Using documented examples from education and health care settings, we raise concerns that arise when SLIS become a prerequisite for public service provision. It starts from the observation that “access” for deaf people is tantamount to availability of sign language interpreters, and the often uncritically proposed and largely accepted solution at the institutional level to lack of access seems to be increasing the number of interpreters. This article rethinks the impact of sign language interpreting services (SLIS) as a social institution. In so doing, I mobilise some of these external evidences to make a crucial claim about DEAF ontology: completely reversing the position that deafness is a reductive condition of an otherwise hearing body, DEAFness is reframed to be a productive condition of being, a creative and essential quality inherent to all deaf people. As such, this thesis examines the outward and witnessable shapes exerted by performances of each deaf interlocutor’s view on her own DEAF way of being onto her surroundings. Given this, ‘DEAF space’ (Gulliver 2009), the physical space delineated by deaf-specific modes of visual-tactile authority, can be shown to be created not only by groups of deaf people, but by each individual deaf person as she conducts this work of authoring her own being. I argue that she performs this calibration continuously, and that her performances of this process give rise to externalised material shapes – both literal and figurative – via the ways these adjustments are made witnessable via her flesh.

Because each deaf person’s experience of her own body is unambiguously hers alone, so too are the ways she uniquely calibrates the physical degrees of her specific deaf condition with her particular socio-cultural understandings of her own life and those of other people and finally will determine how (and to what extent) she cultivates her ever-evolving habits of visual-tactility.

Therefore, deaf perspectives on ‘reality’ are necessarily dominated by the visual-tactile ways that each deaf person uniquely connects with her interior self, with others, and with her surroundings. Every deaf person, whether they sign or do not, considers, works through, embodies, and performs the different elements of her deafness via the vessel of her own deaf body.

Outward conjure