Hello

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Posted by maxporter on May 18, 2012 – 10:19 PM
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I feel like I have dropped off the face of the Earth. So, I figured I would update you.

I have been going through some difficult processing lately regarding an event that happened several years ago. It is pretty intense, but it is good to start healing.

I think that, at the end of all this, I will have a more ‘balanced’ and nuanced perspective on social justice issues. Instead of reacting against every racist or audist or homophobe as if they were literally the same people who hurt me, I can take a more detached perspective.

And I think I will be more able to actually speak my views in real life – I am strongheaded, as evidenced by this blog, but I rarely say my opinions in real life. That’s because my trauma involves someone who tried to surpress my opinions among other horrible things, so I learned to ‘fly under the radar’ as a survival skill.

But right now, I am just taking it easy. So, I don’t know when I will blog in here again. I am still here, though. Lots of love to all of you.

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How to communicate with deaf and hard-of-hearing people

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Posted by maxporter on April 20, 2012 – 9:00 AM
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Dear hearing people,

I understand that the majority of you have never met a deaf adult in your entire life before, other than maybe your grandma whose hearing “is going.” So, when you meet me or another deaf/hoh person, you might not be entirely sure how to communicate.

And I want to tell you that that’s fine. It is natural, especially for people who come from mainstream US culture that teaches us to fear difference, to be unsure about what to do when meeting someone who lives differently than ourselves. What matters is how you handle your uncertainty.

It really is simple: if you aren’t sure how to communicate with us, please just ask us.

Trust me, this makes things simpler. There is this idea that deafness is the same for everyone, or that there is a uniform answer for dealing with all deaf people. This is not true.

For one thing, people can have very different types of hearing loss. Some people hear high sounds better than low sounds, some are the exact opposite way; some people can’t hear conversation but can hear louder sounds, some people can hear virtually nothing at all; etc. Some of us sign, some of us speak; some of us wear hearing aids and cochlear implants, some of us don’t. On top of all that, we approach our deafness in very different ways: some of us consider it to be a disability, while others consider it to be more like a culture, and yet more consider it to be something in between. There are a billion variables that make any one deaf individual different from another deaf individual.

This diversity may make it seem even more overwhelming to communicate with us – with so many people to communicate with, how on earth can a hearing person communicate with all of us???

Simple: Just ask us.

But, you may be wondering, how do I even go about asking a deaf/hoh person about communication when I don’t even know how to communicate with them in the first place??? Catch-22!

When in doubt, the safest bet is to start out politely and respectfully. And slowly.

If you can, try to go with social cues. For example, if you are at an office mixer and the lady with hearing aids is laughing and chattering with all the hearing people in her department, it would be a safe bet to assume that she can lipread and to approach her accordingly.

In my experience, where there is a will, there is a way. Someone can be perfectly fluent in my mode of communication but still have nothing interesting to say. Conversely, someone can walk up to me with absolutely no knowledge of deafness and still be a welcome addition to my life if they treat me, first and foremost, like a human being.

What happens if you don’t ask how to communicate?

Well, I can’t speak for every deaf/hoh person, but I definitely feel very annoyed when hearing people assume that they know everything about my deafness before I even open my mouth. It is presumptuous, to say the least. Also, a conversation takes more than one person, and if a hearing person makes assumptions, they’re acting as if they are only person in the conversation – and I’m gonna treat them accordingly.

For instance, I was recently in a situation where I met two hearing people at an arcade and couldn’t talk to them because it was too loud. Afterwards, in a more quiet setting, I was ready to invite them to my home to watch a movie – but then they started talking about me in front of me, still assuming that I couldn’t hear them! Well, those people are not going to be my friend anymore. Even if they had been saying wonderful things, like, “I love how many zombies he killed in that one game,” they were still acting that I didn’t matter enough to be part of the conversation. (They weren’t saying such nice things, by the way.)

In sum: when you want to communicate with deaf/hoh people, just be patient and don’t be an asshole. Those two things will get you far in life in general, and they are especially applicable (and appreciated!) when communicating with deaf/hoh people.

That’s it. Best of luck.

Love,
Me

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Racism: A Terrible Beast

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Posted by maxporter on April 17, 2012 – 9:00 AM
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So I’m gonna be honest: I grew up very, very ignorant of race issues, and I am still learning. Partly because of white privilege, partly because I grew up in such a homogeneous area (Utah). I didn’t even know that racists associate watermelons and fried chicken with black people until I got to college, for instance. I definitely had a ton of blind spots when I was growing up, and one of those most notable blind spots was with regards to people whose roots come from south of the US border.

I’m going to be honest – although I now fully disagree with Arizona’s racial profiling laws, it did take me a while to understand why it is a bad thing to legislate ‘breathing while brown.’ Today, I can tell you all about the history of US/Mexico relations (as an activist said, “We did not cross the border; The border crossed us”), the fact that Native people who ‘look’ foreign according to racial profiling have actually have lived here for thousands of years before any other people did, and I can discuss the unfairness of how white immigrants aren’t profiled like brown immigrants are, etc.

But, as a kid from Utah who had been taught from an early age that brown people = Mexicans = immigrants = job-takers, it took me a long time to understand all of this. I was taught the racist idea that all brown people, particularly those who are poor, are in this country because they want to steal our precious resources, and I had to unlearn that. And I had to learn what, exactly, ‘white privilege’ means.

If I had to do it all over again, or if I had to teach a kid coming from the same place I did, I would have started with an episode of I Shouldn’t Be Alive just before diving into Chicano literature and watching documentaries about the border. This episode would be fantastic for a “white privilege 101″ class, in my opinion.

I Shouldn’t Be Alive, a Discovery channel TV documentary series, is one of my favorite shows ever. It is about ordinary people who get themselves into life-and-death wilderness-survival situations – for example, there’s an episode about a woman who is out to run in the back country of Moab, then she falls off a cliff. She lies there for three days with a shattered pelvis until she is rescued, doing sit-ups through the night (despite her shattered pelvis, which causes internal bleeding) to stave off hypothermia and drinks tiny capfuls of water from a nearby puddle. The show gets very intense and is gory at times, and I have cried at more than one episode, but I find the show to be very inspiring because it showcases the will to survive.

In this particular episode, A Family in Desert Hell, a white family in Arizona frequently drives out to the Arizona desert for family trips. As the mother says, they can’t afford to go anywhere else, so for vacation, they drive out to the middle of nowhere, have some hot dogs, and shoot a few clay pigeons. They’ve done it a million times before, and the mother did it when she was growing up, so they aren’t concerned in the very least. The two children are certainly having a blast.

But, on this particular vacation, it all goes horribly wrong – they get lost. Then the stepdad-to-be drives the truck into a dry riverbed in the hopes that he can drive across the ditch, but the truck gets stuck; its back wheels hang in the air and it cannot be pushed forwards or backwards. On top of that, they have two-wheel drive, so the front wheels have no power at all.

So they survive in the desert for three days – which is a really long time, given that it’s about 120 degrees and practically 0% humidity and they don’t have any water. (No, the cacti don’t have water.) As the sun bakes their skin, the stepdad-to-be, who started out with a more olive shade, becomes very brown.

Early on, they split up: the mother stays with her two children and the stepdad-to-be goes out and finds some dirt paths with tire tracks. So he wanders along those roads, hoping to find people.

And, finally he does find a truck – which turns out to be occupied by two bigoted white assholes. They laugh in the stepdad’s face when he croaks out, “Water?” Then the stepdad, who is used to living in bilingual border towns, croaks, “Agua?”

I don’t know how people usually read the stepdad-to-be – I would guess ‘white’ – but at this point, he has no white privilege because he is so brown from the sun. So using Spanish is potentially deadly in the land of ‘this is ‘merika, speak English!’: the driver laughs even harder and the passenger pours water into his face! Then they drive off, leaving him to die from exposure!

After I got over my initial rage at those asshole white men for being such insensitive pricks – this man could have died and they didn’t care – I realized how huge and terrible racism is. I grew up in a liberal white town thinking that racism is about people being mean to each other, but I didn’t really understand the life-and-death implications of racism.

Thanks to this show, a simple truth shattered my comfortable white bubble and hit home: this man could have died due to racism. It didn’t even matter what race he was – all that mattered was that other people read him as brown. Furthermore, it doesn’t matter that brown people are, in fact, human beings – the problem lies with the utterly self-centered white men who thought that it was a game that a thirsty man was in the 120 degree desert begging for water, who thought that a brown man didn’t deserve to be considered ‘human’ like they are. That episode helped me to realize that this kind of thing happens very often, maybe every single day, in border towns, and that it has been happening for far too long. And then I realized that other people of color who don’t have to deal with being brown on the US/Mexican border also go through similar shit – most recently, Trayvon Martin, who was shot for breathing while black. Not to mention the history of lynching, genocide, etc, in this country.

Racism isn’t just about people being not-nice to each other; it’s not just about white people hurting brown people’s feelings. Assumptions about other people are not harmless. At best, they make people feel invisible, dehumanized; at worst, they can be deadly. Again: Racism is not about being nice or not nice. It’s about violence, even death. This is something that more white people need to understand, in my opinion.

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“But ASL is a Visual Language!”

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Posted by maxporter on April 16, 2012 – 9:00 AM
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One way that I have seen prejudice manifest itself in ASL is by offensively describing physical characteristics, especially when signing countries and ethnicities.

I want to be very clear: Most of these signs that I am going to discuss are ‘old ASL.’ If you talk about them in ASL classes, instructors usually depict them as ancient signs that nobody would ever think about using, ever. Maybe that is true in more progressive places, but I have definitely seen young people use these signs in the Western states where I live – in fact, I learned many of these signs from my peers who would then adamantly defend them. I would compare the usage of these signs to words like ‘Jap’ – very few people would use that word nowadays, but that doesn’t make the word hurt any less and it doesn’t mean that absolutely nobody says those words anymore.

Okay, on with the post.

Some prejudiced ASL signs offensively stereotype entire countries based upon physical characteristics. For example, Eastern Asian countries used to be signed using the same slanty-eye gesture that some asshole children use, plus the letter that the country starts with (J for Japan, K for Korea, etc). The sign for Africa used to combine three different signs: a + beautiful + nose. The sign for India used to indicate the Tilaka.

I have run into deaf people, all of whom were white, who still insist upon using these signs. Many were old, but a lot of them were young. “ASL is a visual language,” they say. “We don’t mean any offense by pointing out visual differences; it is actually a celebration of difference.”

They are missing the point. These signs do not celebrate differences. Rather, these signs stereotype people by overgeneralizing. Not all African people have big noses, not all Asian people have the same eye shape, not all Indian people wear the tilaka.

In addition, these signs can have insulting implications in ASL beyond ethnicity. For example, I used the sign for “Indian” that looks like someone’s tilaka at summer camp once because I genuinely did not know of an alternate sign. Someone was like, “Why are you calling Indian people idiots?” This is because pretty much every sign that has to do with intelligence – ‘idiot,’ ‘small minded,’ etc – use that same motion of pressing against the forehead.

There is also a double standard. Think about it this way: if ASL were a truly visual language and it was considered okay to stereotype white people in the same way that we stereotype people of color, there would be an infinite number of ways to sign “white person”: “easily sunburned and wrinkled skin,” “milk-eaters,” etc. But the way things are now, the ASL sign for “white person” is the same as the ASL sign for the color white. And the ASL sign for American is the same as a waving flag.

It is true that ASL is a visual language – but it is possible to come up with more neutral descriptors that are still visual. And that is exactly what has happened with a lot of countries – ‘Canada’ is signed like someone holding their coat, for instance.

Today, there are new signs for countries and ethnicities that are more neutral. For instance, the sign for ‘Japan’ and ‘India’ are signed like the shape of the countries and the sign for ‘Africa’ is shaped like the continent. I feel that these are more respectful signs.

In my opinion, there is absolutely no excuse for continuing to use offensive signs if you know of the alternatives. Some deaf people are genuinely ignorant of the offensive undertones of their signs, but if they learn about those offensive undertones and continue to use the old sign, that’s inexcusable in my eyes. ASL may be a visual language, but that does not negate the basic ideals of respect for others that I try to live by.

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On Silence

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Posted by maxporter on April 11, 2012 – 12:00 PM
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I recently read this comment on a deafness-related story – thanks to thelettereth for sharing it:

Sure, sign language is beautiful but even more beautiful is being able to hear speech and understand language, and music, birds chirping, babies crying, and all the sounds that the deaf do not hear and miss out on.

This is a very common sentiment that I have heard from many hearing people. According to people who think in this way, silence=bad and sound=good. Always. No exceptions.

I feel that this is a very black-and-white viewpoint. Also, it is centered upon the experience and perspective of the hearing person, instead of listening to the experience of individual deaf people. I mean, just look at the phrase ‘the deaf’ – as if we deaf people are this monolith unit of people who think and act exactly the same. In reality, deaf people have many different viewpoints. So, let me tell you about my own individual experiences with silence in order to bring a few more shades of grey into this discussion.

Personally, I find beauty in visuals and do not feel as if I am lacking anything by not hearing. One thing that a lot of hearing people – including the person quoted above – have said to me and other deaf people is, “What about birdsong? It’s such a beautiful sound!” Well, this morning, I was watching two birds court each other. It was a beautiful sight. I saw the birds court each other and found beauty in that; I did not feel like I was missing anything by not hearing them.1

I also find inherent beauty in the fact that I am deaf. Without my cochlear implant, I am “profoundly deaf” – eg, my hearing ‘loss’ is so great that it goes beyond what the audiogram can measure. But I have never felt like it was a big loss. I never wanted to be hearing because living in silence personally comforts me – it is like being in the womb or something. I draw strength from silence; it grounds me. Personally, I associate ‘silence’ with ‘peace,’ ‘serenity,’ ‘profoundness,’ ‘happiness,’ etc. I guess I would compare it to the feeling of reverence, of belonging in this world, that a hearing person would get from entering a completely silent cathedral.

From what I have observed, though, hearing people seem to be unnerved by silence. They seem to associate silence with emptiness, absence, all of that. In one particularly dramatic example, a hearing person and I once entered an art installation about silence: the artist had completely soundproofed the room so that there was absolutely no sound. It was quite dramatic to enter the room – one second, there was lots of chatter around us from museum patrons and video exhibits; the next, silence so complete that it caused one’s ears to pop. Immediately, the hearing person I was with ran out of the room because the silence freaked them out so much – it caused a visceral reaction. Meanwhile, I took off my cochlear implant and was like, “Huh, this room isn’t really silent.” Although this installation might have been the closest that a hearing person could get to experiencing ‘silence,’ I still experience a more complete silence than that.

Honestly, it is difficult for me to understand why so many hearing people seem to be unnerved, even afraid, of silence. But they are. And I just want to make this clear: it is okay for an individual hearing person to feel a negative emotion, including fear, towards silence – but it is not okay for that person to project their own experiences and perceptions upon others.

Another thing is that hearing people associate silence with isolation – I guess that some hearing people feel as if sound connects them to the world. For instance, I just read this whole long passage about how echoes comfort people because they ‘prove’ that there is really a world out there. So I guess that hearing people who think in this way look at deaf people and think that we live in this empty world, connected to nothing around us. It’s not like that for me. Personally, I feel interconnected to the world – I can feel vibrations, I can see things, I can sense movement, that kind of thing. Just because there is an absence of sound doesn’t mean that there aren’t other things that we can pick up on and relate to.

Also… some hearing people think that deafness is inherently isolating because they associate language with speech. In reality, language goes deeper than that: body language, for example, forms a huge portion of what people communicate. Furthermore, language doesn’t even have to include speech. When a bunch of deaf signers or deaf cuers get together, there is community. Nothing isolating about that.

People talk about how we can’t experience hearing. Well – to flip the coin, what about the fact that hearing people can’t experience complete silence? Not every deaf person can, but I can. What would it be like for me to say to a hearing person, “Wow, you must have such a devoid life because you are missing that experience of complete silence!”

I mean, to be honest, on some level, I don’t understand how hearing people function with a constant input of sound. It seems so fucking overwhelming! People talk about “beautiful sounds,” but what about ugly ones? Is every single sound beautiful? Plus, the sheer volume of sound out there – How can people deal with listening to bathroom sounds, crying babies, humming computers, traffic, air conditioners, all that??? All day, every day! So much noise! No relief, unless you fall asleep! But most hearing people seem to do just fine, so, okay.

Hearing people are hearing and I am deaf and that is okay – it is a fact of life. When hearing people deny that deafness can have any positive qualities rather than listening to those of us who say, “We love being deaf!” – it leads to the idea that we have to be ‘fixed’ in order to avoid the “miserable” experience of silence. That, for me, is where the idea of silence=bad crosses over from being ‘presumptuous’ to straight-up oppressive. There is no universal cookie-cutter idea of ‘beauty’ and ‘happiness’ that applies to every single individual human being; better to focus upon creating equal access for deaf people rather than try to mold us into hearing people.

-~-~-~
  1. As a sidenote: To be honest, I can hear birds because of my cochlear implant – and I find birdsong to be on the annoying side. [↩]
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Checking myself on sexism

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Posted by maxporter on April 4, 2012 – 9:00 AM
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For various reasons that I don’t want to go into, I have a very different relationship with sexism now than when I was growing up. Long story short: I wasn’t socialized in the same way as a ‘typical’ cis male. I don’t want to go into why exactly that is because I feel like I would be giving away too much information about my past, so I will leave it there. Lately, it has become very obvious that, despite my socialization, I am a man now, subject to the pressure to conform to patriarchial ideas – and I am going to have to check myself more now. Especially since I sometimes find myself overcompensating for the disenfranchisement I feel from being deaf and queer by being more ‘manly,’ which can be harmful if ‘manliness’ includes being a sexist.

One thing that makes it difficult for me to stay on top of my sexism sometimes is the fact that I am a deaf queer man. This means that I am subject to multiple conflicting messages from society: according to this culture that we live in, deaf people and queer people are weak but men are strong.

When I think about the stereotypes that hearing people have of deaf people, I can come up with a really long list:

  • Deaf people are dependent upon hearing people to provide them with all the answers
  • Therefore, deaf people will forever be a burden upon their parents
  • Deaf people are incapable of complex thought, such as logical arguments or abstract thought
  • Deaf people will never be able to find employment because you can’t do anything without hearing
  • Deaf people can’t do a wide variety of independent-living tasks, like driving or going to the bank
  • Being deaf is something to be ashamed of – why wouldn’t you want to change it? Being hearing is so awesome!

And so forth and so forth and so forth – every time I forget one stereotype, a new one pops up in its place.

But all of these stereotypes boil down to the same basic idea: deaf people are incapable of being independent, self-actualized human beings who can lead their own lives. Hearing people, often our parents, must come in to save us. In this logic, we are a burden upon hearing people.

When I think about what kind of messages my family and society has started giving me about what manhood ‘should’ be, they look like this:

  • A man must provide for his family
  • A woman will do ‘supporting’ tasks for a man, such as ironing his clothing, so that he can focus on the ‘important’ tasks such as providing for his family – if a man does not have a woman in his life other than his mother, well, his mother will do it even though she logically should have seniority over him due to age
  • A man has full mastery of all of his thoughts and emotions at all times and is highly capable of complex thought; therefore, he has the final authority on what will be done
  • A man must condemn all “feminine” aspects of his self in order to be truly strong because, according to sexism, femininity = weakness
  • Furthermore, the distorted logic of patriarchy includes universal traits of human nature like emotions as ‘too feminine’
  • Being a man is super awesome and there is no way that anybody would ever want to be a woman

Basically, the stereotype of the Ideal Man is someone who is completely able to stand upon his own two feet and provide for everyone. It also creates the illusion that manhood is the enemy of womanhood.

There are endless ways in which people drive home these messages of manhood, and some of them are very subtle – one thing that my mother has started doing, for example, is waiting until I take a bite of dinner before anybody else is allowed to eat. But some are very obvious, like when guys look around and realize that there are no women around, then start complaining about how women do nothing but “bitch” all the time!

By being queer, I have given up some of these male privileges – not all; men still listen to me more than they do to a woman and you just would not believe all the asinine bullshit that men, regardless of sexual orientation or trans history, say about women when they are not around. That is a manifestation of male privilege: the idea that women are invading “our” world but we are allowed to invade theirs and demand things from women. It’s disgusting how patriarchy allows men to feel so entitled to this world. However, by being queer, I have given up my “right” to claim the male privilege of being a strong Ideal Man with no “weak” qualities such as being feminine. Patriarchy often combines with homophobia: gay men aren’t ‘really’ men because they don’t have sex with women.

Given these conflicting messages that I am strong or weak, depending on which lenses you look at me through, I often experience contradictory treatment. I am treated as a stronger person than a woman – I am expected to stand on my own two feet to an extent that women aren’t. (I want to be very, very clear: this expectation is not as oppressive as the idea that women are weak-minded creatures. It is hurtful to men, which is very different than being oppressive.) Then I have to deal with shit because of being deaf, like going to the driver’s license office and being asked whether I am capable of driving.

So sometimes I do overcompensate. Personally, I am fine with my queerness, so I tend to overcompensate more when people treat me as an inferior human due to my deafness than when some random homophobic bigots invade my space. When someone comes to me thinking that deaf people are literally mentally retarded, I quote dense philosophical academia theory at them. When someone assumes that I’ll never be able to find a job and support myself, well, I drive myself even harder at school. When someone assumes that I need a hearing person to support me through every step of the way and that “real men” don’t need support, I reject any and all help even when it is offered to me freely with no strings attached.

I have seen other deaf men do this – compulsively embrace their manhood because hearing society says that we are “less” than the Ideal Hearing Man. But the thing is, this damages us. By feeling as if we have to prove ourselves to society at all times, we overperform and therefore exhaust ourselves. It is one thing for an individual to feel naturally masculine, even hypermasculine, and another thing for someone to put on this false mask of hypermasculinity because one feels he constantly has to defend his masculinity.

And it is damaging to others – for example, I have seen deaf men become hypersexist towards women in order to have somebody beneath them. Because that is the ‘true’ standard of ‘Ideal’ manhood: to oppress women and ‘put them in their place.’ I have seen deaf men ignore women who have independent thought because they don’t want to be challenged, thus effectively creating a world where all the women around them mouth agreement with their every thought. Often, the patriarchal male ego has harmful, sometimes literally deadly, consequences on the women around us.

I want to make it clear: I am not attacking manhood. Despite the fact that patriarchy has warped and distorted manhood into this ugly thing, I still do value myself as a man and I am proud of my manhood. I worked very hard to get this body, and I appreciate the small physical details that I am fortunate enough to possess: body hair, deep voice, straight-lined body shape, etc. And I think that traits such as strength are admirable in everyone, regardless of gender, so I do value some qualities in myself that patriarchy says are the exclusive domain of manhood. I have many feelings about manhood, basically, which I will have to unpack more.

On a more personal level: I can’t tell you guys how weird it is to look at myself and have to ask myself, “Hey, am I doing sexist shit?” It is… just weird. And sometimes I feel guilty – I know firsthand how hurtful this shit is, so why do I do it? But I understand that, as a man who lives in this world, it is very important to keep doing this work, to keep checking myself. It doesn’t matter that I see women as human beings and am therefore better than most men out there – I still got shit to work on.

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Becoming Empowered in Cued Speech

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Posted by maxporter on April 2, 2012 – 9:00 AM
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Lately, I have been thinking about using cued speech as a way of affirming deafhood, the idea that deafness can be a positive quality. I unconsciously internalized the idea, from hearing and deaf alike, that cued speech is an eccentric curiosity like esperanto: a cool linguistic toy, but not a real practical thing. And separatist-Deaf people say that it is a threat to Deafness. But now I’m realizing that that’s not true: I can find deafhood in cued speech. In fact, looking back, I would say that cued speech helped me find deafhood. I have lost touch with cued speech but am getting back in touch with my roots and am excited about that.

At the WPC, when I was talking about how I grew up using cued speech, Angela McCaskill told me that cued speech was beautiful. I was quite blown away. It was the first time that someone who knows the difference between ASL and Cued Speech has ever told me that it was beautiful.

In high school, when I used a cued speech translator and cued to my family, hearing people would tell me, “It is so beautiful when you sign.” I would try to remember that it is meant to be a compliment – but, really, it feels more dismissive than anything else. One audist idea is that visual communication is not ‘real’ – that it is like miming. In order to get any ‘real’ ideas across, you must speak or write. So, when someone doesn’t take the time to notice the difference between sign language and cued speech, I feel like the person is overgeneralizing and failing to appreciate the beauty of the difference.

But… as soon as people learn the difference, they usually don’t say that cued speech is beautiful – ASL is beautiful. I avoid talking about cued speech with interpreting students, to be honest, because they start asking me about my ASL skills. As if cued speech is inferior and ASL is the true standard of deafhood. So to have Angela tell me that cued speech is beautiful meant a lot to me because, coming from her, it was a true compliment.

I was looking at my friend’s youtube videos of him cueing. Youtube video comments can be insightful because they show the negative attitudes that people are usually too ‘polite’ to express. Here are some comments:

lol its wtffable… –ASL makes people look even hotter, fyi. hah ;-)

ASL POWER

Like the other poster, I don’t understand why you have “ASL, Sign Language, or Deaf Culture” tagged for this video. It IS very offensive to people who actually do use use ASL and have Deaf Culture. It’s not something to depend on. Cued Speech is not a language. ASL is.

Looks like you went to Clarke.

So, right there, you’ve got a bunch of toxic assumptions. The underlying theme is that cued speech is somehow a threat to ASL and to Deaf culture – so the ASL POWER person, for example, feels like they have to ‘defend’ ASL. Going along with this idea that ASL is superior, the first commenter made it clear that they think that cued speech is ugly and that ASL is the true beauty – according to them, signers are hotter than cuers.

The comment about going to Clarke, an oral school, associates cued speech with oralism. This plays upon the separatist-Deaf community’s fear that oralism makes someone more hearing-minded and thus not ‘really’ deaf. This is a complicated issue I’ll have to blog more about later: Honestly, if an oralist instructor plays upon the audist idea that visual languages are ‘lesser’ than spoken languages, it can damage a deaf child’s self-esteem, but if someone grows up lipreading his mom and dad because they had no other alternative, that is a completely different issue and I don’t think it’s fair to lump all ‘oralism’ together.

All of this is ridiculous because, really, cued speech is not a threat to deafhood. It simply is another way of communicating in this world. For instance, the person’s comment about how cued speech is not a language totally misses the point. No, it is not a language. It is a visual representation of one’s native spoken language – in my case, English. But does that really matter? English is not a hearing person’s language; it can be our language, too. What cued speech does is, it provides visual access to that language so that we can communicate more fluently – it doesn’t matter if cued speech helps us speak or not; the fact that we can see spoken languages matters.

Deafhood is about accepting ourselves as deaf people: cued speech can help people do this, in my opinion, because it provides clear visual access to the world. I never thought of English as a hearing person’s language because it was always a visual language. My skills lie with English, and I wonder what would have happened if I had grown up thinking that English was out of my reach due to being a spoken language. So I do feel that cued speech helped me to embrace myself fully as a deaf person in that sense.

I feel like a lot of literature presents cued speech as a tool to learn English or to help children learn how to speak. In fact, I’m not sure if Orin Cornett, the inventor of Cued Speech, ever envisioned a community of deaf cuers. But, really, cued speech isn’t just a tool for speech therapists and audiologists to play with. Yes, in part, it is those things, and the cued speech community is starting to explore the possibilities of using it in wider special ed settings, like teaching hearing dyslexic readers.

But it goes beyond that. We deaf cuers can also create community by communicating with each other by cueing. And that’s not any less valid than using ASL. Just because we have visual access to spoken language does not make us hearing-minded. We can still find deafhood in cued speech.

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