Moving Hands

It is the early 1990s. I am young, hyperactive, and already in love with moving images. I pop in the VHS tape and hit PLAY.

Even as a small child, I can tell that the aesthetics aren’t as polished as my favorite movie at the time, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang. It looks as if it were filmed in a studio on videotape: the backdrops appear to be cut from construction paper, there are only a few pieces of furniture, the fluorescent light washes out everybody’s features, and that faint blue tint that you see in films shot on videotape hangs over everything. But none of this matters because Super Deaf Woman’s is out to save the world!

The plot revolves around the plight of people who are struggling to find a language to express themselves. There are multiple storylines, but this is the only storyline that I remember clearly today: A man fingerspells G-R-O-W to his plant in a futile attempt to make it grow. He tries over and over again, but the plant just won’t grow. Never fear! Here comes Super Deaf Woman! She swoops into the frame and teaches the man how to sign “grow.” He tentatively signs it and she gives him an encouraging nod. He signs it again, more fluently this time. She smiles, seeing that he has learned the sign by heart, then flies away. The man turns his full attention back to the plant and signs “grow” to it – and it immediately blossoms into a beautiful flower.

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People talk about how some pieces of art change them forever, how they carry art inside them for a long time. Well, Super Deaf Woman stayed inside me for a long time. She showed me how much language matters: if you have the right words, you can bring beauty to the world and/or you can cause a profound change to occur. At the same time, she showed me that ASL is a beautiful and worthy language with meaning of its own, not an inferior shadow to English. In fact, in this film, English is almost inferior to ASL. How can a fingerspelled English word like “grow” fully convey the image of a plant growing?

Personally, I also found inspiration from the simple fact that the superhero was female. In a world where most of the other superheros on TV were male, she was a strong woman, a positive role model. In a similar manner, I internalized the film’s message of how men should act: instead of discounting what a woman has to say, a man should listen. (And it’s okay for them to grow flowers for the sake of nothing more than bringing beauty to the world.)

I remember being a deaf child inside of a hearing world. I looked around me, and everybody that I loved was hearing. (Exception: my younger sister, who is hard of hearing.) I have heard horror stories about deaf children whose parents tell them, “You are the only one like this.” Thankfully, my parents had enough foresight to let me interact with Deaf people, even though that meant traveling an hour to the nearest city so that we could converse in a language that my parents didn’t speak. I count myself as very fortunate. But when I wasn’t around those role models, where did I turn? Books and movies, including Super Deaf Woman.

Now, in spite of Super Deaf Woman, I did manage to internalize a lot of bullshit about the Deaf community. For example, I used to think that Gallaudet was a waste of time and money because it was “inferior” to hearing schools. Today, I see that that’s not true; this notion comes from the misconception that an absence of English, an absence of hearing, automatically signifies inferiority.

But what if I had not had access to positive portrayals of deafness like Super Deaf Woman? I shudder to imagine how much more bullshit I would have managed to internalize. I feel for the countless children out there who, in the absence of positive deaf role models, think that being deaf is somehow wrong and deficient and makes them less worthy of respect than their hearing counterparts. That’s just one of many reasons why media and the representation of minorities matters to me: Children and grown-ups alike internalize the roles of minorities in the media that they consume. What if my first image of a deaf person had been negative?

One final thing: Today, I can’t remember the name of this video. I’ve been searching for it for years to no avail. Do any of you know what I’m talking about? If you do, please let me know!