disabilities, including deaf people, within asylums and residential schools in the
nineteenth century. In a move not dissimilar to what Foucault named the ‘Great
Confinement’ of the ‘insane,’ the deaf were increasingly segregated from ‘normal’
society, hidden away behind the forbidding walls of Victorian institutional architecture
they were out of sight and out of mind. Boarding schools offered families of deaf
children the opportunity to send away, and possibly forget, the ‘problem’ of disability,
at least on an everyday basis. Day schools for deaf children ensured that the deaf were
educated separately and differently from hearing children. Physical segregation
symbolized and reinforced the marginalization of the disabled.