My weekly review post is scheduled to happen today. But I don’t have many of my books or movies with me, and I like to have the media next to me so that I can look through it while writing up a review. So, here is a rough post that I wrote up a few days ago:
The more I think about it, the more unsure I am as to if the distinction between deaf vs Deaf or hearing vs Hearing is such a useful one.1
For me, the primary problem that I have is that it creates a binary. I generally dislike binaries, preferring to think in shades of grey. And, in this case, there’s a lot of shades of grey.
For example, I personally don’t fit very snugly into either the ‘deaf’ or ‘Deaf’ category. I grew up mainstreamed and many of the people that I currently know and love are hearing. Yet I know ASL and the only reason that I don’t interact with culturally-Deaf people is because there aren’t very many where I live. And what about my sister? She was born hard-of-hearing, then gradually went deafer and deafer, until she got a cochlear implant. She doesn’t know sign language and doesn’t use a translator. Culturally, she’s more hearing, but her audiogram doesn’t indicate that.
In this blog I’ve capitalized terms. I’m not so sure if I’ll keep doing that. I guess that saying “culturally deaf” is more useful. I’ll try to do that more often in the future.
-~-~-~- In a nutshell, if it’s capitalized, it denotes a cultural affiliation; if it’s lower-case, it simply indicates auditory status. [↩]
One Comment
I think capitalizing “hearing” is a bit odd, as there is no community built around the ability to hear, though there are many communities that use spoken languages and that tend to assume people can hear.
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