The aim of this paper is to provide some insights into how American identity embedded within feature films is cross-linguistically/culturally transferred to the Italian Deaf community. Profoundly deaf and hard-of-hearing people rely entirely on non-verbal multisemiotic visual input: dynamic or static images including graphic representations such as writing in the form of subtitles. Though deaf people’s sense of emplacement and belonging to a community is firmly entrenched, ‘transition spaces’ allow for a certain osmosis of identity and culture from mainstream Italian society. This paper deals with osmosis from further afield: the positioning and negotiation of American identity in the Italian Deaf world.
