Hearing deafness: Subjectness, articulateness and communicability

The ability to speak clearly and distinctly has long functioned as a defining criterion in determining who is human, and who will get heard. Articulateness determines subjectness. As a profoundly and congenitally deaf person for whom speech and articulateness did not come 'naturally' but arrived through the aid of technology, science, and perspiration, I am highly aware of how articulateness enables my subjectness. What could have been the conditions for the possibility of my voice, if I had failed to achieve articulateness? In this paper, I unpack the relationships between articulateness and subjectness by interrogating an alternative that I call communicability.