Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork at a hospital in Amman as part of a larger project on assistive technologies for deaf Jordanians, I examine a speech-centric ethos in therapeutic approaches for deaf children in Jordan who have been fitted with cochlear implants. These technologies were couched in the language of “benefit” (istifada), but what “benefits” they accrued with such technologies was understood narrowly, primarily in terms of access to spoken language. I argue that these approaches draw on a narrow conception of language and communication that neglects its multimodal and distributed nature; belie specific language ideologies about the “proper” Arabic that deaf children should acquire; and rely on a utopic technological imaginary about the cochlear implant and other kinds of hearing technology. Taking a view from Jordan, this project sheds light on how the regulation of language and communication within medical spaces feeds into broader political projects to govern bodies and to produce modern subjectivities.