Skin Deep Disclosures: Motivations Driving Visible Forms of Disclosure among People Living with a Concealable Stigmatized Identity.

Individuals with invisible disabilities continually undergo decision-making processes regarding whether or not, and if so, how to disclose their disability to others. While a great deal of theorization exists regarding disclosure processes, less work has considered how and why individuals with invisible disabilities forgo the disclosure process by making the invisible visible. This study examines motivations for using tattoos as a mechanism for invisible disability disclosure among the single-sided deaf (SSD) community. Interviews with 41 individuals with SSD across the U.S. reveal a complex set of motivations for permanently and visibly disclosing invisible disability through the use of tattoos. Motivations ranged from being (1) functionally driven, such as normalizing and naturalizing disability disclosures in mixed interactions (2) identity driven, such as showing pride in their condition with the goal of de-stigmatizing SSD (3) community driven, such as educating others about SSD and increasing camaraderie within the hard-of-hearing community to (4) personally driven, such as memorializing a loss, marking the legitimacy of deafness to the self and to others, and increasing disability identification. This study contributes to existing disclosure models by considering how this emerging form of disclosure bypasses and complicates some of the foundational assumptions of disclosure decision-making processes regarding whether, to whom, and how individuals with disabilities disclose. This provides important insights regarding how disclosure decisions can be predetermined and made independent of context, situation, and relationship(s), which has several theoretical and practical implications.