Tag Archives: deaf

Coming out of the Cued Speech Closet

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Posted by maxporter on March 20, 2012 – 9:00 AM
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I’m going to tell you all something: I grew up using cued speech.

I did not mention cued speech in my blog up until this point because it is such a tiny community that I felt that telling the Internet would make me much more identifiable. In this case, the problem that I had with giving up my anonymity was the fact that I had not yet disclosed to the cued speech community. As far as they knew, I was a straight kid.

I am now getting involved with the cued speech community again. It is such a small community that people are like, “Oh, do you know ____ who lives in (name of a state on the other side of the country)?” When I say my name, people ask me if I am related to…? and then name my father. In addition, my family is pretty prominent in this community – researchers have done case studies of us. Basically, the second I introduce myself, people “know” who I am because they have read about or have met my family.

Personally, I hate publicity, so I have mostly stayed out of the spotlight. Now, though, I am getting involved again. There are things that I don’t like about cued speech as it is today – for example, its association with AG Bell and the fact that people emphasize how cued speech can help kids to speak. I think that the visual side of cued speech is much, much more important than the oral side.

So, yeah, now that I am ‘out’ of the cued speech closet, so to speak, I look forward to talking about it in this blog.

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Decoupling elitism from writing

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Posted by maxporter on March 11, 2012 – 3:29 AM
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Recently, I’ve been reading critiques of white people who focus on language, rather than on ideas, in a discussion group. For example, scroll down to dumbthingwhitepeoplesay’s commentary about language here and read witchsistah’s commentary here. So that has been causing me to reflect.

Before I go any further, let me bring any new reders up to speed: I am white, my parents are hearing, and I was mainstreamed into a hearing school, so I definitely was socialized to focus on grammar and stuff like that. I think that, if my parents had been ASL-Deaf, I wouldn’t have been socialized like that to quite the same extent, but that socialization would still have been present in the very structure of the school system and so forth.

Like dumbthingswhitepeoplesay says, this obsessive focus on language is fucked up:

There’s no need to acknowledge another person’s argument if you can use their wording to imply their logical fallibility or intellectual weakness. After all, why bother attacking the actual issue (which is likely to have an objective rightness or wrongness) if you can focus on word-choice (where the subjectivity of definitions can provide all the shelter one needs)?

One example that jumped to my mind was when I went to an elitist Ivory Tower college where a professor critiqued a Black student’s story because it was written in Ebonics. It can be super-ridiculous sometimes – there is a time and place for things, and an argument is not the time or place to go into minutiae of language. And I get tired of people who say shit like “devil’s advocate” instead of actually stating their opinion directly.

However, I have noticed that sometimes people, white or PoC, go in the opposite direction and condemn all people who focus upon language. The people who wrote the tumblr commentary that I just shared don’t do it, so this post is not exactly a direct response to them. But I’ve seen it elsewhere. For example, people have asked me if I am Hearing simply because I write well. I understand why people do this – it is hard to trust those who belong to the same group of people who have done so many horrible things to your people. In this example, Hearing people have used English, written and spoken, to oppress Deaf people for centuries.

But I don’t think that caring about expressing one’s self in writing is, in and of itself, a bad thing. And, actually, I think it’s a little screwed up if people look at a well-written essay with suspicion. Speaking from a personal perspective, I write well because it makes me happy. I like creating order and meaning, and when I string together English words like it’s a chess game, I am happy. I’m not trying to twist my words around, at least not in my non-fiction. In fact, I would want someone to tell me if I was twisting my words around in critical pieces like this – I want my writing to be a space where the reader can trust me and to show my reader that I am willing to communicate with them and learn from them.

I think that the distinction to make is this: it’s okay to care about your own language, and it is okay if a friend says, “Hey, can you help me edit this paper?” – however, if you are actively drowning out someone’s ideas by focusing only on their language and not listening to their content, that’s fucked up.

Writing is a tool that people have used against us, but that doesn’t mean that it only belongs to the oppressors. It can belong to us, too. Writing is an art form and one of the many ways that humans communicate with each other. I want to see it uncoupled from this oppressive power dynamic – it should be a tool as blameless as a screwdriver, not a weapon.

So, from my perspective, respecting all forms of communication can be one way to do that. dumbthingswhitepeoplesay uses the example of AAVE and how white people don’t like it because it forces them to communicate in an unfamiliar way – well, if people approached communication from a more open-minded perspective in general, I think that that would help a lot. In conjunction with that, we need institutional support for that, too – for example, having anti-discrimination policies in place that prevent a professor from suppressing the ideas of a person who just so happens to use an interpreter.

Because, really, in the end, what matters is communication. If we lived in a society where we could speak ASL in public without scrutiny because it was simply another form of communication, if we could read Spanish alongside English without politicians making a huge deal out of it, if white people did not constantly police every aspect of people of color, including their language – I think that that would be a lot closer to an ideal society than what we currently have.

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Thoughts on the Feminist-Relational Approach to Interpreting

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Posted by maxporter on February 21, 2012 – 4:20 AM
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One thing that I learned within the last six months is that there are many different conceptual approaches to ASL interpretation. For example, there’s a theory that thinks of the interpreter as a ‘conduit’ who provides no cultural translation – so an interpreter would translate an English idiom literally to a native ASL speaker instead of translating the concept to ASL. You can read more about the different models here.

Recently, I was reading an article, A Feminist-Relational Approach to Interpreting. It was super-interesting. I encourage you to read it if you have the time.

Let’s start by defining the words ‘feminist’ and ‘relational’: in this context, ‘feminist’ is a set of related philosophies and approaches related to things like empowerment and consensus-building that don’t apply only to women or sexual/gender minorities. A ‘relational’ approach “examines individuals in context (Ulrich, 1996). It notes that each interaction is a unique mix of participants, place, time and social conditions.”1 With this perspective, the goal of the feminist-relational interpretation is to avoid oppressing the Deaf participant and to not inadvertently act as the oppressor. The interpreter is aware of their role as a bilingual individual who mediates the power balance between the minority language speaker and the majority language speaker.

At first, I was a bit dubious. What if the well-meaning interpreter ends up being condescending towards me because he or she knows The Answer to saving Deaf people from oppression? What if the interpreter’s hidden agenda interfered with my services?

But, as I kept reading, I began to grasp just how empowering it would be to have an interpreter who took a feminist-relational approach to interpreting because it puts an emphasis on the idea that “experience is linked to respecting individuals and valuing their stories. It takes into account the unique perceptions of people who, although sharing an event, experience it differently.”2 So, instead of pretending that I grew up Hearing and that I understand every single rule of Hearing social etiquette, an interpreter would treat me like I truly am, a deaf person.

Let’s get honest here – even though I grew up among mostly Hearing people, I still don’t understand all of Hearing culture’s inner workings to this day. When I was younger, having a personal connection to interpreters was quite important to helping me navigate a mainstreamed school – For instance, A Feminist-Relational Approach to Interpreting talks about how interpreters can help their student determine culturally appropriate times to ask questions. My interpreter in primary school did things like this, and I really appreciated having her around to teach me about Hearing culture. Before she began doing this, I would get sent to the office for “speaking out of turn.”

When the interpreter-client relationship is deeper than a simple professional relationship, I definitely feel more connected to my surroundings. For instance, in high school, I definitely appreciated having an interpreter who stood in quiet support of me when I had a homophobic teacher who would yell at my then-sweetie and I whenever we held hands outside of class. He didn’t do much – he simply let me know that, although he was Mormon like our teacher, he stood in full support of LGBTQ rights and saw absolutely no reason whatsoever, religious or otherwise, to act/think like our teacher did. Having that support helped me keep going to that class and I learned a lot about the subject matter in spite of that teacher, who was an asshole for many many reasons beyond the scope of this post.

When the interpreter treats it simply as if it is a job, I feel very disconnected and even exploited. And when the interpreter acts as if he or she possesses no understanding of the Deaf experience whatsoever, I feel uncomfortable. For instance, I had an interpreter who talked about how she had encountered one of her clients at the local Deaf and Hearing Professionals Happy Hour and how awkward that was because she interpreted for that client’s therapy sessions. As somebody with very strong feelings about the stigmatization of mental illness, I was completely appalled. Also, we place a large amount of trust in our interpreters, mostly by necessity, and to have that trust violated is horrible.

Looking back, her behavior was utterly unprofessional even by standard interpreting guidelines – I should have requested to switch an interpreter. But at the time, it didn’t even occur to me as an option – I had been told so many times that the hired interpreters were set in stone that I had forgotten all about my rights.3 It definitely made me feel much more uncomfortable in that class to voice my opinion because I knew that that interpreter was sitting there in judgment of her clients. What if she didn’t like my opinion about the political system of Mexico or something?

So, having an interpreter who came from a more feminist-relational context and was in a position where he or she truly understood all the intricacies and power dynamics inherent in the Deaf/Hearing relationship would be very empowering, I think. Especially if that interpreter was also able to expand their understanding of power dynamics to other minority relations – I am also a queer man, so having an interpreter who is able to support me in that aspect too is very empowering. Like in my aforementioned example of the Mormon interpreter who stood by my side – or, in another example, when I had two gay interpreters (one male, one female) and they would sometimes just so happen to discuss their partners in our conversations during break times. Nothing too personal, just older adults talking about their domestic gay lives. It made me feel more welcome in the sometimes-homophobic classroom.

As A Feminist-Relational Approach to Interpreting discusses, it’s not just empowering for me, but for the interpreter, too. When I worked with interpreters a lot in a job where I was responsible for determining the feasibility of remote ASL interpretation in the university, I talked to them a lot. And I learned that a lot more interpreters genuinely care about us than I had realized. For example, I had the opportunity of talking to a woman who had been interpreting for the university for about 20 years, and just hearing about her passion for Deaf people and the community as a whole was pretty awesome.

And, when I think back to the aforementioned interpreter who is one of the most ethically-concerned interpreters I’ve had from an adult perspective, I can see that he felt very powerless in that situation. He could see no way out of the iron suit of the code of conduct. If he had been aware of alternatives, I think that he would have felt more empowered to act out against the dysfunctional situation that he saw every day – for instance, here is one scenario in which an interpreter was able to retain rights to file a complaint:

An interpreter visited a Deaf friend who had recently been released from a hospital that had not provided appropriate accommodation. During the visit, nurses came to teach self-care. The interpreter refused to interpret the session. This would have meant accepting an obligation to hold confidential all information. Instead the interpreter allowed the interaction to occur at a ponderously slow and frustrating pace, fre-quently stopping to check that his Deaf friend understood the instructions. In doing this, the interpreter retained the right to file a complaint against the visiting nurse ser-vice with the Office on Civil Rights.

-Source

I think that having that option would have been incredibly empowering for both my interpreter and I.

However, I think that people have to be very careful about how this plays out. What is key is how the interpreter goes about all of this. They can’t just rush in and save their Deaf client all the time. They have to take their Deaf client’s perspective into consideration.

One thing that has helped me with my interpreter/client relations in general – and they go into this a little bit in A Feminist-Relational Approach to Interpreting, too – is having contact with interpreters outside of a classroom setting. For instance, one of my interpreters would take me out to lunch to discuss the dynamics of what was going on inside the classroom and ask for opinions from me about how he could better serve me. I think that having that kind of open, regular discussion would be very valuable and empowering for everyone involved.

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  1. Source [↩]
  2. Source [↩]
  3. This was a team-interpreting situation – interpreter B seemed just as appalled as I did when interpreter A began talking about her client… so I think that one of the best things that interpreter B could have done would have been to say, “Hey, how did that comment make you feel?” after class. But, on the other hand, I can see where she might have been unsure about the possibility creating a rift in the team solidarity. [↩]
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Black Deaf History

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Posted by maxporter on February 20, 2012 – 11:16 AM
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So I co-moderate fydeafies on tumblr and I posted this video to that blog but it occurred to me that I should post it here too. It is in ASL but has subtitles for those who don’t know ASL.

Transcript:

Hello, my name is Opeoluwa Sotonwa and I work at the Kentucky Commission on the Deaf and Hard of Hearing as the information program coordinator. I’d like to talk to you a little bit today about back deaf history.

As you already know, every February in America we celebrate Black History Month. Well, we also celebrate Black Deaf History at the same time. I, myself, am from Africa, but Black History month impacts me and reminds me about something that has happened in the past. I am talking about a man named Dr. Andrew Foster. He was a black American man who happened to be the first deaf black person to graduate from Gallaudet University. Then he also obtained a Masters degree from Eastern Michigan University.

After Dr. Foster finished his schooling, he went to Africa. You see, up until that time many missionaries went to Africa and they claimed that they never saw any deaf people. Really, there were many deaf people, but they were hidden from view by their parents because the culture there is different and they oppressed and discriminated against deaf people. Deaf people were never given the opportunity to go to school or do anything else.

When Dr. Foster came to Africa, he first went to Liberia in West Africa and established the first deaf school in Africa. At first when they established school, they thought that no one would show up, but they were shocked to see that many deaf people showed up, filling the school to its capacity and resulting in a waiting list.

Then Dr. Foster decided to move to various countries within Africa to set up deaf schools as well as church programs and vocational training centers all over, altogether about 30 centers. Finally, he set up a headquarters in Nigeria.

I’m standing here today because I benefited from what Dr. Foster started in Africa. If Dr. Foster had never gone to Africa, deaf people would never have gotten their educational opportunities, they would never have gotten their right to go to school. Due to Dr. Foster’s efforts, I am able to stand here as I am standing here today. I was able to obtain an education in Africa and then I was able to go to America on a scholarship and then I was able to live an independent life.

Today, in Africa, we remember him and honor him for all he has done for the deaf communities in Africa. Recently, we have established a higher education school and we named it Andrew Foster Memorial College. We hope that one day that school will become a University as well. Also, at Gallaudet University, they honored Dr. Foster by dedicating a hall to him. Really, we in Africa owe a lot to Dr. Foster and he should never be forgotten.

We, at KCDHH, recognize and honor Dr. Foster for his role in establishing deaf schools in African countries. Every February, when we celebrate Black History Month, we remember him and praise all he had done. Thank you.

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Hearing people and Deaf culture

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Posted by maxporter on February 19, 2012 – 11:09 AM
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To be honest, I have mixed feelings when I see Hearing people doing things like being Good People for learning ASL, becoming the absolute experts in the cochlear implant debate, and telling deaf people that ASL is their natural language.

My problem with some Hearing people is that they come to ASL with a touch of exoticism in their outlook – “OH MY GOD I CAN LEARN ASL TO TALK TO THESE AWESOME PEOPLE!” Or they have pity for us (and might even want to save our souls). But they do have this tendency to think of Deaf people as wonderful, innocent little creatures.

The thing is, there’s a harmful stereotype out there: the stereotype of the Deaf adult as a dependent child who knows nothing and relates to Hearing people as a child would relate to adults. This stereotype is completely false. But I do feel that there is a paternalistic attitude in the approach of some Hearing people to ASL, and when you combine that attitude with this stereotype, it’s not good.

Another thing is that Deaf culture and deaf issues are extremely complicated. I grew up in this world and I still don’t have a good answer for, say, the education issues that we face – so it strikes me as arrogant when a Hearing person immediately gains an opinion on every aspect of Deaf culture after one semester of ASL class.

I have been in situations where I was in a conversation with a Hearing ASL Student who then got very aggressive about their opinion of cochlear implants – “They are destroying Deaf culture,” that kind of thing – without even asking me if I had one, let alone what I thought of them. In their head, they are leveling the Hearing/Deaf playing field by being “good allies”, but really, they are replaying the common Hearing/Deaf power imbalance of the Hearing person informing the Deaf person of his/her opinion without taking the Deaf person’s opinion into consideration.

And then Hearing ASL students sometimes assume that I am The World Expert on Deaf culture. It doesn’t matter how many times I try to explain that I grew up very isolated from other Deaf people and that I therefore am not a very good representative of Strong-Deaf culture – all deaf people are automatically culturally Deaf from their viewpoint. It makes me wonder if they actually listened to their teacher when she/he said, “90% of all deaf children have hearing parents” and if the class actually discussed the implications of that – Deaf culture is primarily a peer culture, and if you are isolated from your Deaf peers, it’s hard to get a foothold in Deaf culture.

The thing is, not all deaf people know ASL. But not all non-ASL speaking deaf people are puppets of the Hearing society. Shades of grey exist! It is not a black and white issue.

But I’m usually too afraid to tell Hearing students that I’m not really well-versed on Deaf culture – because then they sometimes start parroting Deaf separatist sentiments that they might have picked up from their books or from their teachers. I don’t like that. It’s more bearable if if it’s put in a benign way, like, “Hey man, I think you should hang out with more Deaf people” – but it’s still none of their business. It is up to me, the deaf person, to decide how and when and with whom to socialize; the Hearing person has no place in that conversation.

And, let’s get real – separatist talk sounds very very different when it comes from somebody outside your minority versus when it comes from someone within your minority. If I hear Deaf separatist talk from hearing people, it sounds to me like, “You people should just interact with yourselves; it doesn’t even matter that you don’t have all of your rights in this world – you can give each other community.” That’s super-condescending, really, and it ignores the systematic change that needs to happen in order to ensure equal rights for d/Deaf people.

It’s all pretty complicated.

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Educating d/Deaf children: A deeper conversation

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Posted by maxporter on February 14, 2012 – 10:10 PM
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The other day on Tumblr, I had the chance to participate in a very insightful reblog conversation about education & deafness – you can read it here (I’m maxmovinghands).1

One of the things that we began talking about is that experience that nearly every child with some form of deafness significant enough to miss “normal” spoken conversation has experienced: walking up to adults who are talking and asking, “What are you saying?” Just – literally – I physically cannot understand you due to the language barrier because you are communicating in the audio channel that you exist in rather than in the visual channel where I reside; can you please fill me in because I have absolutely no access to the auditory realm whereas you have access to the visual world? In my head, this has always been a simple enough request, but Hearing people would become resentful or even angry when I was a child and say, “It’s not important,” and I didn’t understand why. I was simply asking for the same access to a conversation that every other human being in the room has.

As arfism pointed out:

I do feel that if you’re told over and over that it’s not important or I’ll tell you later and so on. It’s almost like they’re saying you don’t matter enough for me to take the time to explain this to you. It has to affect you psychologically somehow. Especially if you’re told that over and over from freaking day one pretty much.

I agree that it can have a negative psychological effect. My “friends” have done this to me in the past – heck, my parents have done it to me occasionally. Personally, I don’t really internalize things like that, so I just said, “fuck society,” but it is a painful experience to go through all the same and I can only imagine how much worse an internalizer would feel.

Really – it’s not fair. Since getting my CI and integrating more into Hearing society, I’ve discovered that people enter and leave conversations all the time. Yet when we deaf people try to do the exact same thing, it’s suddenly an inconvenience. Discovering this double-standard makes me even angrier at the hearing people who excluded me from conversation in the past.

And I do get pissed off at hearing parents/teachers sometimes for being so self-centered and not taking a moment to think, “Boy, this child is deaf; what does that really mean?” Like – I don’t care how big of an inconvenience it is have to put down the knife while cooking for two seconds to sign something to your deaf child – just goddamn suck it up and play by the rules of deafness because the child cannot play by the rules of Hearing society. And if deaf children simply cannot play by the same rules that Hearing society functions upon, so what? Their psychological well-being is so much more important than the *huge* inconvenience of having to take two seconds to translate your audio-based speech into a visual format.

Personally, I think that this prejudice from audist society is one of the reasons that some deaf children don’t do well in school. From day one, deaf people are told, “Don’t seek out information. Nothing is of importance.” Contrast this with the message that hearing children get from the world: they eavesdrop on their parents’ conversation about how to pay taxes, and although they may not understand all the words, it gives them more tools to put in their toolbox that they use to figure out the world. Well, what happens if deaf children don’t have the tools – worse, if the parents say, “No, these tools aren’t important”… which the child then reads as, “because you’re not important enough to repeat stuff to”?

When you combine this message of an active resistance to learning that deaf people get from society with some teachers’ tendencies to assume audist things – for instance, that deafness automatically equals mental retardation – you get a losing combination.

Like – when you read about educators who talk about deaf children, sometimes they focus on all our shortcomings and lacks and deficiencies. Well, what about focusing on society’s problems instead?

Personally, all the resistance from society sparked my super-stubborn nature and put me into overdrive to start learning everything about the world. And I know some other deaf bookworms/academics – I think that we tend to be more intense about intellectual topics than our hearing counterparts because we are constantly fighting that message of, “You don’t matter enough to share information with.” My reaction to that message was, “Well, fuck you, I’m gonna learn all the information in the world and then school you,” but I can definitely see how somebody with a more easygoing personality would be like, “Hmm, you know, maybe they have a point…”

I don’t know. Just thinking off the cuff. No real in-depth theory or research here. Just some ideas to start a discussion.

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  1. Edit: thatdeafdude, who created the original post, clarified that he was talking about his friends rather than deaf people in general and apologized for the confusion. Still, it generated an insightful conversation imo. [↩]
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Why I’m not a separatist

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Posted by maxporter on February 6, 2012 – 3:50 PM
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So I have a ton to say, it’s just that I haven’t had the time to get these things down. Also, I tend to think at a very abstract generalized level, which can be kind of hard to translate to day-to-day life sometimes.

I’ve been tentatively getting more involved with various sects of the d/Deaf community – some of my friends are strong advocates for Cued Speech; others are strong advocates for ASL. Honestly, though, it’s more difficult for me to gain a foothold in the Strong-ASL Deaf community due to the negative perceptions of other people.

In the past, I’ve been asked, “Are you Hearing?” What, just because I have a good grasp of English, I’m Hearing all of a sudden? The worst part is when I say, “No, I’m deaf” (this is all in ASL of course) and then the other Deaf person just flat-out refuses to believe me and stops talking to me. Obviously I’m a Hearing person who is lying to them.1

Now, in the past, I’ve said that separatism is a valid solution for some minority individuals and communities. If someone truly is hurt by the day-to-day grind of living in a Hearing, white, straight, whatever, world and just wants to be among other people who will love and respect him or her because they are going through the same thing – well, that is valid.

Where separatism becomes a problem, in my eyes, is when minority people start excluding other minority people on the basis of not being “enough” of a minority. In my case, I speak and write too well. Other ways that I have seen this play out in other communities is:

  • You weren’t raised as x gender, therefore, you cannot participate in a group of x gender because your perceptions are that of y gender. (See also: Michigan’s Womyn’s Fest, which has decided to ban trans women because they’re not “woman enough.”)2
  • You are bisexual, therefore, you are not allowed in the gay bar/community because you are not gay enough. Or the straight world – it depends on how others read you.
  • You weren’t born in Mexico, therefore, you are not really Mexican-American. (I’ve seen my Mexican-American students argue with each other about who is more “Mexican” – some say that you have to be born in Mexico; others say that your parents had to be born in Mexico…)

And so on and so forth. It leads to a lot of circular arguments. The problem with separatism is, it still focuses upon an essentialist, binary notion of identity – for instance: you are deaf, therefore, you are not hearing. Therefore, you must be placed into the separatist Deaf community. It also attaches binary notions of ‘good’ and ‘bad’ to entire communities – Deaf people are good; Hearing people are bad.

But, really, real life is more complicated than that. You can’t simply invert the paradigm and expect it to be progressive. For instance, insisting upon female superiority rather than the equality of sexes misses the point – in this example, the point is not to reinscribe the dominant notions of male/female by inverting them; the point is to imagine a completely new world where the notion of ‘dominance’ is foreign. In this new post-patriarchial world, there would be no male or female superiority – just human beings who don’t control or subjugate one another.

And somebody is not inherently better / more progressive simply because he or she is in the same minority community as you are. For instance, I certainly have been hurt by straight people in the past, but some of the worst damage that I’ve experienced came from others in the queer community. So I have experienced firsthand that the idea that “queer = good; straight = bad” is absolute bullshit. And that goes for any minority community, I think – just because someone looks like you doesn’t mean that they are a good person. That’s another leftover prejudice from mainstream society, which seeks out similarities and devalues differences.

Now, I can see where a separatist would feel threatened by, say, me. I think that, in part, separatism is an effort to control the world and make it more manageable. It’s a way of taking back power in a society that does not confer power upon minorities. I’ve done it – I went through a separatist Deaf stage to take back some of the power that I felt had been taken away from me as a visibly queer man who had his photos snapped by strangers.

So when I show up, able to transverse borders and boundaries and live as if there was no distinction between Deaf and Hearing – because, for me, the distinction is not as large – well, I can see where somebody who is a separatist would become uncomfortable. Especially if they can’t transverse boundaries as easily as I can. I can see why they would feel as if I am belittling the power that they have managed to take back.

One thing that I struggle with, honestly, is how to be respectful to separatist people, especially in my Deaf culture, while also having space for my own opinions to exist. What on Earth do I say, for example, to a bigoted old woman who tries to tell me that cochlear implants are against God’s will? We need to discuss these fears and come up with actual solutions, but her emotions about becoming powerless didn’t allow room for my thoughts about the relationship between Deaf and Hearing culture. Speaking to her, therefore, wasn’t very productive.

But if I had a chance to talk to an open-minded Deaf separatist who was willing to at least listen to my perspective before completely and utterly rejecting it – that’d be awesome.

I think the key here is to treat each other like individuals who have decided to have a specific relationship with the community – not as representatives of particular political agendas, which is a dynamic that I have seen a lot. For instance I’m not a representative of the cochlear implant industry, and having a cochlear implant does not mean that I have this set of ideas or that set of ideas – I am simply an individual who just so happens to have received a cochlear implant when I was eight. I formed my own opinions; you can’t assume what my opinions are until you actually talk to me and find out.

I don’t know, though- I just see a lot of identity policing within separatist communities that ends up echoing the prejudices of mainstream society. And I don’t think that that’s a good path for entire communities to go down. But, if separatism helps an individual heal from the traumas of prejudiced society on the personal level – okay, that’s cool.

I have way more to say about this topic – will cochlear implants really annihilate Deaf culture? How does it make me feel when I see Hearing people telling Deaf people to be separatists, to just learn ASL and stay within Deaf culture? There’s so much.

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  1. This is yet another reason that I strongly dislike the deaf-for-a-day ASL class exercise, btw – it sets up a context that does allow Hearing people to lie to Deaf people. [↩]
  2. Edit 2/14/12: I just realized that a new reader might have misunderstood this – just to make it clear, I think that trans women are absolutely women and that MichFest’s polies are ridiculous. [↩]
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