sundries

[rm]

In the last panic to get ready for this trip.

Anyone here want do so some basic web development for Erica and I? Not a whole lot of $$, but also not something hard. It's an afternoon of your life in all probability. Drop me an email if you're interested, we'll be in touch probably when I get to Switzerland. -- Done!

When you stand up and decide to make stuff, especially stuff that's challenging or confronting in theme and style, a lot of stuff can and will go wrong. The people you thought were on your side won't be, not just with an absence of support, but sometimes with judgments that can seem a little startling. This can be extra hard when you're doing work about a topic or a life you're supposed to be embarrassed by.

So let's be clear. I'm a queer woman working with another queer woman on a show about sex work that features a character with a disability who is an adult with his own life, history and sexuality. The show also contains a lesbian romance and two awesome M/F friendships with sexual overtones that provide some romantic ambiguity. These characters are not dumb, and they're not doing sex work because they can't do anything else.

The show is not targeted at women vs. men or gay people vs. straight people. It's not a "wink-wink, nudge-nudge, celebrate your bachelorette party with us" show (although you can if you want). We think what's identificatory about of the piece is the theme of persona and the gulf between who you are and who you want to be. And we think what gets people in the door ranges from "oooo, hot chicks in fetish gear" to "woman changes her life" to "people singing about the weird hidden worlds of New York."

This is a story about longing for a world you can only buy half of and how we fill the gaps.

Sound interesting? You can help us by either donating towards making our workshop production come true and/or spreading the word.

Randomly, a friend noted last night that I often use the construction "person living with a disability" and she said that that read as me being really uncomfortable with people with disabilities. So, I just wanted to tell you what I told her, which is a) I'm sorry if I gave anyone that impression and b) it's an artifact in my writing from when I was writing a lot of material for the website Disaboom, which requires that construction as part of their writers' guidelines. I'll try to pay more attention to this one.

Profiles of several subway preachers.

Now, I have a lot of laundry to do, a pounding headache, and a flight to catch. More later.

Comments

[browneyedgirl65.livejournal.com]

As a deaf woman, I'm utterly bemused by constructions like these. I lived with a whole plethora of increasingly convoluted constructions to describe me as a child until, when I was about 12 or 13, I put my foot down and said I AM DEAF. YOU DEAL WITH IT IF YOU'RE UNCOMFORTABLE WITH THAT.

Now, not everyone's cuppa, yadda yadda, but if you ask me how I want to be addressed (and hey, that's cool, in fact that's good), I will tell you -- I'm deaf. And if you ask another deaf person and they give you a construction they like then you know, I'd treat that the same way I'd treat how someone notes they want to be called and remember which one wanted which (and wouldn't make assumptions about the next person).

Because in my experience, all this foo-fah language was always forced ON ME. No one asked ME what I wanted to be called. So I get a fairly strong negative personal reaction seeing all this carefully constructed stuff. But that's me, and that's one data point, for what it is worth.

[rm.livejournal.com]

My question with folks I know who are deaf is generally if they prefer the big-D or the little-d. But then I lived in DC for years and years and studied ASL, so I'm used to navigating that one on different terms than a lot of hearing people.

[browneyedgirl65.livejournal.com]

Yes, there is that, but verbally it's hard to slip up that one :D (actually I haven't seen separate signs for those either, except maybe following "deaf" with "power"). And frankly with most hearing people that would take up so much explanation I don't even bother starting it up in the first place. Although sometimes *sometimes* I may make a distinction between being deaf and being "culturally deaf," if I wind up explaining why I don't sign natively to a non-aware hearing person.

But in any case, what I notice with a lot of these constructions is that they are being assigned to me, which I resent as paternalistic.

[rm.livejournal.com]

*nod*nod*nod*

One of the things my friend said to me the other night was "OMG, more than pretty much any marginalized group, people with disabilities are going to argue about what phrasing they like best, so this is data, but none of us agree with each other, so there you go!"

I try to be "person first" even when I find somewhat inorganic (since I am neither a "person who is gay" or a "person who is Jewish" or a "person who has celiac disease" in my own consructions for myself), but if it is the most consistent thing I can use to be not-assholish, that's perfectly fine with me (and much easier than "person living with").

I worry about the deaf/Deaf thing a lot, but that's mainly because the folks who are deaf that I interact with are on-line, so typing counts. And again with the living in DC and the living in DC during some pretty big controverisies at Galludet, so I'm sensitized to in a way that's atypical.

[browneyedgirl65.livejournal.com]

Actually I think QUILTBAG folks come close to this because it's pretty much an umbrella term for anyone who is not heteronormative, and that's a huge collection of diverse groups of people.

Disabled folks are also basically all these different groups of people who may have relatively little in common except that they are not part of the abled, or normative community.

And just as you can find transphobic gay males, so can you find deaf people being terribly judgmental about people who use wheelchairs. The alliances are uneasy at times, and the nomenclatures utterly unclear...

[feyandstrange.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the disabled don't really have a "community" other than that we've all been excluded from Normalville. (Heck, right now I can't even point to a national organization for all disabled; we're all chopped up by type of disability. How the heck did we ever get the ADA passed?)

The FABGLITTER queers at least pretend to be inclusive within the acronyms and so on, even when actual inclusivity breaks down (do we have to let the straight kinksters in? what about the straight transgender persons? Oh no, not the ugly people!), but I can't even figure out what capital-D disabled would *be*. It's not like we have parades or a nonprofit.

Which is another reason I tend to use language which refers to a specific chunk of disability-dom, since a) what matters to the visibly disabled won't always matter to the invisibly disabled, and so on, and b) so many of us have multiple flavors anyway.

[feyandstrange.livejournal.com]

Interesting that there's no separate sign for D/deaf. Huh.

I will try to respect a person's wishes as to labeling, including D/deaf and "culturally deaf". When referring to a group of such folks, I usually group under "auditory disabled" or "hearing disabled", because I do get tired of the way the Deaf folks can like to shove out the heard-of-hearing, audio processing disorder, and et cetera folks. (Which includes me.)

I don't like being told what I should label myself, but I understand that sometimes a person will need to say "Mobility-disabled persons may be interested in this new taxicab design to which I'm linking" or "New speech-to-type software designed by hearing-disabled engineers". I don't always know what the engineers prefer to be called, they may each prefer different words, and so on.

And when I'm referring to a subset of disabled folks, I tend to put the subset first (as in 'mobility-disabled') because it's shorter and gets to the point faster. "Persons with disabilities which are physical and/or mobility-related" is awfully long, and my dyslexic eye and wandering attention will not always follow it as well.

[browneyedgirl65.livejournal.com]

Just to clarify -- "culturally deaf" isn't a general term ppl use to describe themselves. It's a phrase I use when trying to quickly give a clueless person some idea of what Deaf vs deaf is, and how a hearing person can be Deaf and a deaf person can be not Deaf.

[feyandstrange.livejournal.com]

Gotcha - but I am going to steal it for use in speech (where I cannot capitalize 'Deaf'), and/or for the same explanations, if that's okay.

[cigfran-cg.livejournal.com]

Interesting that there's no separate sign for D/deaf. Huh.

Caveat: I am neither deaf nor Deaf, and it may be only local dialect, but when I was taking ASL a few years back, a couple of our instructors gave us a sign for Deaf. Left hand in a 1 hand-shape, right hand in a C hand-shape, together form a capital D.

[browneyedgirl65.livejournal.com]

And actually if someone *does* ask me if I'm deaf or Deaf, that's pretty impressive in my book.

[rm.livejournal.com]

Since we're on it, Which one do you prefer? (I mean, I'm assuming "deaf" based on previous comments, but because of "culturally deaf" I feel like that could possibly go the other way, based on my limited understanding of the issues involved).

(Also, my flight is boarding now, so TBC from another continent on my end).

[browneyedgirl65.livejournal.com]

Yeah, I saw your tweet, so -- hope you have/had a safe flight, catch up quick on your jetlag, ignore my insane jealousy over 5 - 5! - weeks in Europe, etc, etc, etc.

Short answer: I'm deaf (I would describe being Deaf as being culturally deaf, that is, raised as a Deaf person -- which btw happens also to CODA [(hearing) children of deaf adults]). (I'm extending explanations here for the benefit of anyone reading this and while I'm at it, apologies for the extended and nested parentheticals.)

Long answer: I'm deaf because of choices the hearing world made FOR ME (hence my slight, ah, sensitivity on the subject). I never made the choice, but I have been harrassed by some Deaf folks for "favoring" oral when in fact I am not a native signer due to the very discrimination (audism) that they rail against. So I have also chosen to not try and become Deaf, although I continue to work on my signing when I can. However, I make no bones about it, I am deaf, I am not hearing, and I do favor deaf children being taught ASL from the start, exposed to Deaf culture from the start, whether they also get hearing aids, cochlear implants, or whatever else, because all these things have a possibility of not being the tools the child ultimately need. But you do not want to find that out once you are well past the formative years for language acquisition. In other words, if you take a deaf child, put cochlear implants in her, *deny* her exposure to ASL or indeed to any deaf role models, and it becomes clear when she's about 8 or 10 that she cannot function orally, you have fucked her over royally. She has no chance to play catch up effectively at this point.

I escaped being royally fucked over through sheer blind luck and I *know* it. It's scary. It really is. My parents had the best of intentions and have always worked with & for me to the best of their understanding, and I could *still* have wound up functionally illiterate and uneducated except for the tiny fact that I happen to be very talented with oral speech despite being 90db down. Stupid, random luck. It does occasionally give me the chills when I think about it.

Erm. Sorry for the dissertation. This is why I usually stick to the short answer :)

[feyandstrange.livejournal.com]

For myself, thank you for the dissertation, parentheticals and all. I am audio-processing disorder which wasn't diagnosed until nearly thirty, and my exposure to the Deaf world has often been problematical due to my ignorance and/or some Deaf folks' tendencies to be a little dismissive of hearing problems which are not Deafness.

[browneyedgirl65.livejournal.com]

If I can ask, in what way does your audio processing disorder manifest itself?

[dsmoen.livejournal.com]

Actually, thank you for the long answer. I learned something.

[amara-1783.livejournal.com]

Thank you for the dissertation; I feel honoured to read your experience. And I like your parentheticals :)

[gwyd.livejournal.com]

Thank you for posting. It really helped clarify things for me.