Terry Galloway: “I Wanted Those Words" 
[Articulating Betweenity]
Wanting Words
Terry Galloway: “I Wanted Those Words"
Finally, some carefully pronounced words from author and performer, Terry Galloway (who was a visiting performer at Ohio State University when this video was recorded for the DALN in November 2009). In this powerful clip, Galloway remembers her early “lust for sound” coupled with her “lust for language” then soon squelched by her sense that she would never be able to achieve the vocabulary she desired. Yet in another remarkable “deaf gain” moment, Galloway finds a way (much as Jane Fernandes did) to mediate and mitigate the deaf girl’s desire to be as literate and articulate as her sisters and peers—she discovers performance, willingly becoming “a fool,” and learning to make the enchanted most of her sure mispronunciations. This is not so much an overcoming narrative (that tried, true, constrained and overdetermined staple narrative too often attached to deaf and disabled people’s successful lives) but more a “coming over” narrative—a narrative of the deaf girl learning how to make connections between herself and others (her audiences) by turning what might have been construed as loss (her deaf mispronunciations) into performative gains.
