Wikipedia
Deafhood is a term coined by Paddy Ladd in his book Understanding Deaf Culture: In Search of Deafhood. While the precise meaning of the word remains deliberately vague—Ladd himself calls Deafhood a "process" rather than something finite and clear—it attempts to convey an affirmative and positive acceptance of being deaf.
Unlike deafness, which is often used to describe deaf people only in terms of their hearing loss, Deafhood asserts being deaf has a positive value for humankind and does not need to be cured like a disease. Many other deaf people, like Ella Mae Lentz, have used this term to explain a deaf person's unique personal journey to discover and understand themselves as a deaf person. Some in the deaf community, regardless of whether or not they had read Ladd's book, latched onto this concept as a way to unite the varied segments of the deaf community. Others have found the term too ambiguous to be helpful.
H-Dirksen L. Bauman quotes Ladd's definition of Deafhood in the introduction of the work Open Your Eyes:
"Deafhood is not seen as a finite state but as a process by which deaf individuals come to actualize their deaf identity, positing that those individuals construct that identity around several differently ordered sets of priorities and principles, which are affected by various factors such as nation, era, and class."
According to Ladd, Deafhood requires deaf people to evaluate and liberate themselves from the oppression they have faced historically from the majority hearing society. To this process of self-liberation, Ladd writes:
"...I found myself and others coining a new label of 'Deafhood.' Deafhood is not, however, a 'static' medical condition like 'deafness.' Instead, it represents a process - the struggle by each deaf child, deaf family and Ddaf adult to explain to themselves and each other their own existence in the world. In sharing their lives with each other as a community, and enacting those explanations rather than writing books about them, deaf people are engaged in a daily praxis, a continuing internal and external dialogue." (Ladd, 2003:3)