Tag Archives: intersectionality

DeafVIDEO

2
Posted by maxporter on November 7, 2011 – 4:20 AM
Filed under Uncategorized
Tagged as , , ,

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.

-~-~-~
  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. [↩]
Share

Work in Progress

0
Posted by maxporter on November 4, 2011 – 1:25 AM
Filed under Uncategorized
Tagged as , ,

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?

-~-~-~
  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. [↩]
Share

Deafness & Socioeconomic class

1
Posted by maxporter on November 2, 2011 – 10:01 PM
Filed under Uncategorized
Tagged as , ,

A few weeks ago, someone asked me if there is a correlation between deafness and socioeconomic class – eg, are deaf people more likely to be poor?

I said something like this: “Well, historically, deaf people have been relegated to manual labor types of jobs because employers didn’t want to staff them in other jobs. Because these jobs are low paying, yes, there has historically been a correlation between deafness and socioeconomic class. But it’s not because of deafness itself – it is because of the way our society is structured. I think things are changing, though.”

I’ve recently been going to a few d/Deaf happy hours, and during one of these events, I related this story to someone. My conversational partner said, “You know what, I have a theory – I think that one reason that Hearing parents freak out so much when they find out that their child is deaf is because they’re concerned the child will be of a lower socioeconomic class than them.”

I thought about it, and it makes sense to me.

One of the things that many deaf people have a really, really hard time comprehending is why their parents, if applicable, had a negative reaction to their deafness. For us, it’s a perfectly normal aspect of ourselves – and some of us would never even dream of being hearing. “So your child is deaf, big deal.”

But, looked at from a parent’s standpoint – most of the ones who care want the best possible world for their children, right? They want their child to have every opportunity available, or at least more opportunities than they themselves grew up with. If a child is deaf – that may concern the parent because they may think, “Well, will he/she be able to get a good job so that he/she can have a good life?”

One of the things that makes my friend’s theory hold water for me is the fact that it elegantly explains what I’ve observed in various classes. I have seen wealthy, middle class, and poor parents who all freaked out at their child’s deafness.

However, for me, it leads to more questions that I don’t have any concrete answers for. It all makes me want to go to grad school to learn how to do field work to study intersectionalities in a more concrete manner.

Share

On separatism

0
Posted by maxporter on October 22, 2011 – 2:33 PM
Filed under Uncategorized
Tagged as ,

For a few weeks now, I’ve been thinking about the accusations of separatism that a lot of minorities hear from majority communities. These accusations come in many forms:

“Why would you teach your child ASL instead of lipreading? Wouldn’t you want him or her to learn how to mingle with the Hearing world, too?”

“Why do you only hang out with other gay people? Straight people are cool, too.”

“How come you stay in your immigrant community instead of making a greater effort to assimilate in mainstream American society?”

The list goes on. The words may be different, but the basic sentiment boils down to this: we minorities should assimilate into mainstream culture.

But here’s the thing. Whenever people accuse us of separatism, the central assumption is that the majority community is inherently better than the minority community and that assimilating into the majority community therefore makes one a more complete person. When I see, for example, hearing people bemoan the fact that, without a cochlear implant, a child could be ‘trapped’ in the Deaf community – well, what’s wrong with that? What makes the Hearing world so much better than the Deaf world?

One of the main advantages of being surrounded with a community of like-minded individuals is the fact that one feels a lot less isolated. I know that I definitely felt like I was alone as a teenager – intellectually, I knew there were other deaf queer people out there, but that didn’t help me because I felt alienated from the majority of my hearing straight peers. I could not understand their lives on an emotional level and vice-versa. Hanging out with other queer people lessened this isolation somewhat, but I still felt like they couldn’t understand me and vice-versa because they were hearing and I’m not. I was expected to learn the basics of their lives, so I did, but society didn’t expect the same from them. I know a new person will become true friend when they begin to ask me questions in a genuine effort to understand what life is truly like for me. But it does get tiring sometimes to constantly explain your reality to people who have the privilege of never having to think about life on my terms.

When I found more people who belonged in one or more of the minority groups that I belong to, I felt a lot of relief. I don’t have to explain myself all the time; we can just concentrate on sharing the shit that’s happened to us today without having to explain things like systematic heterosexism – we just get it. Then we can talk about video games or whatever. So I do find it comforting to be around like-minded individuals. I can integrate myself in mainstream society extremely well – the majority of the people that I work with are hearing and straight as a pole – but at the end of the day, being with other deaf and/or queer people is like putting on my most comfortable pair of shoes after wearing a nice pair that pinches.

One thing that people miss when they accuse us of separatism is that our minority communities are far from homogenous. I’m deaf, but so is that blue-eyed black man. I’m bisexual, but so is that Latina. etc. Admittedly, both of these minority communities have issues with homogeneity – especially racial homogeneity – just look at how many white people are in a gay bar and how many white people go to Gallaudet. A lot of the time, it just doesn’t reflect the racial diversity that you’d find out on the streets.

But, personally, I enjoy being with other people who are in intersecting minorities. It doesn’t matter to me if they are hearing and latino and gay while I am white and deaf and bisexual or whatever; I just keep in mind that I don’t know a lot about what they face as a member of those intersecting minorities and chat with them. I feel like I can relate better to people who belong to multiple minorities like myself than to people who only belong to one minority. We may not share the same exact minorities, but we share the feeling of not fitting in completely in many places. And I find that it is easier to find other people who experience intersecting minorities in minority communities than in majority communities.

One final thing that bothers me about the accusation of separatism is that it is so hypocritical. This is honestly what bothers me most about it. People in majority communities say they want us to be exposed to a wide variety of lifestyles, but if you look at their actions, they live in these little bubbles of homogeneity.

To illustrate what I mean – I was thinking about the fact that my parents wanted me to be able to interact with both the Deaf and Hearing world. Interacting with a greater number of people would be wonderful, right? Hence the move to Washington, DC: I could meet Deaf people and Hearing people; I could meet gay people and straight people and people of all varieties of queerness; I could meet people of every shade imaginable from every country and family background imaginable; I could meet everyone from any socioeconomic class; I could meet people of any political leaning and religious affiliation. I would be able to make friends with people who are like my parents – hearing, white, straight – but I also would be able to make friends with people who are like me and with people who are not like me at all. This, in fact, is just what I did at my school in DC.

Except, oh, yeah, we lived in a big house in the suburbs with other people who looked exactly like us. Then we moved to an entire state that is one of the least diverse states in the nation.

What gives? If my parents had truly wanted me to be able to communicate with and interact with a greater diversity of people, why did they retreat into a bubble of people who are of the same class, race, religion, and political persuasion as themselves? I love my parents, but they do have some major blind spots about this kind of thing.

But it’s not just me – I see it all the time. People say that they want their deaf kids to interact with a greater number of people – but that usually only means hearing people who look just like themselves. Deaf people? Forget it, those people are crazy. Black people? Scary. Poor people? Also scary. And so forth.

And that is the crux of my problem with the accusations of separatism: often, people who make those statements haven’t turned the mirror on themselves. They accuse us of unfairly favoring our minority communities, when in fact, the exact same thing could be said about them: the brotherhood of white wealthy men, for example, is a small, closed society that excludes the majority of people.

So, if you are a member of a privileged minority – commonly known as the majority – and you find yourself asking things like, “Why do those gays have to have a special pride march?” and “Why can’t Deaf people just learn to talk so they can communicate with Hearing people?” – please look at your own reflection. Don’t accuse us of separatism until you make a genuine effort to include us. Until you do that, we have every right to remain suspicious of you and retreat to our own communities at the end of the day.

Share

Introversion vs extraversion

0
Posted by maxporter on August 23, 2011 – 11:58 PM
Filed under Uncategorized
Tagged as , , , ,

A central part of many people’s personalities is whether they are an introvert or an extrovert. Over the years, I’ve found that my self-definition has shifted somewhat. That leads me to ask: am I an introvert or extrovert because I’m deaf and queer, or is it just the way I am?

For the longest time, I considered myself to be an introvert. But looking back, that was simply by default, not necessarily because I was naturally inclined to be an introvert. Because I was born deaf in a hearing world, I had to learn from an early age to entertain myself. Introverted activities like reading books were much more reliable than trying to keep up with my peers in a world where hearing kids were so thoughtless about communication. Since I had a way to entertain myself, I cared less about fitting in. So, for a lot of reasons, being an introvert was a good thing for me.

I carried those skills with me when I realized that I was queer. It gave me the confidence to come out at a young age: I already knew who I was and that I could rely on myself. I wasn’t really worried about the repercussions of coming out – and believe me, I faced a lot, including the prospect of being disowned – because I already didn’t fit in mainstream society.

Interestingly, I find that I’m more interested in extraverted things since I’ve come out. It sounds really trite, but I’ve gained a new perspective on life because I was able to more fully reveal aspects of myself that had previously been buried. Now that I’m more able to express myself, I’m able to form genuine connections with more people. That has led me to a lot of extraverted interests.

I have no idea if it’s just the way I am or if my deafness and queerness somehow influenced this aspect of my personality. These days, I honestly cannot pinpoint myself as either an introvert or an extrovert – I’m somewhere in between. I love to socialize, but in a world where people can be real assholes about communication, having the means to entertain myself is a really valuable skill. In the end, though I don’t really care what formed my personality – what matters is that I’m pretty content with it.

Share

Learning Foreign Languages

3
Posted by maxporter on May 18, 2011 – 12:02 AM
Filed under Uncategorized
Tagged as , , , ,

For years, I’ve been wanting to learn a different language – preferably Spanish, because I live in an area with a large population of Spanish-speakers. I’d like to be able to read the local newspapers and to speak with my neighbors to understand everything that is going on in my larger community. Also, I want to work with at-risk LGBT youth, and, given where I live, I think it’s utterly naive to expect that all of them will feel comfortable talking to social workers in English. However, I’ve run into problems whenever I’ve tried to learn another spoken language.

Because I’ve always been mainstreamed, my teachers have approached the matter from a Hearing-centric perspective. To them, speaking and listening are among the most important aspects of learning a language, if not the most important. Of course, I completely disagree – after all, I didn’t need to hear to learn English.

I began to learn English when somebody gave me a book and I quickly devoured it. That book led to another, and another, and another, until I was reading at 8th grade level in 4th grade and college level in 8th grade. The fact that my parents used manual communication rather than straight-up oralism also helped, but I definitely am grateful for books. That’s why I don’t understand why on Earth hearing people put so much emphasis on speaking and listening exercises – why not just let us read and write? As a result, I became bitter for many years and thought of spoken languages as “Hearing people languages” until I realized that it’s illogical of me to not think of English in the same manner. That’s another post for another day, though.

Classrooms, in my opinion, also tend to be very sterile environments filled with stupid games. I would be a lot happier with a more immersive experience. For example, I learned ASL by going to Deaf camp and fending for myself. At first, I knew very basic signs like “thank you” and “please.” Staff members who knew manual communication translated for me during the first year. Then, after eight years of going to that camp every summer, I could carry on more complicated conversations in ASL.1 When all is said and done, I don’t care what this piece of grammar is called; I don’t care about the boot drawing that illustrates how to conjugate verbs; I don’t want to practice the most incredibly awkward conversations in the world. I just want to be thrown into the language and figure things out on my own.2

Sadly, queer issues got in way during the only time that I’ve ever come close to a language learning experience that would have been close to what I wanted. I took a Spanish course at the community college in my home state, and our teacher was a native Spanish speaker who had immigrated from a Spanish-speaking country – I forget which one. She was very big on contextualizing the language within the various Spanish-speaking cultures and wanted to work towards an English-free classroom.

I really liked the class and was looking forward to finishing it. But then, one day, my Spanish instructor was teaching us about pronouns. She pointed at everybody in the room and said either “el” or “ella.” Well, she pointed at me and said “ella” – at that point, I was an androgynous femmy twink. Then the entire class turned around to scrutinize me. All I could do was stammer. It didn’t matter that she was wrong when she read me as female; I was still too scared to go back to Spanish class because my home state is super homophobic and is extremely hostile towards androgynous people. I dropped out of the course with no explanation.3

Lately, I’ve been thinking about trying again. It’s true that I’ve run into a lot of problems in the past and that language education in the US is, in my opinion, awful. But that’s become a poor excuse for me to keep deferring my goals. When all is said and done, I want to learn Spanish for the reasons that I mentioned. I know I’ll probably have a terrible accent, but I’ve come to peace with that. As long as I can communicate with others without inadvertently saying something completely different, I’m okay with having an accent – I have one in English, too. What’s more important to me at this stage is learning how to read the local Latino paper and carrying on basic conversations with my neighbors; I can always improve my spoken Spanish later.

-~-~-~
  1. The problem is that I haven’t really communicated in ASL since I was 15, save for one year in 2009, so I’ve forgotten it. I’m confident that, if I had stayed immersed in the Deaf community, I would have continued to improve my grasp of the language. [↩]
  2. Incidentally, this applies to English, too – in fifth grade, we learned how to diagram sentences. I hated it. To this day, I couldn’t be arsed to tell you the difference between the subject and the object. All I care about is the fact that I know how to make sentences sound right; I don’t want to split hairs with terminology. [↩]
  3. Looking back, I could probably have handled the situation a lot better, but it was a really difficult summer for me in a lot of respects. [↩]
Share

Intersections

2
Posted by maxporter on November 18, 2010 – 12:02 AM
Filed under Uncategorized
Tagged as , ,

When I saw the proposed topic for the latest disability carnival, I hardly knew where to begin. After all, I have an entire tag on this blog devoted to intersectionality, and it’s one of my most-used tags.

So, instead of talking about myself, let me take a more indirect approach: I shall talk about my parents. Both of them are Hearing and straight. I am not.

Both of my parents, especially my father, come from dysfunctional families. When they got married, they were reluctant to have children lest they unconsciously begin to repeat dysfunctional dynamics. After a few years of marriage, though, my parents decided that they wanted children after all. So I was born.

At first, everything went well. According to them, I was the perfect child: adorable and smart. But my language development wasn’t coming along at the same pace as the other children. They kept making up excuses for why this was the case, but those excuses fell apart when I was diagnosed as a deaf kid. This revelation initially devastated my parents.

Later on, though, my parents said that my deafness was a blessing in disguise. The diagnosis, they say, forced them to reevaluate “normal” family dynamics and to adopt a different way of interacting. With improved communication, everyone benefited. According to them, the fact that I am deaf is the reason that they did not repeat the dysfunctional family dynamics that they had grown up with.

Interestingly, my parents say that my deafness helped them to accept the fact that I am queer. At the time that I came out to them, they were very conservative, so it was Earth-shattering for them at first. Over time, though, they gained perspective and realized that, just as the diagnosis of my deafness did not change who I am, my revelation that I am queer did not change who I am. In both cases, they learned more about me, but I was still the same person when all was said and done.

Since I live it every day of my life, I can’t quite grasp the initial difficulty that my parents faced when confronted with these aspects of my identity, especially the fact that I am deaf. However, I truly feel fortunate that my parents were able work through their issues and to accept me. We have experienced rough patches, but I would say that we are a close-knit family.

-~-~-~
This post is part of Disability Carnival #71. The November theme is “Intersections” and is hosted by Modus Dopens. You can find posts by other participants here.

Share