ASL Poetics of Practice: Reading and Writing Communicative Bodies into the Media Materialities of Poetry

Taking up Deaf literary studies, communication and media studies, this thesis conducts a interview-based and qualitative study of the media practices undertaken by poets who use ASL in their work. In addition to expanding prevailing and hegemonic approaches to poetics, central to this investigation are the related concepts of: (1) the communicative body, a term used to describe how the ASL-signing body is enacted as a media technology, and (2) the problematics of interpretation across the materialities that contribute to poetic meaning. Through the insights of a small cohort of poets, this research attends to gaps at the intersection of Deaf and communication studies, highlighting how poetic meaning emerges from the material spaces and accompanying practices of communicative production.