Looking In: Teresa Deevy, Deafness, and Radio

Looking In: Teresa Deevy, Deafness, and Radio Emily Bloom (bio) The Irish playwright Teresa Deevy wrote for the radio medium without ever hearing a broadcast. She had been deaf since 1913 when she lost her hearing as a result of Ménière's disease as a nineteen-year-old student at University College Dublin.1 In the decade that followed, radio developed into a popular medium, inaugurated on the British Isles with the founding of the BBC in 1922. As radio was coming into its own as an increasingly reputable venue for dramatic writing in the 1930s, Deevy was beginning her career as a playwright at the Abbey Theatre, one of the few women of her generation to find acceptance on Ireland's national stage (fig. 1). By the 1940s, she had fallen out of favor with the increasingly conservative Abbey leadership and was looking for new outlets for her work. Deevy, like many writers of her generation, came to write for radio reluctantly after other options dried up. In a letter to her close friend and fellow playwright, Florence Hackett, she describes going to the BBC's Belfast studios with a sense of trepidation, feeling "doubtful as to whether I could ever be really enthusiastic over writing for radio." But by the end of the visit, she reports having been entirely won over: I loved the place—and their way of production. I would love you to come sometime with me. There is nothing formal about them—a really theatre-atmosphere—everyone friendly & casual. It was most interesting to watch the rehearsal. . . . We spent one evening at that. Another evening we were in the "panel" room all the time. This is where the producer sits—switching on to the various studios—according as sounds are to come through. [End Page 279] The producer is never in the room with the actors!!—He listens with ear-phones & then corrects them through a loud speaker. I was fascinated watching it all.2 The details that Deevy gives are striking for the level of interest she took in the technical production and how she depicts the physical space of the studio, describing the devices, the placement of the director and actors in relation to each other, and the overall arrangement of parts. Most notable in this letter is Deevy's sense of medium specificity. There may be a "theatre atmosphere" in the studio with its mingling actors and casual bonhomie between the crew, but when the production begins, she hones in on what makes radio different: its studio architecture, technical apparatuses, and physical distance between producer and actors. As a deaf woman, Deevy was not the listener that radio producers had in mind when they imagined their audience. In order to write for the medium, she would need to understand it differently than they did, developing an alternative set of definitions and practices. Deevy described this alternative approach to radio in letters to friends and producers, in which she reroutes the auditory modes of consumption that are often considered radio's exclusive domain. In so doing, she brings to light radio's occluded visual elements such as the infrastructure of the studio and the circulation of scripts, and shows how these, as well as the auditory, are also essential components of radio broadcasting. Click for larger view View full resolution Fig. 1. Photograph of Teresa Deevy, Abbey Theatre Dramatic Festival of Plays and Lectures, Dublin 6–20 1938, Souvenir Brochure, page 14. © Abbey Theatre Archive. [End Page 280] Drawing upon disability media studies scholarship, I argue that Teresa Deevy's tactics as a deaf radio writer overturn assumptions about normative modes of media engagement and expand our history of accessibility practices. Intermedial and visual approaches to radio such as those pioneered by Deevy reveal underlying structures of the medium itself and can help steer media scholars towards a disability-studies informed approach. Early radio scholarship, beginning with Rudolph Arnheim's book-length study Radio (1936), were dominated by ableist language defining broadcasting as "a blind medium" and presumptions about the deficits of the medium and its audience have been hard to shake.3 Such arguments about radio's blindness attribute disability...