ABSTRACT:
The article analyzes a set of linguistic policies of deaf education to show how knowledge about deafness articulates to the norms of deaf behavior and operates in the constitution of possible forms of being deaf in the contemporaneity. The analysis uses, as a prominent example, legal documents that regulate deaf education in Portugal. It is observed, in the documents, discursive recurrences that allow to think of the production of possible universal forms of being deaf that are mainly governed by the use of the language, be it signed or spoken. These forms of being can be thought beyond a geographical territory, since they are inspired by international knowledge and tendencies of deaf education.
Keywords:
Deaf education; Language policies; Portugal; Government; Subjectivation