feel that it is late) is also the reason the central government cochlear implant program offers funding to children up to age five and sometimes makes exceptions for six-year-olds. The age of diagnosis often dictates children’s re/habilitation and treatment pathways, although these do not differ very much and always involve some focus on listening and spoken language. These different pathways index varied potential linguistic, sensory, and communicative futures for children.

Normal Hearing

According to many surgeons and re/habilitation practitioners, children are simply no longer deaf after implantation. As an engineer working on India’s indigenous cochlear implant told me: “The brain is intact and not impaired, but there are connectivity problems. With an implant, deaf children do hear and they hear normally in that the CI stimulates the auditory nerve.” A cochlear implant is said to feed, stimulate, and maintain the brain through a proper connection. As Stefan Timmermans and Mara Buchbinder (2013, S27) note: “Technology designers—everyone involved in bringing a technology into use—charge new technologies with potential in the sense of a not yet realized desirable future attainable with their implementation.” While these scholars analyze the ways that newborn genetic screening “is thus what it does” (S29), cochlear implants work similarly. There is often a moving target in that children are said to hear normally postimplant even if they do not speak normally. However, the former ostensibly sets up the conditions of possibility for the latter—and, eventually, normal life—to happen. AVT practitioners refer to this as the “domino effect,” which relies on child development neatly following a sequence.

The therapists I observed repeatedly told families to point out sounds to their children and talk about them constantly, because their children hear these sounds, even if they do not respond. Professionals refer to an auditory hierarchy (Erber 1982), and many therapists show families charts of this hierarchy. The first step is sound detection (hearing sounds). The second step is discrimination (telling the difference between sounds), and the third is identification (identifying what is making the sounds and what they mean). The fourth and final step is comprehension (being able to follow connected speech, understand directions, and participate in interactive conversation). Children are supposed to move from sound detection to comprehension with training and practice. Within this step-by-step hierarchical model, it is assumed that “learning to listen develops incrementally from simple to more difficult tasks and that auditory skills progress from sound awareness to identification/comprehension in a stepwise, linear fashion” (Gibbons and Szarkowksi 2019, 350). If only it were that easy. However, this focus on hierarchies is dependent on the conviction that children actually hear. For parents and others, speech is needed as proof of hearing and is the ultimate goal.

As a program administrator at an NGO with a flagship cochlear implant program told me: “The child actually hears with the help of a cochlear implant and a processor. Then that information goes to the brain. Then the child develops his language. So it’s basically hearing, understanding, and then talking.” She went on: “Our kids after a cochlear implant are not deaf anymore. They hear everything, it’s just a matter of making them understand.” She said that she instructs parents: “A cochlear implant is done because your child does not hear. After a cochlear implant, your child will hear. Even the drop of a pin your child will hear.” She tells parents that their children’s experience is similar to watching an English movie without subtitles: they hear everything, but they do not understand what they are hearing. In this line of thinking, children hear as long as they wear their processors. They have “normal hearing” but must learn to understand what they hear, and then they will learn to speak. The administrator told me that parents are instructed to think about it this way: “Aapke bacche ko sunna hai, samajhna hai, aur bolna hai” (Your child listens, understands, and then speaks). Again, a seamless trajectory, like dominos falling in a line, is envisioned, with the ultimate goal being listening and speaking (with the emphasis on speech).

Therapists told me that parents often do not believe that their children hear with their implants because they are unresponsive to sounds. The therapists thus counseled parents that as long as the implant battery was working and the implant processor was not broken, their children could hear. They instructed parents to look for evidence of hearing at moments such as when the pressure cooker’s whistle goes off or someone rings the doorbell. Parvathi, who sees more than twenty patients a day at a large government institution, admonishes parents: “The machine is not for speaking, the machine is for listening. If your child listens well, he will talk!” Parvathi and other therapists ask parents to take a leap of faith, to trust that the “machine” is doing its job in the absence of indicators such as the flashing lights on battery compartments that signal the batteries are dying. Parents are directed to privilege the signals emitted by “the machine” over signals, or their lack, from their children.19

Normal Life

In August 2019, I sat in a trendy coffee shop in Mumbai with Mahesh, a twenty-five-year-old man with two cochlear implants who adamantly told me that he is normal. He attends a regular college and receives no accommodations (he calls them “concessions”) other than extra time on tests, although he never uses the extra time. In an essay that he wrote and subsequently shared with me, titled “The Pursuit of Normal,” Mahesh wrote: “For most of us, possessing normal physical faculties is a given; something we take for granted. For me, however, it was a goal, a desire, a wish, and a hope.” In his family’s “race to being normal,” Mahesh described, “like every other child I had a normal routine of school and homework and playtime. And I had a special routine: auditory verbal therapy to learn to listen and speak . . . , one-to-one sessions at home, hearing aid fittings and trials, cochlear implant surgery, care and maintenance of my equipment all became part of my life.” In addition to providing an overview of these routines, Mahesh outlined his educational and recreational accomplishments, including mastering piano and playing badminton competitively in India’s deaf league. While Mahesh did not write this explicitly, his “special routine” enabled sensory normality and was a foundation for and an essential part of his normal life.

Mahesh concluded his essay with the assertion: “I struggled to reach normalcy and when I reached that, I strove for more.” Becoming normal meant successfully developing “normal physical faculties.” However, this was not (yet) normal life. Mahesh’s “striving for more” was not to have more normal hearing (he already had it). Rather, his normal hearing enabled potentiality in other areas, namely, in everyday activities that are typical for children of his class position. Mahesh is an excellent example of what AVT practitioners refer to as children who are ahead of their peers socially, linguistically, and academically because of the intervention they have received. Does being ahead make him other than normal? And what happens when a path is not a typical one? How do nonnormative paths threaten ideas and ideals of enacting normality?

Mahesh participated in a deaf youth badminton league, in which he became a prize-winning player. Initially he played only in normal leagues, but he did not place competitively in them. In 2011, he was invited to play at a World Deaf Badminton League tournament in Korea. At a subsequent international tournament in Bulgaria, he won a bronze medal. As Per Koren Solvang and Hilde Haualand (2014) point out in their analysis of the complicated politics involved in deaf international sporting competitions, players must remove all hearing aids and implant processors when they play. Thus, Mahesh and other players who use hearing technology must become deaf, at least temporarily. Mahesh’s mother was upset when he joined the deaf league because she saw it as evidence of failure; she did not see deaf badminton as part of normal life, and she did not want Mahesh to become any less normal or any more deaf. Mahesh’s mother had become a well-respected auditory therapist in India and internationally; in recognizing and cultivating Mahesh’s potentiality, she had unleashed hers as well.

But what happens when potential is circumscribed not just by brain plasticity but also by political economic factors? I move now to experiences that surface potentiality’s friction and that constrain possible becoming. In chapter 3, I introduced Imran, a friendly and intuitive twelve-year-old boy whose family lived originally in a village about five hours from Delhi; here I go into his case in greater detail.

When Imran was five years old, his parents learned about cochlear implants from an advertisement placed in a Hindi-language newspaper by a cochlear implant surgeon who practiced in Delhi. The family traveled to Delhi to meet the doctor, and he encouraged them to implant Imran but said it would cost Rs 7 lakh (US$10,000) for the necessary medical tests, surgery, implant, external processor, postoperative mapping, and speech therapy. He showed them videos of formerly deaf children now talking and told them that unless Imran was implanted, he would never be normal. The doctor then suggested that the family sell their land or take out a loan, a daunting prospect for a family in which the father was a wage laborer who sold cloth from a cart. The family saved and borrowed funds, and within a year, Imran was implanted.20

After one month of daily therapy that was included in the initial implant cost, the therapist said that Imran’s mother had been taught how to do the therapy with Imran, and the family could return to their village, where Imran could attend a regular school. (Imran was not ready to be mainstreamed, but the family had run out of money to pay for therapy.) The boy’s daily lessons with his mother would be supplemented by weekly trips to Delhi for follow-up therapy and implant mapping. After five years, during which Imran made no progress and did not learn anything in school, the family returned to Delhi to pursue more listening and spoken language–based options. There Imran was able to receive speech therapy from an NGO that a relative had told his parents about. A central government–run school admitted Imran, albeit with a falsified birth certificate identifying him as two years younger than he was (even then, Imran still lagged behind his classmates). His family established a delicate balance of schooling, therapy, and making do—although Imran was far from speaking and hearing “like normal children,” as the surgeon had promised. Six years after implantation, and after the family had twice replaced implant cables and purchased batteries every six months, Imran’s processor broke and needed to be replaced. The family had spent their savings and taken out loans to pay for travel, housing, and the implant. The broken processor was out of warranty, and the family could not afford a new one.

When I met the family, they were attending speech therapy twice a week, and Imran’s mother was ordering him to speak different words. Instead of the Suno! (Listen!) that comes with AVT, she was saying Bolo! (Speak!) or Bat karo! (Talk!) and giving him different words to repeat—pencil, ball, fan, the names of fruits and vegetables, and so on (AVT practitioners would say that she was treating him like a parrot). Imran, modeling his mother’s behavior, was very concerned about his missing implant—“Machine karab,” he kept on saying; “The machine is broken.” The broken machine was potentiality’s hard limit for his mother and thus for him. It was also a convenient object on which to focus. Imran’s teacher at the government school told me that he was not able to read or write although he was very social with his classmates. She said that she had fifty other children to focus on, and she could not give Imran special attention. She did not permit him to sit in the front of the noisy classroom because he was taller than the other students (she was unaware that he was older). Although mandated by the central government, a special educator was not (yet) attached to the school. The headmistress, however, was very attentive to students with disabilities and compiled a roster of them in a notebook optimistically titled “Late Bloomers.” In this title she revealed her assumption that these children had potentiality and that they could and would reach grade level.

I accompanied Imran and his family to visit Aruna, a well-respected auditory verbal therapist in Delhi, for an assessment of how much Imran could hear with the hearing aid that he uses in his nonimplanted ear. As we sat in a small, colorful room, Aruna ran through different sounds with Imran before concluding that he “could not be an auditory child.” She said that he was barely hearing with his hearing aid, he had never learned how to hear through his implant, and even if he had, his implant was no longer working. She stressed that Imran needed to learn language through visual and tactile cues and that he needed a working implant for environmental sounds, but the implant would not provide him with the ability to listen and speak like normal children. She said, “This hearing is good for him to get the environmental sounds, be aware of his environment, be alert about his environment . . . but it doesn’t build his future.” Aruna thought that it was no longer possible for Imran to become a hearing person, and she could not imagine a normal life for him (and she could tell this after an assessment of a few minutes based on how well he could hear blended consonants without visual cues). Instead, she recommended vocational training and skill development so that he could at least become independent, although she did not consider this a successful path. Because Imran could not be worked upon to become a hearing and speaking person, she could not imagine any potential successful future for him. Imran was no longer plastic in a way that was meaningful to Aruna. Note, too, that Aruna did not even consider as options that Imran could learn Indian Sign Language and attend an ISL-based school.

After the appointment with Aruna, I met Imran’s surgeon. A young surgeon with a thriving practice, he proudly told me about the infrastructure he had built in Delhi for audiology and re/habilitation postimplantation (which had not existed when Imran was implanted). He said that he had told Imran’s family about the importance of re/habilitation and encouraged them to stay in Delhi after implantation for a longer period of time (I do not know that I believed him). I commented that I was worried about Imran, about the fact that he was now twelve and could communicate only minimally. I mentioned that perhaps it would be good for Imran to learn ISL and to attend a deaf school (the headmistress at Imran’s current school supported this idea). However, the surgeon replied, “No, actually, we don’t recommend that children go for sign language after implantation. He can still learn to speak normally. It is not too late.” While his words might be interpreted as naive or optimistic, it must be noted that they were also harmful. Imran was experiencing language deprivation (Hall, Hall, and Caselli 2019), and the surgeon was refusing him the possibility of a future in which he would have access to language, even if it was not spoken language. He was refusing Imran the possibility of developing a multimodal and multisensory life. For the surgeon, Imran was infinitely plastic, at least as long as this plasticity protected the doctor’s practice and resonated with his goals. Potentiality existed only in relation to spoken language. The only potential future was a normal future.

A few days after we met with Aruna, Imran, his parents, and I visited an ISL-based deaf school that employed signing deaf teachers, a rarity in India. Imran and his father were excited to observe children fluently conversing in ISL as we visited classrooms. Imran’s mother, however, was emphatically not happy, and she scowled at everything and everyone. At one point, a teenage boy approached us to tell us in ISL that he recognized Imran’s school uniform (we had come directly from Imran’s school). He wanted to tell us that he too had attended this chain of government schools. He had not learned anything there and had ultimately failed out because the school system stopped doing grace passing (automatic promotion to the next grade) in eighth class. He said that he was learning for the first time ever at this new school. Imran’s mother looked at him as I interpreted what he said, and when he finished signing, she commanded him, “Bolo!” (Speak!). In spoken Hindi, he told us his name, his age, and where he lived.

When Imran’s mother heard him, she said, “See, he can speak. This is what I want for my child.” I gently reminded her what the boy had signed—that he had failed out of the other school and had not learned anything—but this was not of interest to her. All she wanted was for Imran to speak. Again, not hear, but speak. She said that she would do everything, that she was prepared to work hard.21 Speech and language therapists like Aruna, however, told her it was too late, and that she had missed the window for teaching Imran language when he was younger. (In contrast, the director of the ISL-based school stressed that it was not too late to enroll Imran there, and that he would pick up ISL quickly.) Now Imran was twelve, very affectionate, and fun to snuggle and play with, but what would happen when he got older? The potential to become normal—at least in the way envisioned by Imran’s mother, the surgeon, and the therapists with whom he met—was a receding horizon for Imran. Perhaps he could still pass by learning basic speech, which could provide access to (some aspects of) normal life?

Normatively Normal

And what of adults who “choose,” perhaps ambivalently, to get implants? In July 2018, I took a two-hour road trip south from Delhi to Palwal, a small city in Haryana, to meet Rahul Dixit, a forty-five-year-old officer in the Indian Administrative Service.22 Some years before, Dixit had twice passed the prestigious Civil Services Examination given by the Union Public Service Commission but each time had been refused an IAS post because there were no reservations in the service for deaf people. Under the existing reservation system, deaf people were entitled only to manual and low-level clerk positions. Rema Nagarajan, a Times of India reporter, became interested in Dixit’s story when she filed a Right to Information Act petition to learn about what posts disabled candidates were given after passing the Civil Services Exam. She was intrigued to find out that Dixit, unlike the other successful disabled candidates at the time, had not been given a position, despite passing the exam for a third time. The documents she received in response to her petition included only an address for Dixit, no phone number, so she wrote to him and asked him to come to Delhi from his small village in Rajasthan to meet with her. He agreed to come, and brought along a neighbor who worked for Indian Railways because he had never been to Delhi before.

After meeting Dixit, Nagarajan (2009a, 2009b) wrote a series of articles about him and his attempts to better himself through education and employment. These articles were critical of the state, portraying Dixit as an innocent and hardworking young man who had faced many hardships and deserved a post that he had rightfully earned. Dixit was subsequently contacted by the Prime Minister of India’s Office and was invited to meet with Manmohan Singh’s personal physician, who also happened to be a renowned cochlear implant surgeon. Dixit told me:

So, Prime Minister Doctor Manmohan Singh called me and he called [the doctor]. [The doctor] checked me and said, “He can hear with the help of cochlear implant.” And this cochlear implant I did not know at that time. And I did not have a single penny at that time. Not a single penny. And this is very, very costly.

The cochlear implant surgeon and unnamed politicians raised (anonymous) funds for Dixit’s implant, and Dixit was told to report for surgery at a Delhi-based hospital. He said he had no idea what the surgery would entail or how long it would last, and he did not tell his family about it. He commented that the doctor had wondered if he had any family or friends, because no one accompanied him to the hospital. After the surgery, he needed auditory re/habilitation, which he could not afford. His wife became his therapist, repeating words such as aam, papita, and kela (mango, papaya, and banana) over and over again until he recognized them. Before he was officially given an IAS post, he had to have his hearing loss (and new gain) certified, which was difficult to do, as audiologists at state hospitals claimed they did not have the equipment they needed to test cochlear implanted hearing (they were not accustomed to working with implanted people), and the state would not permit Dixit to go to a private clinic.

At the time I met him, Dixit was the deputy commissioner of Palwal district, a position he had held for three years. He had previously been posted in the northeast, where he served for a few years before he was transferred to Haryana and reunited with his family. Over coffee and Rajasthani snacks served in the lush garden adjacent to his house, where we were surrounded by his wife and two children as well as household help, Dixit told me about his journey to becoming the deputy commissioner. Dixit has a genetic condition that his mother and other relatives also had. He passed the condition on to his two children, both of whom, like him, were slowly becoming deaf. His teenage son had already gotten a cochlear implant, and his daughter was wearing hearing aids for the time being. Dixit told me about his impoverished upbringing and the hostile climate his family faced in the village because of his and his mother’s deafness. Dixit studied very hard, which made some people in the village even crueler to his family, because he was one of the few residents to become literate.

Dixit ultimately left the village and studied for a master’s degree and then a PhD. He became a political science professor at a Rajasthani university. He also decided to take the Civil Services Examination, which he did not pass on his first try in 1995; he took the exam again in 2005 and 2006, both times passing but not receiving a post (he finally received a post after passing the exam for a third time in 2009). Because of his deafness, Dixit had been left alone by his family and community. He had not been forced to marry as a young teenager, as his relatives and friends were. He could devote himself fully to his studies and work. By the time he married at the age of twenty-three, most of his friends and their wives already had two or three children, and the women had undergone hysterectomies; their families were “finished” when his was just beginning. Dixit emphasized that his deafness offered him potential in the form of time and space away from normative responsibilities. He told me, “Because I was deaf, I couldn’t hear gossip, films, stories, nothing at all, right? So, I was completely alone with my studies.”

Despite or because of the time and space that deafness offered him, Dixit ultimately found his way to sensory normality and political power. During our visit, he told me that he routinely has telephone calls with the chief minister of the state and that the chief minister does not know that he is deaf. His constituents, whom he meets when he goes out into villages for inspections or when they come to his imposing office and sit as supplicants in front of his large desk, think that his implant processor is a Bluetooth device. In Dixit’s mind, his normal (and normative) capacities have afforded him power and allowed him to become an emissary and representative of the state. He stated: “I am the boss of my district and I have more than a thousand employees under my supervision, under my control. . . . If you are deaf, you cannot become a collector, magistrate, or any of these posts.” Dixit believes that a representative of the state can only be hearing and that he must therefore perform state power through speech and, to a lesser degree, listening. In 2017, the Hindustan Times chronicled Dixit’s use of insulting language to berate poor agrarian workers for not using toilets; the article included no mention of his implant or deafness.

Dixit’s story, which he selectively narrated to foreground victimization, merit, chance meetings, and proud sensory normality, is a fascinating example of how a cochlear implant can seemingly change the trajectory of a life. Dixit moved from deafness to normal hearing thanks to the direct intervention of politicians and a well-connected surgeon, as well as the support of his wife, who tirelessly helped him to train his auditory sense. It is easy to be inspired by his story, as many are, but I am left with questions about why he needed a cochlear implant and his refrain that someone who is deaf cannot do his job. In addition, while Dixit did not discuss this during our interview, his pursuit of an IAS post was aided by protests held in Delhi on his behalf by a national disability rights organization. These demonstrations were attended by many deaf people from across India, the majority of them ISL speakers. (In our discussion, Dixit told me that he shad no interest in ISL or disability or deaf activism, despite the fact that activists claim him as one of their own.) Dixit’s becoming hearing resulted in his gaining a prestigious government post, where he is, in his own words, “very powerful.” The man with the cochlear implant is, arguably, the most powerful man in the district, although Dixit believes that his power is predicated on the illegibility and inconceivability of his cochlear implant and the way that he is not recognized as deaf; he is unmarked as normal.

I now discuss an ambivalent case, all the more so because of how this person’s deafness occurred, with a suddenness that reveals the tenuousness and contingencies of re/habilitation. Vandana Iyer was a twenty-nine-year-old woman from Mumbai who had recovered from severe tuberculosis during her college years and was on track to become a journalist at a prestigious news agency. However, Iyer’s TB returned, in multidrug-resistant form, after she finished her postgraduate degree. She took a medication not recommended for multidrug-resistant TB, kanamycin, a known side effect of which is deafness. (There were other possible treatment regimens for Iyer’s illness, but these were not available in India or were financially out of her reach.) During an afternoon nap one day, Iyer completely lost hearing in one ear, and the hearing in her other ear began to decrease. She soon became completely deaf. While she had learned about cochlear implants, she was afraid of possible side effects, and none of the surgeons with whom she met inspired confidence (she had developed an ambivalent relationship with medicine). She was fitted with hearing aids and set out to learn to lipread. She became a TB patients’ rights activist and traveled to Geneva and New York to advocate for equitable access to TB medications and the removal of patent barriers. She also became a plaintiff in a lawsuit against Johnson & Johnson concerning a patent extension for which the company had applied.

Senior physicians and scientists whom Iyer met through her TB activism urged her to consider a cochlear implant and helped arrange an appointment for her with one of India’s top cochlear implant surgeons. Since these were well-respected professionals, Iyer trusted them and traveled to Chennai to meet the surgeon. She crowdsourced funds for the surgery, the implants, and accommodation in Chennai for postsurgery re/habilitation. Now she is learning to hear (again) with the help of her implants. This process was recently delayed when she tripped while walking down a road and one of her processors was smashed by a car. She then needed to raise additional funds for a new processor. Iyer has become a disability activist of sorts, in addition to a TB activist. In a public talk (which I was able to view on video), she first described her journey through the ravages of TB to becoming hearing impaired. She then discussed the difficulties of hearing in noisy group settings and the importance of accessibility features such as closed captioning. Generally, when she discussed patient rights, pharmaceutical patents, and the ravages of TB, she was incredibly powerful and polished; in contrast, her remarks about disability access came across as newer and tacked on.

Iyer’s story is particularly ambivalent because the roles of capital and international patent regimes are difficult to ignore. Structural violence cannot be wiped away by triumphant narratives of becoming normal, especially when, as in Iyer’s case, the people affected have experienced the loss of their senses. In a video made by Iyer’s surgeon and his clinic (in collaboration with a cochlear implant company) that Iyer shared with me, Iyer states: “The cochlear implant has its limitations. You’ll be able to hear some things. You won’t be able to hear some things. But definitely your hearing will get better.” This is a surprisingly nuanced message for a cochlear implant corporation–sponsored video. (Both Dixit and Iyer are postlingually deaf—deafened—and both struggled with becoming deaf before they could ostensibly become normal again.)23 I am interested in the ambivalences in their stories: Why did Dixit need an implant for an IAS post that he earned? Why did Iyer take kanamycin for TB, despite the known side effects?24 I am also struck by way the media, surgeons, and cochlear implant manufacturers have seized on these cases as success stories. What kinds of political economic erasures happen when success is foregrounded?

Thinking about structural erasures and the ways that cochlear implants become fixes for political economic and other forms of violence, I was surprised to find out that Nobel Peace Prize winner Malala Yousafzai has a cochlear implant made by the Cochlear corporation; I learned this during an interview with a family in India in which one of the children, also implanted, had been invited to attend a Cochlear event with Yousafzai. Yousafzai’s implant restored her hearing and seemingly enabled her to maintain her voice. How, however, might we depart from (re)building normative and violent (sexist, ableist, capitalist) structures and reconceptualize how we think of normal? How do we interrogate the roles of different infrastructures in building and collapsing sensory ways of being in the world? I think about village caste dynamics, a civil service exam, state power structures, multinational drug company patents, and the role of social and political connections in creating possibilities for sensory normativity.

Deaf as Normal

I offer a reconceptualization of what it means to be normal through the experiences of Justin, a thirteen-year-old deaf boy in Bangalore who was implanted at the age of ten; Justin’s story reveals tensions between becoming and unbecoming and the importance of theorizing multiple ways of living normal life or multiple normals. Justin attended a deaf school where ISL and spoken English were used. He had become a confident signer and was doing well in school. Both his mother and the school principal said that he was creative, clever, and good at sports. His mother had also become fluent in ISL because she accompanied Justin to school when he was younger, and his teachers encouraged her to stay and learn both English and ISL (she previously knew only Kannada). Justin’s father saw a TV show about cochlear implantation and decided unilaterally that Justin would be implanted. Since the father was a government employee, the implant was paid for. It cost altogether almost Rs 10 lakh (US$13,245), Justin’s mother told me, smiling ruefully. After implantation, Justin went for a year of therapy but could not move past auditory discrimination and recognizing environmental sounds (he was stalled on the first step of Erber’s auditory hierarchy; Erber 1982). When it was time for him to return to school, the deaf school’s principal told the family to take Justin to “a normal school.” However, Justin would have been lost in a normal school. His mother argued with the principal, saying that “without the implant, Justin is normal like a deaf child.” With this phrase, Justin’s mother asserted that deaf is normal and that normal is relationally constructed. The principal relented.

While Justin’s mother and I talked in the family’s apartment one afternoon, she told me that all life had gone out of Justin after the implantation. He sat at home with his arms crossed and lamented that he “was no use.” He refused to play outside because he was afraid of harming his processor. For his school’s annual sports day program, the students made a human pyramid, and while he wanted to participate, he did not because he was worried about banging his head. Currently, Justin wears his processor only at home. He finds everything loud and distracting with it on. While his mother and I chatted, Justin’s sister came home from her job at an information technology company. I asked her what she thought about Justin’s situation, and she said that “it was too late for Justin to have gotten the implant. He had gotten accustomed to having the kind of body that he had. The sounds are too much for him and it is too much for his body.” She added, Justin “lost his identity and his special ability has been drained from him. Before he was more creative and now he wants to be normal.” These perceptive comments reveal that becoming normal can be experienced as a constriction of the world and opportunities within it. Justin’s sister said that “before, Justin had high marks and was doing very well, but the implant drained him of this focus. People have their own worlds inside of themselves, and Justin is not accepting his world. He wants to be one of us. I just want him to be him.”

Justin’s mother’s comment that “without the implant, Justin is normal like a deaf child” and his sister’s observation that “he wants to be one of us” reveal that pursuing normality (in Mahesh’s words) also results in a narrowing of life and sensory worlds. In Justin’s case, the introduction of the implant fragmented his world and his sensorium. It also affected his social life: he does not like to wear his processor at school or make it known that he has an implant, because children tease him and tell him that he will “become crazy” or “go mad” from the implant’s impact on his brain.25 At school he prefers to pass as a typical deaf student.

During our conversation, Justin’s mother mentioned that the money spent on the implant could have been used for Justin’s education, foregrounding another possible path of becoming normal. This speculation about another possible investment is something I heard from other parents and stakeholders. For example, I spoke with the principal at Justin’s school about the case of seven-year-old twins who had recently been implanted. The twins had started attending the same deaf school at the late age of five years, and they were doing well, rapidly acquiring ISL. Their mother, under pressure from her family, decided to have the twins implanted—even though clinical expectations were low because of their age. The principal said that rather than spending this money on cochlear implants, the family should have put money into a fixed deposit account; then when the twins reached adulthood, they would have the money to use as they pleased. The implication was that the twins would be able to live a normal life in this way. A mother of an implanted teenage girl told me that while she was at the hospital after her child’s implant surgery, a stranger came up to her and told her that she was crazy. The man scolded her: “Are you in your senses? Why did you spend so much on the surgery of this young girl? You should have kept the money aside!” She replied that her daughter was her investment at that moment: “I must invest in her, and she will look after her own future. I must make her able enough to take care of her own future.” This mother saw her investment in her child’s future potentiality as exceeding present monetary value.

In another case, the parents of a one-year-old girl decided to sell the gold that they had accumulated to fund their daughter’s cochlear implant. The mother reasoned that she would eventually spend this money on her daughter’s wedding, so why not spend it now?26 In the view of some people, such as the principal of Justin’s school, spending money on a cochlear implant is risky, as good outcomes are not guaranteed (a sentiment different from those expressed by the state, cochlear implant surgeons, and cochlear implant corporations). In contrast, money saved can buy a house or a business, or provide financial security in another way. This is a different path, then, to living a normal life. This comparison between spending on an implant now and saving small amounts in a fixed deposit account over time to yield a greater sum of money later reveals different ideas about investments in potential presents and futures—although the goal is perhaps ultimately the same. In the case of the former, the child will ostensibly become normal in terms of sensory configurations and this establishes a foundation for a normal life. In the case of the latter, while the child’s senses will not become normal, access to funds will enable the child to integrate into normative life trajectories (Lloyd and Moreau 2011); the child might also be able to pass as normal.

Becoming Normal but Failing to Pass

In October 2019, I attended a CIGI-sponsored cochlear implant industry conference held in a five-star hotel close to the Mumbai International Airport. Among those present at the conference were approximately four hundred surgeons, re/habilitation professionals, audiologists, special educators, and representatives from the major cochlear implant manufacturers, along with a few government administrators. All of these participants were committed to expanding cochlear implant programs. I moved between the conference halls dedicated to surgery, audiology, and rehabilitation and took advantage of the ever-available espresso in the lobby as I exchanged pleasantries with people I knew and introduced myself to people I had not met before. In many cases, surgeons, therapists, or audiologists introduced me to others. Invariably the introduction went something like this: “This is Michele. She is an anthropologist from the University of Chicago writing a book about cochlear implants in India. She is also a bilateral implantee! Could you guess?” In one situation, a therapist named Aruna (mentioned above in relation to Imran’s case) introduced me to two surgeon friends of hers. She could barely contain her excitement when she told them that I was a bilateral implant recipient. She asked them if they could tell. They were surprised, something that Aruna took great pleasure in, because it marked her expertise as an AVT practitioner—she was attuned to differences in speech and voice in ways the surgeons were not. Other audiologists and therapists told me, “I knew as soon as you said something” or “The first time you opened your mouth, I could tell.”

How odd to be in a space where I no longer passed. I had seemingly become normal, at least in terms of audiograms and life trajectories, but I soon learned that normal speaking was more important to some attendees. (In this space I would have really liked to pass.)27 A speech and language pathologist whom I met for the first time at the conference told me that she had known immediately that I was implanted; she was able to tell the first time I said something to her. She invited me to her clinic to work on my S; she enthusiastically offered to fix this sibilant along with some other speech issues. I politely demurred, telling her that I was busy, but perhaps during my next research trip. This helpful therapist also complained to me about a video that a surgeon screened during his conference presentation. Meant to demonstrate success, the video showcased an implanted child cheerfully and confidently talking with his family. However, according to the therapist, the child did not pronounce certain sounds, like Ss, normally, and this detracted from the surgeon’s and the family’s accomplishments. Normality can be discounted at any point.

This experience of not passing was particularly striking because I was the only implanted person and the only deaf person at the conference. When the first CIGI conference was held in 2003, implant recipients were invited to attend, as they offered “proof” that implants worked. One of the people involved in the planning of that first conference told me that CIGI needed these people’s cases—both adult and pediatric—as evidence. When I asked why no implant recipients had been invited to the 2019 conference, an employee of one of the major cochlear implant companies (also a sponsor of the conference) told me: “These people are out leading normal lives and are busy in school or working. They don’t have time to come to something like this.” Ostensibly they were too normal to come. Confidently asserting this normality as a fact absolved surgeons and therapists of the responsibility to follow up or measure outcomes. And evidence was no longer needed.

Multiple Normals

Disability studies scholar Lennard Davis (2013, 1) has argued that “normal is being decommissioned as a discursive organizer.” In contrast, I found that people pursue normality and are excited about its potential and what it is a springboard toward. If becoming normal means achieving a certain outcome on an audiogram and testing into the narrow slice of frequency and decibel range termed the speech banana, I argue that we need to consider how becoming normal limits and constrains possibilities, especially in relation to other normal ways of engaging the world, such as through ISL, lipreading, and total communication. How does becoming normal produce certain kinds of unbecoming?

At the same time, however, as someone with two implants, I am aware of how these devices enable moving through the world in both expanded and contracted sensory ways (noise has become unbearable, music is meh, but speech has become far easier). As Eric Plemons (2017, 133; emphasis added) writes: “Projects of political and philosophical imagination are vital to our collective spirit; they give us something to look forward to, a future worth working for. They help us envision possibilities that have not yet existed. But the present isn’t only a moment to be surpassed.” The present was previously the future toward which hard work was directed. The present is also, for many, a time of successful outcomes, a time in which potentiality has been reached and is now being safeguarded through maintenance work.

I think about the mothers who invested in cochlear implants now for their children as opposed to gold or savings accounts for the future. I recognize these actions as motivated by a desire to create a more inhabitable world for their children in the present. A normal life, activated through sensory normality, seemingly means an easier path. Such a path is what Dixit and Iyer have pursued and what my mother wanted for me, although such paths were and are not easy. There is friction when a processor is run over by a car, when batteries die or need to be recharged, or when one does not pass as hearing, for example. In my Conclusion, I stress the importance of allowing for multisensory, multimodal, and multipersonal deaf presents and futures. Returning to Deleuze and Guattari (1987, 248–49, 274–75) and the scales that exist between the molecular and the molar, I argue that attending to the messiness of both the molecular (it is messier than AVT practitioners would have us believe) and the molar enables us to imagine different kinds of social, political, communicative, and sensorial becomings.