Tag Archives: intersectionality

Relating to Deaf culture as a queer man

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Posted by maxporter on January 24, 2012 – 10:14 PM
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Remember that post about an identity schism that I just put up? Well, more identity stuff happened today. I am just going to quickly type up this blog post to get it off of my mind, then head out to the barcade and shoot baddies.

Today I gave a presentation to a bunch of Hearing students in an ASL class with an older Deaf instructor. It went really well. After the presentation, the instructor and I chatted for a bit in the lunch room.

She said that cochlear implants are against God’s will – I have a cochlear implant and she knew that. It was quite upsetting because, as a queer man, I have had “it’s against God’s will” used against me. Like, people have sat in front of me with the Bible open on their laps while they quote Bible verses at me for hours (and several tissue boxes, all of which they ignored) to explain exactly why I am such a horrible person for exactly these reasons as stated in God’s book. It’s against God’s will to like people of the same sex, it’s against God’s will to have a gender expression contrary to what God “intended,” all that crap. I don’t want to have it used against me from the Deaf community, too.

I also don’t think that “it’s against God’s will” is the most logical and airtight argument in the world. I’m such an atheist that the notion of creating an ethical code based upon this imaginary person’s desires is just so foreign to me.

Another thing that bothers me about it is that religious notions in Deaf individuals just seems so foreign to me. Religion is something that Hearing people forced upon us. They didn’t – and often, still don’t – care about us until we said, “Okay, we will listen to your teachings of Jesus Christ just so that you can give us food/money/whatever.” So to hear a Deaf person, who probably would not have been religious if Hearing people had not forced it upon her ancestors hundreds of years ago, talk as if God was the only thing in her entire life that mattered – it was upsetting.

Also, this lady said that her body told her that she is deaf, so she obeyed her body and socializes primarily with the Deaf community. Again, this triggered me on the queer aspect. In order to have a fulfilling life, I have had to change my body to be more congruent with my identity. And, upon changing my body, I have been happier because now my body fits my identity. I tried to do it the other way around – changing my identity to match my body – but I was just so unhappy that I had to go ahead and change my body. So, to have this lady sit here and tell me that she socializes with the Deaf community because she has a deaf body – I had to take a headspace break before I could work again.

It also really highlighted some of the downfalls to having a complex identity. For the most part, I like having a complex identity. You can’t make any assumptions about me. That’s okay, because I don’t make any assumptions about you either – to the best of my ability. But it made me remember that nearly everyone else sees identity as a simpler thing. Either you are a man or you are a woman. Either you are deaf or you are hearing. That kind of thing.

I’m very definite in some categories, – I’m definitely that blue-eyed and blond whitey who could never be mistaken for any other race, for example – but I blur the lines on the categories in the minorities that I belong to. Do I act Deaf or Hearing? Neither/both. Do I act gay or straight? Neither/both. That kind of complexity may upset people who are used to a more binary mode of relating to others.

I mean… this lady was saying that I should have an interpreter at work and just sign all the time. Because I guess that being neither fully Deaf nor fully Hearing is too complicated. Which was rude – it’s my life, so let me live it. I tried to convey to this lady that I do share her mixed feelings about cochlear implants – it’s not right for everybody, and it shouldn’t be the first solution that parents go to – but I definitely did not share the fact that I personally appreciate my cochlear implant as a tool that enables me to function in the Hearing world.

Like, I don’t blame her for telling me to not trust Hearing people. She told me that her own brother would make fun of how she spoke. I can definitely see why she would be like, “Fuck the Hearing world!” after that. But the world is not the same as it was in her day. My problems are different than her problems.

It’s just all so complex. Other people see intersectionality as this kind of academic theory that doesn’t really apply to them – I don’t. It’s definitely very much a part of my day-to-day life, and sometimes that makes it harder to find people to talk to.

Alright, time to go shoot those baddies at the arcade.

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Deaf people of color

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Posted by maxporter on December 26, 2011 – 4:20 AM
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In the city where I used to live, there was a pretty nifty store in a low-income neighborhood that allowed people to learn about computer geek culture – with donations, they were able to build computers, learn programming languages, learn about network security, and so forth.

Once, I went there to donate computer parts. One of the staff members assisting me, an African American lady, noticed my cochlear implant and began telling me about her deaf son. She was hearing, so she wasn’t quite sure how to deal with him in some ways – which is super-common in hearing parents; my own loving parents were like that. So I guess she was looking for a deaf man to give her some advice about how to raise her boy.

She told me that he was acting out in class because he couldn’t always understand teachers, and I nodded – yeah, I can relate to that; I did the same thing in grade school and went to the principal’s office a lot. But then she kept talking and I quickly realized that her son was experiencing a vastly different reality than I did when I was a child. When I was a kid, I was sent to the office to talk to the principal and got sent home to watch TV and that was it. In contrast, this deaf kid’s school had labeled him as a ‘troublemaker’ and wanted to put him in a class for children with aggression disorders. But the thing is, he didn’t have an aggression disorder – he was simply deaf! So they were basically setting him up for failure.

There’s probably a lot of reasons why this kid is experiencing different issues than I did, but I think that a major factor is racism. Authority figures have this tendency to see white people as innocent and racially profile people of color as criminals. So, they feel a need to “intervene” in the life of an African-American deaf boy – but the problem is, their interventions are inappropriate. It would be better to address the root cause of the problem – lack of access to the education causes him to become bored and act out – rather than treat the symptom that fits within preconceived stereotypes. Instead of assuming that every boy of color who acts out has an agression disorder, how about addressing the root cause of the problem?

Worse, it sounded like this lady’s doctor wasn’t really communicating the kid’s needs very well – she kept talking about how she wanted to get him a cochlear implant but the hospital kept telling her no. Later on, she talked about how the kid’s deafness was from nerve damage. I don’t think she realized that nerve damage rules out someone as a cochlear implant candidate – even if the cochlea worked perfectly, the auditory signals wouldn’t be able to get to the brain. I don’t know – it just seemed like a failing of the healthcare system to me.

I haven’t really heard a lot of Deaf people talk about intersectionality, except maybe for LGBT/Deaf issues. I’ve also noticed that the Deaf community is pretty white. I think that we could do a better job of being more inclusive – the Deaf community is a wonderfully empowering environment for a lot of people, so I think it would be awesome if we could expand our community to include everyone, not just people who look like us.

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Advice Animal

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Posted by maxporter on December 20, 2011 – 4:20 AM
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Recently, I asked a queer coworker for advice about a queer-related issue. She gave me solid advice and I thanked her. Later that afternoon, I told another coworker – a straight woman who basically hadn’t even heard of LGBT people until a few months ago – about that conversation. Even though she is ignorant, she’s very willing to learn and is open-minded, so we get along. I told her about that conversation so that she’d see some of the nuances of the queer experience, but she offered me advice instead. Interestingly, she gave me the completely opposite advice than my queer coworker did.

Honestly, I’m going to take the advice of my queer coworker. As much as I respect and love people who belong to the privileged population, they simply can’t give advice as relevant as a fellow minority person’s. Someone who is in the same minority as I do has actually lived through similar situations, whereas somebody in the majority culture has no clue what it is like to be in that minority.

It was an interesting situation because I realized that this wasn’t the first time that I’ve gotten advice from non-minorities. That conversation with my straight coworker seemed awfully familiar. After I thought about it for a while, I realized that it reminds me of the advice that I got from my parents. My parents did the best they could, considering that they had had no exposure to queer culture or deaf culture prior to having me, but they were still straight and hearing when all was said and done.

When I was young, my parents were very big on me self-advocating with regards to my deafness. This was, for the most part, a good thing – many colleges and professional environments expect the deaf client to request what they need in order to get services, so learning how to advocate for myself from an early age was an extremely useful skill.

However, what my parents didn’t know is that there are times when a minority individual should choose his or her battles. Sometimes it is exhausting to constantly advocate for oneself. I learned on my own that, as noble as “advocating for myself” is, sometimes I just do not care about the small details in the face of much more oppressive problems. Thankfully, I had access to books about Deaf role models, so I could read about how they handled stuff and apply them to my own life.

Later on, similar things happened with my sexuality when I came out as queer. At first, my parents tried to explain my own sexuality to me. “You’re just confused,” that kind of thing. Of course, I ignored them in this area.

Then, later on, they tried to give me advice – my mom, especially, was very concerned about my safety in a manner disproportionate to the actual threats I face out there every day. I had to remind her that people aren’t gonna automatically know that I am queer and jump me; besides, I know how to handle myself and what social rules to follow in this world as a queer man.

It is all really interesting. I wonder about the motivations of people – sure, they’re just trying to be helpful, but what makes them think that they have advice to offer? I don’t mean to hate on advice-givers – it’s just that it’s a topic that’s irrelevant to your own life, so how do you expect to have knowledge about that topic?

Put it this way – it’s like if I tried to teach somebody how to crochet a baby sweater. I know absolutely nothing about crocheting or babies, so it’d be pretty ridiculous, right? Likewise, I think it’d be ridiculous for me to try to give a person of color advice about dealing with white racism.1 So… as much as I love straight people and hearing people who can be an audience for my venting, I don’t expect them to have any real in-depth knowledge of my experiences. So, I appreciate your intentions, but I can find my advice elsewhere, thank you very much.

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  1. Actually, this is something that I come across every day in work – what is my role in, for example, a discussion between two Hispanic students about the semantics of Hispanic/Latino/Mexican-American? [↩]
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Gang Signs & ASL

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Posted by maxporter on December 16, 2011 – 4:20 AM
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I learn so much every day in my new job working with at-risk youth. I wish I could share all my insights with you guys and start a dialogue every day, but my schedule is usually quite busy.

The other day, an interesting situation occurred. One of my students is the type who tries to make friends with everyone, including the teachers. He usually succeeds, but teachers can’t exactly be his friend because that is not our role. So we have to remind him to behave within professional boundaries that are appropriate to a classroom setting – for example, he cannot say that a random female adult is hot. He also jokes around a lot with everyone.

The other day, this student jokingly made signs at me that looked like gang signs. There were several things objectionable about that, so I explained that it is insulting to make random gestures to Deaf people because it mocks actual sign language, certain signs mean certain things to certain people but don’t mean anything outside of that group, and it is not acceptable to make gang signs in our classroom because it is intended to be a safe space for all people with no territory claims. He took it all quite well and showed engagement by asking questions, so that made me happy.

That wasn’t the first time that I’d thought about gang signs and deafness in recent months, however.

During a recent training day, members from a local gang outreach organization came and talked to us about gangs. They showed a clip of gang signs, and I was frightened at how much it resembled Strong-ASL.1 I could tell that it wasn’t ASL, but it certainly made me frightened that I could be signing ASL to a friend in the hood and then get shot as a result. I mean, the majority of Hearing people think that sign language consists of nothing more but random, spontaneous gestures, like miming – how can I expect them to understand the difference between gang signs and ASL?

After the video clip, I spoke to my interpreters, who shared the same concerns that I did. They said, “Yeah, we’ve all heard stories about Deaf people getting shot because they were mistaken for a gang member.”

Sure, it’s not very likely to happen, but it points to one of the underlying problems within the Deaf community: the Deaf community is extremely White. I know very few people of color or people who were born in poverty who identify themselves as Deaf rather than hearing-impaired or hard-of-hearing. Why is that? How can we change things? Personally, I’m trying to contact a variety of organizations about this issue so that we can brainstorm solutions.

I’d love to see a more diverse Deaf community and a hood/barrio where Deaf people are accepted. I don’t want to see gangs or other inner-city strife, period, but since it looks like they’ll be around for a long time to come, I want to see people in the hood/barrio who understand that Deaf people aren’t gangstas; they are simply communicating in their native language.

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  1. By Strong-ASL, I mean extremely fluid sign language spoken by a native Deaf ASL speaker, rather than the choppy Englishy stuff that some people sign. [↩]
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On being a member of invisible minorities

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Posted by maxporter on November 14, 2011 – 4:20 AM
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I belong to many different oppressed minorities, but all of the ones that I belong to are different from most minorities: they are relatively invisible.

I’m deaf – but I speak with a tiny accent and am able to hear a lot (75-85%?) of what goes on. I’m queer – but there are strangers who wouldn’t ever be able to tell.1 In all other respects, I’m pretty much The Man: a white male who doesn’t have to worry about money/class. It’s resulted in some interesting tensions.

Many people who are in minorities undergo identity/assimilation struggles. The choice often is: embrace your differences or shed them to assimilate?

Personally, I’ve definitely gone through these identity issues, but it’s weird for me because I ‘pass’ so often as a white able bodied straight dude in everyday life. The person sitting next to me on the bus may never discover that I am deaf or have any idea that I like men. If I pass so often, that leads to the question: well, what really separates me from The Man with all the privileges in the world? Do I have more privilege than I’m used to thinking that I have because I pass so often? Should I assume that everyone is reading me as The Man and act accordingly?

It’s even weirder because I didn’t always pass so well. I used to be so deaf that I could hardly communicate with anybody but my younger sister and my interpreter, but now people forget I’m deaf. I used to be so gay that people could tell from the next state over, but now I can interact with strangers without experiencing random homophobia. So that evolution from non-passing to complete passing has been strange. I grew used to having much less privilege because I didn’t pass, but now that’s changed.

The thing is that my differences definitely set me apart once they are discovered. I could be denied medical treatment – easily – due to my body if a doctor is uncomfortable treating me. I don’t know if I could always hold my partner’s hand in public. And people assume on a frequent basis that deafness = mental retardation and treat me accordingly. It’s not like I belong to some benign non-oppressed invisible minority like left-handedness – these minorities definitely aren’t treated kindly in this world.

So, when I think about my identity/assimilation struggle – on one hand, I have a tremendous amount of privilege. On the other hand, I… don’t. So that’s interesting, I think.

I have so many questions these days about the visibility of minorities and passing and how it all affects identity. I think it’s time to finally pull Nobody Passes, which I’ve been reluctant to read for some time, off of my bookshelf and read it.

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  1. Honestly, I’m not sure how people read me most of the time – I identify as bisexual. When I was in high school, people could tell a mile away because my gender presentation was so non-stereotypical, but now? I’m not sure. [↩]
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DeafVIDEO

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Posted by maxporter on November 7, 2011 – 4:20 AM
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I had access to the Internet before it had video capabilities, so I can remember what it was like to be deaf on the Internet back then. It was an extremely text-based environment. While I am extremely comfortable in that context, there are many Deaf people who don’t necessarily feel comfortable with English – it just feels like a weird Hearing-person language from a world that is utterly alien to their own. ASL has no written version, so it couldn’t exist in such a strongly text-based environment as the Internet.Therefore, I definitely knew people who didn’t interact much with the Internet because it was in that alien language.

But when vlogs came along, it was pretty groundbreaking. For the first time, Deaf ASL speakers had the opportunity to speak in their native language to a national – no, international – audience!

I remember the excitement of those first moments of vlogging – webcameras were extremely choppy and the videos buffered like crazy, but at least people could sign on the Internet! It was so awesome.

Over time, that initial shininess faded and a strong community of Deaf vloggers evolved. They began to discuss issues pertinent to the Deaf community like cochlear implants, subtitles, the low socioeconomic status of many Deaf people, audism, achieving self-actualization via a Deaf identity, and so forth. Like many online communities, drama inevitably came to seep through the discourse – but many people eventually were able to look past that and focus on truly important issues rather than infighting.

One of the most notable gathering places for vloggers is DeafVIDEO. It’s an amazing site – it somehow fuses WordPress and Youtube and other random bits of Internet engineering to facilitate communication among millions of Deaf people.

Basically, when you register for an account, you can link it to your Youtube account. Then, when you want to post to DeafVIDEO, you click ‘POST VIDEO’ and it connects to your webcam. Then you say whatever is on your mind – “Today, I was thinking about the history of Deaf cinema…” or whatever. Then, when you are happy with the result, you hit ‘post’ and DeafVIDEO cross-posts your video to Youtube and DeafVIDEO. After that, users on DeafVIDEO can hit ‘reply’ and go through the same process to upload a reply to your video. Then you can reply back to them. Etc.

Because of DeafVIDEO, all of the essential elements of an online forum – a post and an opportunity to discuss – can be accessed by ASL speakers. It’s truly impressive.1

I recently checked the site after two years of neglect. And I was really fucking impressed – the discourse has evolved even more. I suppose people are starting to feel like the same old conversations about Deafhood, while important, are becoming redundant, so they have branched out into other arenas – “Women have rights over their eggs, not the lawmakers” by WonderGent, “How do you care about Deaf child in future?”2 by DeafSpanish, etc.

The only downside is that not all of the videos are subtitled – some people have the attitude of, “I don’t have the time and energy to subtitle for Hearing people – and, besides, now they know what it’s like to be me and denied access to vlogs!” So, if you aren’t an ASL speaker, sorry.

But, if you are, this is an amazing place on the Internet to find community. Come check it out.

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  1. I do have one quibble with it, but it’s not DeafVIDEO’s fault: because ASL is a language that mandates that the speaker shows his or her face, one of the most important features of an Internet forum – anonymity – is lost. But, like I said, that’s not DeafVIDEO’s fault – that’s an inbuilt byproduct of speaking ASL. I’m not sure how one could remedy this. [↩]
  2. Grammatically questionable English is acceptable in this community – the attitude is, ‘we’re all here to discuss issues in ASL; fuck English.’ That’s something that’s really affirming and contributes to the overall ‘safe space’ feel. [↩]
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Work in Progress

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Posted by maxporter on November 4, 2011 – 1:25 AM
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Lately, some of the clients on my caseload have been more difficult to deal with, so I end up thinking about them.

So what helps me is – I plug myself into my MP3 player, then I open up Music and put on the album ‘Metropolis’ by Janelle Monae. (AKA the most amazing woman in the history of music.) Then I dance away all my worries.1

But, seriously, I’m gaining a greater and more profound appreciation for Monae. I’ve been a fan of her long before I started this roller-coaster, but I’m finding that since I began my job, I’m starting to understand her lyrics a little better. For example:

We’re dancing free but we’re stuck here underground
And everybody trying to figure they way out
Hey Hey Hey, all we ever wanted to say
Was chased erased and then thrown away
And day to day we live in a daze
-Janelle Monae, Many Moons

Metropolis is ostensibly about a dystopian future that’s like the German silent film Metropolis meets Blade Runner. In a highly stratified society, the androids are at the very bottom of the social ladder – but the androids are so advanced that they are more or less equivalent to humans at this point in the future. But, as is typical for Afrofuturistic works, there are definitely very strong parallels to today’s African-American experience. As Wikipedia puts it,

Afrofuturism is an emergent literary and cultural aesthetic that combines elements of science fiction, historical fiction, fantasy, Afrocentricity, and magic realism with non-Western cosmologies in order to critique not only the present-day dilemmas of people of color, but also to revise, interrogate, and re-examine the historical events of the past.

Please listen to her ASAP. You will not regret it.

So, I’ve talked a lot about certain minorities in this blog, but haven’t really touched upon the full range of current social justice struggles – for instance, Occupy Wallstreet is an epitomical history-making moment, but I haven’t talked about it at all in this blog. And I’ve barely even touched upon race.

Well, it just goes to show how blinding privilege is. I’m sorry, I hate it when people act all overwhelmed when they become aware of their privilege; I don’t mean to do that. But anyway. Now that I’m in my first post-college job in the social work field, I’m definitely learning a lot more about the world.

And now it’s making me ask questions and I’m ever more eager to do work with people who experience multiple minorities.

In the meantime, I’m looking for good activisty theory – think bell hooks, Julia Serano, et al. I’m gonna check out Audre Lorde – other than that, suggestions?

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  1. Disclaimer for those of you who just followed that video link to the most amazing showcase of dancing skills ever – I don’t dance that well. But I don’t care; I figure the neighbors may appreciate the entertainment of this random boy dancing while he plays with his roommate’s dog. [↩]
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