Why Should I Have the Right to Speak?

I am twenty-one year old female college student. So why should I have the right to speak? Why should I have the right to proclaim my opinions and ideas? In what way does my identity give me the justification to have a say in the world? These are just a few of the questions that arise when considering whether or not our unique identities gives us the capacity to make claims about the world we live in.

In Ann George’s work, Mr. Burke, Meet Helen Keller, she transforms the culturally constructed identity of Helen Keller as the “patron saint of the deaf and blind” by highlighting her considerable feats in the realm of language, politics, and rhetorical theory. Before I read this work, I will admit that my view of Helen Keller was unfortunately limited to the character portrayed throughout popular culture. I was certainly amazed at the extent to which she proclaimed her ideas and views of the world with such elegant language. Even her considerable disabilities could not hold her back from addressing the issues she cared about.

But what gives her the right to make radical discourses and political speeches? Certainly many critics of her time asked this same question, mostly due to the fact that her disabilities prevented from “truly” experiencing the world. How can a blind, deaf woman declare her opinions about a world she’s never seen? To Keller, her worldview depended on language, texts, and the things that people told her, or further more, her “reality was a linguistic reality because so many of her experiences came to her through the eyes and ears of other people” (George, 345). So does the fact that what she knows about the world came from sources other than her own observations make them any less real?

Keller’s identity, which creates both a female and disabled person perspective, acts as a perfect example of the identity crisis in terms of authority to create ideas and make them known.  Should the fact that she is both a woman and disabled be taken into account when analyzing her writing and rhetorical theory? Of course, in a perfect world it would not matter who says what. But as it is so, our world depends heavily one placing individuals in their certain groups. As a result, we are able to easily form ideas and perspectives about one another once we know which group they identify with. The fact that Helen Keller was blind and deaf, and still managed to be a participating member of society is a testament to her power and capability to overcome her culturally formed identity. Due to her unique set of disabilities, she was forced to learn language and communicate in a way that was vastly different from others. By learning language through reading words spelled in her palm, Keller become a physical vehicle of verbal communication and quite “literally a body that learned language” (George, 340).  While she learned language differently, she formed ideas just like everyone else: “she gains knowledge and creates a reality the same way most people do most of the time- through texts ‘using the eye and ear of the world which makes the printed page mine’” (George, 346). So, in a way, Keller allowed her unique identity to further position in the world as a brilliant mind who forms and proclaims her ideas, despite her obvious setbacks. But the question still remains: what gives her the right? Why should we listen to her?

Her identity does not give her the right to speak. It is her mind, her ideas, and perspectives that give her the right. It is what every person should be entitled to: the right to declare their ideas and not be judged for it by the group they are forced to identify with.