Deafness and the Power of Signing

Deafness and the Power of Signing

When the deaf Miss America spoke to a crowd of thousands about overcoming her handicap, deaf people across America were disgusted. Deafness is not a handicap, I have been told again and again. It is a cultural identity, a way of life, a choice, even (some hard-of hearing people speak of the time when they had to decide, deaf or hearing), but never a handicap, never something to be overcome. The sign for people like Miss America is the sign for hearing, with the forefinger circling up by the forehead instead of down by the mouth. She thinks she's hearing, is what it means. There is also a sign for the reverse: some hearing people get so involved in the deaf community that they think they are deaf, like the woman who pretended to be deaf and got to be in one of those real-life Saturn Commercials. She was a minor celebrity until she was found out - an investigative reporter called her house and she answered the phone. Afterward there was an outpouring of letters to DeafLife magazine from people who said they had known all along her signing was not perfect, and the sign she made up for Saturn in the commercial was not in accordance with the deep structure of American Sign Language.

American Sign Language is a naturally acquired language; my sister, at five, has perfect ASL grammar and sentence structure, something I will never really have. Grammar in ASL is about your face: eyebrows are lifted for yes or no questions, scrunched together for wh- questions. When signing the word "big", say "Cha" with your voice. It is important to look the signer in the face; use peripheral vision to absorb the hand and arm movements. This, of course is not as easy as it sounds - deaf people have extraordi...

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...cks views the uprising as the deaf community's coming of age, the time they decided to go on their own, and it was the beginning of a resurgence of deaf pride which had been waning since Clerc's days.

3. Cohen, Leah Hager. Train Go Sorry: Inside a Deaf World. New York: Random House, 1994. The title refers to a sign expression, the sign equivalent of "you missed the boat." When Leah Cohen was growing up, her father was the principal of Lexington School for the Deaf, an oral school in New York. Cohen learned ASL as an adult and shows a deep love and respect for the language, but she is not convinced that an exclusively ASL education is the best solution. She believes in a compromise between ASL and speech, that oral education is still important, particularly for poorer deaf children, who have fewer opportunities to work in the deaf community or with interpreters.