2022-04-04 16:00:06
Christopher Jon Heuer is the author of Bug: Deaf Identity and Internal Revolution as well as All Your Parts Intact: Poems. He is the editor of Tripping the Tale Fantastic: Weird Fiction by Deaf and Hard of Hearing Writers. He is a professor of English at Gallaudet University in Washington DC.
Is Deaf Horror fiction a genre or a sub-subgenre?
There is no misspelling above. I’m inventing a new term for a weird situation. When we label something a genre, such as Horror Science Fiction, or Fantasy, we are saying “This is what it is. This is its definition.” Horror stories include axe-wielding serial killers who lurch through the night, and enough of us agree upon that, so fine, we’ll publish stories about axe-wielding murderers. And horror is about witches and gargoyles and one-eyed octopus monsters that snatch up young teen virgins, so great, great, and great. There’s a place for them all.
I have a question, though. Let’s step for a moment out of literature and into television and film. Is Lovecraft Country a “Black Horror show,” or is it just… a Horror show? Is Wonder Woman a superhero movie? Or is it a
female superhero movie? (Or superheroine?)Whatever your answer, hopefully, you see the problem. You’re not thinking about who wrote the script, or who originally created the character. You’re thinking about what you see up on the screen.
And the same thing goes when you pick up a book… say Tripping the Tale Fantastic, an anthology of Horror, Science Fiction, and Fantasy by Deaf and hard-of-hearing writers. What have you got in your hands, here? If it’s Deaf Horror fiction, then by definition it’s not “mainstream.” Yet if one of those stories is about a monster and one is about a murderer and one is about a cannibal, do we classify these stories under broader subgenres and place them alongside of Hearing writers, or… no? Because none of this is “really mainstream enough,” and therefore we should put these stories under yet another subcategorization?
And what happens when we do that? Well, that should be simple enough. Name one Native American actor in any of the last twenty films you saw who wasn’t
shot off his horse. Name a Black actor who didn’t have to work his way up by first
portraying a gang member? Peter Dinklage, as a final example, takes great pride in the fact that, when he was still in the trenches, he turned down “traditional Dwarf roles.” (Of the type where drunken frat boy buffoons of “normal height” would toss them at Little People-sized Velcro dartboards.) Yet his most recent role was the character of Cyrano, a freak. And he’ll likely be remembered best as Tyrion in Game of Thrones.
A freak.
Minority Literature springs up because Mainstream (Majority) Literature is closed. And in a world where Deaf writers exist at all—many Deaf Americans do not use English as a first language, they use American Sign Language, which has a completely different grammatical structure from English, and many deaf people do not acquire English in a timely manner (or at all), not because they are deaf, but because they are neglected by an ongoing, real-life Horror story called the American Education System—we should honor their contributions to our beloved genre as we would the stories of any other writer.https://staging.horror.org/wp-content/uploads/2026/09/Christopher-Heuer-headshot.jpgChristopher-Heuer-headshot.jpg
