Today in the Italian Parliament a bill is… May 24, 2011
Posted by Mike Gulliver in status.Tags: DEAF, Italy, LIS, recognition, Spaces of knowledge
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Today, in the Italian Parliament, a bill is being voted in that changes the status of Italian Sign Language from a full natural language, proven as such by years of accepted linguistic research, to a gestural system that doesn’t need any kind of recognition.
The fear of Italian (and other) DEAF people is that the change in legislative status will lead to a withdrawal of any kind of formal provision for the language (interpreting, schooling in sign etc.) now unmerited by an ‘idiom’.
I agree… and I’ve signed the British-based petition to support Italian Sign, and forwarded the Italian-based version to colleagues of mine who can sign it because they are Italian Nationals.
But what interests me too, is how anyone got enough leverage to get an MP there to present a bill that explicitly denies the validity of some 40 years of linguistic research.
Sure… there is a big CI lobby there (as everywhere) and it would be interesting to see what impact or influence they had… but isn’t this just symptomatic of the different spaces of knowledge that exist in and around the DEAF community? And the protests symptomatic of the fire-fighting that goes on when those different spaces meet?
The question for me is how to bring those spaces of knowledge together in a meaningful discourse before this kind of thing happens so that it doesn’t…
The national ‘forgiven’ summit… part 1 June 14, 2010
Posted by Mike Gulliver in DEAF.Tags: Aboriginals, DEAF, Forgiveness, Identity, recognition, Reconciliation
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Some people complain that Deafhood is unncessarily contestatory.
Why? Because they suggest that it plays on fear to establish an identity that isn’t ‘really real’… that it refuses to accept the modern day situation of the Deaf community… that it unnecessarily separates Deaf people from the wider hearing world.
That they do it in clearly written English (and Welsh) gives some indication as to the end of the Deaf language spectrum that they occupy…
I’ve even argued that Deafhood is problematically contestatory. But ‘unncessary’… No.
Why?
Because, without contestation – you have no recognition.
And without recognition – you have no rights.
And without rights – you have no way to get what you want on your terms… including the space to thrash out your identity with others who insist on being fuzzily associated with you for some reason…
This is something that Aboriginal People the world over have understood…
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A few years ago, I was at a conference in Tasmania… A key part of that conference (on senses of place) was a welcome to the land, given by a representative of the remainder of the Aboriginal population of that state… remainder, because the Whites were so effective in ‘culling’ the Aborigines that there were few left alive and none that were pure-blood…
Key to the policy of the Whites at the time was to ‘remove any trace of the Aboriginal from the Aborigines’… anyone in doubt of the horror of how that policy was put into practice should watch ‘Rabbit proof fence’ for a easy starter…
Clearly the pain of that time is something that is still present – and something that I don’t wish to sweep under the carpet – However, at the time I was there, a seismic shift was going on in the attitudes of the Aboriginals, and many of the Whites…
In the welcome, the Aboriginal spokesman – Greg Lehman, a representative of the Trawulwuy people – said…
“In the beginning, when the Whites arrived, we just wanted to you to leave… Most of our history with you is about waiting for you to leave… Now, we realise that you’re not going to leave… and we realise that you shouldn’t. Once we were the Aboriginal people of Tasmania… now, the whites who live here are also the Aboriginal people of Tasmania…”
A shift of this type (forgiveness, reconciliation, recognition… call it what you may… not resignation, it’s more positive than that) has been going on in other places too… the use by self-referencing Pekeha (Whites) of the twin names of Aotearoa New-Zealand is an example…
And now… in Canada. Take a look at what’s been recently going on with the National Forgiven Summit.
With Paddy Ladd and Sarah Batterbury, I’ve written on the parallels between the Aboriginal situation and the Deaf situation – on the direct comparison that is possible between the ways that people have tried to remove the Aboriginal from the Aboriginal… and the Deaf person from the deaf person…
So is it time, now, for Deaf people to simply ‘suck it up’ and forgive the Oralists as some would suggest they should do? Accept that a time of ‘postdeafness’ is coming, that they can’t avoid it, and that they should take up their place within a fuller designation of valid humanity?
I don’t think so…
I’ll unpick this in a couple of future posts… but there’s a key difference to the situation of Aboriginal peoples and the Deaf community and, however the former construct their identity (and it is constructed…) as somehow self-evidently distinct, important, valid in a way that forces non-Aboriginals to recognise it as they work towards establishing a situation of parity with them… At least Aboriginal people have that recognition…
Deaf people, on the other hand, have no recognition… They are still ultimately best served, in the eyes of the mainstream, by not being ‘Deaf’ at all…
The Aboriginal identity might be constructed… but it’s one construction within a world of identities where everything is constructed… and it’s a construction that has been built on their own term – that has allowed them to define themselves without looking over their shoulders all the time.
Until this is also available to Deaf people… then Deafhood should (and will, I think) remain contestatory.
A euphemism… June 3, 2010
Posted by Mike Gulliver in DEAF.Tags: Auditory Verbal, disabling, expertise, oral, Oralism, recognition, representation
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An article published in The Rebuttal has caught my eye… for its use of a euphemism… I don’t know if “the Auditory Verbal (AV) approach” is exactly the same as Oralism… but it certainly sounds like it.
Note, not ‘oral’ – this is pretty clear from the AV approach to eradicating all exposure to non-oral communication. History suggests that until the choice of ‘oral’ or ‘sign’ became an all or nothing exclusive, then most DEAF people liked the idea of also being ‘oral’ and supported the idea that if DEAF people could learn to speak, then they should… certainly this was a widespread situation until about 1870 and even after that, many DEAF people believed that they could convince the Oralists to soften their approach to this end.
Note also, not ‘oralism’ (which I would define as a scientific and pedagogical approach that prefers hearing and speech as the best ways to educate deaf children)… oralism is (I think) forgiveable, if seriously misguided – it’s an informed stance that is only party informed and should… should be open to an unbiased discussion of the evidence. Actually… just for interest, a really good example of this exists at the 1905 ‘Free Congress’ in Liège, where some of the stalwarts of the 1880 Italian ‘oralist’ approach (Ferreri amongst others) actually converted to supporting sign language because of the evidence offered to them by the then DEAF community… But there’s no arguing with an AV ‘zealot’.
No… not ‘oralism’, but ‘Oralism’ (which I would define as the same as oralism, except that it’s based on nothing but imagination and fear of the Other)… History suggests that there are two kinds of this Oralism:
- The first is a kind that is evidenced by philanthropists and educators of ‘the deaf’ from the early 19th century to the present day. It’s an approach that is much harder to constructively deconstruct (if I can put it like that) because it considers Deaf community evidence intrinsically invalid. It seeks to do the best possible for the deaf person… but only on hearing terms. It’s an approach that uses words like ‘sensible’ and ‘practical’, and that has swallowed the argument that scientific and educational experts are the only ones who really know anything worth knowing hook, line and sinker… Because it’s an approach that really, honestly wants the best for whoever is its philanthropic target, it’s somewhat open to challenge… but the best that often emerges is a grudging acknowledgement that ‘Deaf people get on OK amongst themselves’… swiftly followed by a ‘But… that’s not the real world’ which pitches the argument right back to the beginning.
- The second, however, is entirely different and is demonstrated by organisations that purport to also want to ‘help’ deaf people… but that actually engage in this activity, predominantly for their own benefit. It’s an approach that is exemplified by the Clericalists at the 1900 Congress in Paris who deliberately disabled the DEAF delegates attending in order to reinforce their own control over the education of deaf children, and thereby ensure that they continued in existence within a largely secular state. I have quotes from the Fédération that emerged from this congress that show no interest whatsoever in any benefit that their work might have for DEAF people… they were simply concerned to survive, and used their purchase on the DEAF community to succeed in this. People like this are impossible to talk to, because they’re not interested in any evidence at all…
The Auditory-Verbalists that the Rebuttal talks about appear to be of the second type…
… unfortunately, as the article proves… it seems to still be a habit of stupid government to gift both types of Oralists with the recognition that they so crave, which simply reinforces them in their blindness and power.
