Gallaudet and deaf identity
Lennard Davis at Inside Higher Ed on "The Real Issues at Gallaudet":
For non-deaf people, this issue was perhaps the hardest thing to understand. Why would anyone reject a president for not being “deaf enough” when the person was in fact unable to hear since birth? The difficulty might be easier to understand if you imagined deciding to elect a president of the United States who spoke with a heavy accent and whose command of English was less than perfect. Add to this the fact that one of the new definitions of being deaf isn’t that your ears don’t work — it’s that you belong to a linguistic community the way that Hispanics or the French do. Your community has a literature, a culture, a history, and a language — but the leader of your community doesn’t share fully this cultural palette. Wouldn’t you want someone who was fully of your identity?Go and read.
8 comments:
I thought it was determined that the person who said JKF wasn't "deaf enough" was JKF herself.
I get the point, but he puts in two ways in the passage you quote, and I think the second is better. I can certainly understand wanting a leader who shares my community's literature, culture, history, and language. But I don't especially like the first analogy--I agree that our country would probably not elect a president who spoke with a heavy accent (or, hell, whose first language was anything other than English). But I don't think that's a good thing, since I don't think of "doesn't speak English as a first language" as I sign that someone fails to share America's culture.
I've been following the crisis at Gallaudet some (living in dc, this is local issue for me), and my impression from the protesters has been very much that they are trying to distance themselves from the "not Deaf enough" perspective (and I see that coming through in the comments in the article that you linked to).
For me, the most opaque part of this issue is the oft-repeated critique that Fernandes is not a warm and welcoming person. As an complete outsider to the Deaf community, that's the hardest aspect of this conflict for me to understand -- I feel like there must be some subtext or subtle cultural connotations in that critique that are escaping me entirely, because it just doesn't make sense to me as a reason for rejecting someone as a university president.
I meant to sign that last comment.
-Anna Phor
But I don't especially like the first analogy--I agree that our country would probably not elect a president who spoke with a heavy accent (or, hell, whose first language was anything other than English). But I don't think that's a good thing, since I don't think of "doesn't speak English as a first language" as I sign that someone fails to share America's culture.
Yeah. I think the problem there is that English is *not* analogous to ASL. English is the dominant language of the world. To say that ASL doesn't have the same status is a gross understatement. English is not in any way threatened. A lot of people expect ASL to be cured out of existence. I think it's more akin to whether it would be ok to have a president of a Welsh university who didn't speak Welsh or a Basque university who didn't speak Basque. I mean, keep in mind that Gallaudet is one of the very few places *on earth* where you can function completely in ASL. It's one of the few places *in the world* where people who communicate with ASL aren't marginalized. It's just not the same as protecting America's English-speaking heritage, which is not actually under threat.
I agree that I'm not sure what's going on with the "warm" thing. Are university presidents usually "warm"?
Sally
We do have a president that lacks command of the English language. ;)
Blue said, "The difficulty might be easier to understand if you imagined deciding to elect a president of the United States
who spoke with a heavy accent and whose command of English was less than perfect." Well, last I checked our current president fit this description and he's been elected twice now.
Seriously, understanding the crisis at GU is tough for me as I'm not deaf and I know that the deaf community has very strong beliefs and views about deaf culture. As someone who has read many articles on the matter though, I'm not clear what the deaf community is looking for in the person who will eventuialy lead the university. I fear that is one thing that is lost in all of this. The community needs to clearly state what they expect or want in their leader and what was not in those who have been put aside.
Larry
www.disabilitynation.net
I don't fully understand all the nuances of this problem at Gallaudet myself. It's complex and so much about Deaf culture, I believe, that for those of us not familiar with Deaf culture, there's the usual learning curve required of discussing any "foreign" culture.
Larry, you attributed that quote to me, but it's from Lennard Davis' writing. He himself isn't D/deaf, but is the child of Deaf parents.
I, too, have heard that the protestors didn't initiate the "not deaf enough" idea and though the press' coverage of that perspective clouded the complexity of the issue. Nevertheless, I do think it is an aspect of the conflict since modes of communication and how culturally-imbued each individual is with Deafness is part of the politics of Deaf community. That's my impression of it, anyway.
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