Cast:
Bob - a short story author, published a novel
Erik - a screenplay writer
chez moi - a graphic novelist

Setting:
Fred 62 Diner in LA

Yesterday, at 2pm, I arrived at the diner mere moment before Erik did, despite the best efforts of the traffic gods and an unreliable GPS. We agreed to sit outside, and after we obtained refreshments, the conversation lurched immediately into a “whatcha done lately?” mode. Erik is a filmmaker who desires greater control over his craft, so he decided to break into script writing.

After taking turns in exchanging horror stories about grad school, and before we ran out of gas, Bob made his grand entrance. He’s a middle aged man with the wittiest sense of humor this side of George Carlin, or an American version of Lord Henry from the Picture of Dorian Gray. We spoke a bit about the goals of the club, what we expected from it, and what we hope to gain from each other, and so forth. (more…)

Last week I was reading an article on theNation.com about a new generation of writers from Mexico (Jorge Volpi, Ignacio Padilla & Eloy Urroz) in the mid nineties, and it hit very close to home. They called themselves the “crackeros” but what interested me the most was their resistance to writing “Mexican literature.”  Literary critics from America and Western Europe insisted that Mexicans writers must write about Mexican themes in order to be authentic. In other words, the crakeros‘ novels weren’t about Mexico, and therefore, the writers weren’t authentic. That implies that the “universal” is restricted to the Americans and Europeans. Commence severe eye-rolling. (more…)

The very basic function of the concept called “disability” has perplexed me for decades. Why is it automatically given a negative connotation when thought or spoken out loud? Why do we teach our children that it’s inappropriate to look at a disabled person rather than encouraging them to inquire freely? It seems to further ingrain the lesson that disability is something to be avoided rather than approached as an opportunity for learning.

For the sake of brevity, I will focus solely on the World Health Organization’s (WHO) definition of disability which states:
“Disabilities is an umbrella term, covering impairments, activity limitations, and participation restrictions. An impairment is a problem in body function or structure; an activity limitation is a difficulty encountered by an individual in executing a task or action; while a participation restriction is a problem experienced by an individual in involvement in life situations. Thus disability is a complex phenomenon, reflecting an interaction between features of a person’s body and features of the society in which he or she lives.” 1

I propose a different definition for “disability”: “opportunities unrealized”. (more…)

Greetings, everyone. I bring you sad news. My book club, that unique mix of professionals and literati, has reached a crucial point in its 6 year history.

Let me give you a bit of background: the book club was founded by a couple of deaf bookworms who wanted to discuss books in their native sign language. Soon enough, my sister joined and I followed not long after. The membership stayed roughly at around 6 to 8 people. We struck a near-perfect balance between a linguist, a lawyer, a historian, an activist, a psychologist, and a heretic.  However, about a year ago, more and more members started to join. By last summer we had balooned to 14 and decided on a cap. Sure enough, by fall a couple of people stepped down (moved away or leave of absence) and that opened up roster spots.

Now, a middle aged man was recruited to join but to the general chagrin of the club. I won’t go into personal details – but suffice to say that his addition somewhat skewered the chemistry. Now, for the final spot, I proposed a great candidate (in my opinion but I’m sure she qualifies much better than the other guy) but she had one drawback. She wasn’t deaf by nature. However, she was born to deaf parents, and her first language was sign language. That should have been good enough of a counterargument in itself.

Not to several fundamentalists, unfortunately. They wanted an exclusive all-deaf club. That in itself isn’t a bad idea, given that there are thousands of book clubs out there in the greater metro area we can’t participate. But that bothered the hell out of me – we participated through the use of sign language, not because our audiogram passed a certain level of hearing loss.

After I submitted a petition for the coda (child of deaf adult(s)) citing her merits (she’s involved in the community, has a fantastic personality, well-read, etc) the members voted on her. Some were for, others were against (due to a dubious argument that her profession as an interpreter could lead to conflicts in the future). Battle lines were drawn, blustery emails were fired, ideologies were spouted, etc. The vote was suspended for the next meeting.

Now, my feeling is that the hardliners will dig in, ignore all charges of reverse audism, and with numbers, reject the coda’s application. My sister will then write a card that says “HYPOCRITE,” and then tell everyone that she doesn’t want to be one, and resign. Then some of us will follow her out of the door and set up our own inclusive club.

Despite the scathing title above, this is not ammunition for the Oralist nor the Signing Exactly English (SEE) user, nor an excuse for American Sign Language (ASL) purist to burn an effigy of yours truly, but a serious discourse on whether ASL, as a concrete language, has been shortchanging a certain segment of our population of our nation known as the D/deaf people. (more…)

In February, I submitted the dialogue, None The Wiser, to a collection of Deaf American Prose, in the hopes of being published. However, the professors helming that project had decided that my dialogue was not “deaf” enough to make the cut – even though in their call for submissions, they specified that the topic did not have to be “explicitly about deaf, Deaf, or hard of hearing American lives, but … the author [must be] deaf, Deaf, or hard of hearing.”

As a deaf author, I thought this project was not necessarily a collection of writings about deafness by deaf authors. But, given the politics behind the rejection, it appears that, in order for me to be published as a deaf person, I must write about deaf issues. I was mistaken in the naïve belief that being a deaf man who could write like a philosopher would be sufficient, and that I need not be defined by my deafness, but this is not the case. (more…)

Fiction in literature, as a serious aesthetic experience, took a long time in coming. Many literary scholars have difficulty in determining the date of its emergence. Some of the possible dates are the sixteenth century in Spain, 17^th century in France, and the 18^th century in England.

The difficulty in determining the origin owes a lot to the difficulty a traditional culture, long under the yoke of revealed religion as the sole standard of truth, had in understanding fiction. The very establishment of “fiction” as an epistemological possibility between the traditional concepts of truth and falsehood is actually a huge accomplishment of a culture. The ability to appreciate fiction is an enormous cultural resource.

But what is fictionality? It should not be confused with what is “true,” for that is the province of history, nor should it be labeled as manifestly false, for that is the province of legend or fable. Fiction helps us to perceive what is believable, without asking for our beliefs, and also, represents without referring to any real person or event. Hence, fiction is representative.

Since fiction does not refer to anyone in particular, it teaches us about everyone in general, up to and including ourselves. Reading fiction aids in identification, which is the greatest pleasure of reading that frees us from the moral obligation towards those about whom we read. Fiction also enables self-reflection, which is the most important virtue of reading.

Fiction allows the imagination to bloom magnificently, far surpassing the intellect yet it also integrates the intellect with feelings. In literature, fiction teaches us truths that are not factual or specific, but general and philosophical. In the older societies, this was called “wisdom.”

Regrettably, today in the age of information we have less and less use for both reading and fiction. Some of the causes is the attitude of scientism (the only worthwhile knowledge comes from scientific disciplines), the dominance of pop culture (reality programming and memoirs) and the transformation of education into simulation. These activities come at a cost: our ability to imagine, think and feel our way into other people’s experiences without pretending to be them. This is the ability to hold similarity and difference at the same time within the mind.

However, not all is lost. In Deaf culture, ASL has a unique role that can provide an escape hatchet from the hegemony of infotainment. A proficient ASL speaker can restore the luster to fictionality with his or her command of the language. The signer is capable of holding an audience’s attention with an intoxicating rhapsody, a beautiful rendition of Whitman’s poems, or a dramatic epic. Not being beholden to the fundamental rules of speech or text, perhaps ASL has a distinct quality that can express the best of both modes of languages, which in turn, preserves an enormous cultural resource for the community.

Dontcha hate it whenever you present your thoughts with airtight reasoning or impeccable proof that something is or ought to be the case, the reason why something is going on or the reason why things must change, and then your meticulous demonstration is damned with the faint praise that it is merely just “yer opinion?”

Yes, it just happened.

A rather fine handwave, a pooh pooh, a scoff that dismisses the validity of your conclusions. It also alludes that your opinion is just as good as anyone else’s, and no better, despite the tools of logic or evidence, because knowledge is now subjective goo. Relativist shit like that implies that there are only opinions, or everything is a matter of opinion and there’s no way to judge between them. The reduction of all discourse to a level playing field also reduces knowledge, or true justified beliefs, to a smorgasboard of opinions that individuals can pick and choose from, according to their personal desires/biased beliefs/ignorance.

When it comes to opinions, democracy is the best method, but when it comes to knowledge, democracy is a liability that equalizes everything, for the knowledge of expert has little to nothing to do with the popular opinion of the general populace.

Unfortunately certain deafiez (as well as other intellectually lazy people) are prone to use this sort of strategy whenever they are confronted with an alternative to their convictions and one that is doubly potent and persuasive. Since the lazy person do not want to discuss the actual reasons (or lack of) behind his own convictions, he choose to assuage his intellectual pride by pulling the relativist card. But when that happens to me, I grow irritated at how I’ve wasted my energy and time with this tedious and facile relativist - he who is more than likely too scared or too embarrassed to even bother taking the discussion anywhere except have the last word with typical conversation stoppers - and inevitably, I grow disappointed with such pervasive sophistry among the general public.

There’s a big difference between knowledge and opinions. The truth of knowledge does not depend on the person, because they are objective, which means others can arrive at the same conclusions independently, and they are public. Knowledge must be justified independently of the original person who conceived of that particular concept. Whereas the truth of opinions are private and they depend on the person, since they are subjective, dependent on passions, tastes, inclinations, or desires that vary from individual to individual. An opinion need not be justified by any stretch of the imagination. The reason why somebody likes a certain thing is not amenable to rational standards.

Why do I prefer Seire R cigars?

True knowledge comes from history, from authority, from the experts and from the practitioners. Anybody can form an opinion about something without ever experiencing it, studying it, or observing it. An opinion is something easily arrived at, but knowledge takes years of practice, years of study or training. One is easily gained or dropped, the other is difficult and worth keeping.

Opinions are like assholes, cuz everybody’s got one, but very few actually do know something.

During my college career I have had to struggle against a stereotype about deaf people in general, fight against the common assumptions about a group of disabled people and constantly prove myself capable by shattering unfair but understandable generalizations. After blazing a trial in my own limited time (by breaking the prejudices of others) it did became tiresome and repetitive, exceedingly redundant that I have nothing to fight but the extremely low expectations and that whatever I do already clears the embarrasingly low bar is simply taken as brilliant, impressive, wonderful, amazing, or [insert any superlative here]. This is not a cry for a universal standard, fairness, but that the concept of low expectations does result in low results. It is somewhat a self-defeating prophecy, if you look at the results without any preconceived notions.

The unexamined prejudice, or stereotype I am talking about is that because of common connotations about the disability, a deaf person should not be able to articulate speech consistently well, even write eloquently in English, and/or specialize in non-visual training (i.e. abstract studies such as that of mathematics or philosophy).

The first stereotype is not too much of a problem. Once I open my mouth and ask for something in the public arena, say, ordering food, sometimes I’m taken for a hearing person pretending to be deaf in order to get away with things. Other times incredulity is written allover their faces that a deaf person can speak at all is embarrasing to the degree that those preconceived notions are just exactly what we all are guilty of when we meet the strange or the rare, or the different, those of unlike bent - whatever it is, disability, cultural differences, or social classes - whichever we have limited experience of we unfairly make quick judgments and assessments that are actually a short cut for true knowledge and understanding. Is it human nature to make shortcuts with stereotypes so we don’t have to waste time in the future?

The second stereotype is even more troubling, because my major requires that I write a lot of papers, essays, summations, reports, analyses, critiques, and etcetera. I remember my first semester at the local college, I was enrolled in a course on Folklore & Mythology. During lecture I had been constantly keeping my arm up and answering the posed questions or adding extra information, but alas! That was not sufficient grounds to keep the professor from doubting the true authorship of my papers. He even had the audacity to ask whether I did write my essay! At first I wasn’t too worried because I assumed that the professor was concerned about the quoted material or sources I had worked with. But it slowly dawned upon me that he was laboring with assumptions that I could not have written that paper precisely because of my disability. Not that he came out and said it, for he was too smart to paint himself in a corner like that. My interpreter found this so insulting that during the interrogation she broke down and cried like a baby. The professor defended his charges by saying that in 35 years of teaching he had never came across a paper that technical, so he had grounds to doubt the abilities of a lowly freshman. More similar incidents followed, until I built a reputation of producing well-written papers in the philosophy department was I able to dispell that sort of low expectations. About time!

To this day I keep surprising people on the internet with the admittance that I am hearing impaired. Sometimes I can interpret that as a compliment. For example there is this intelligent, talented thinker who frequents over at darwinawards.org I have had the courtesy of befriending. After I informed him of my disability, he exclaimed that he would have never guessed! Sort of nice, but at the same time, also, damning.

The third stereotype is the choice of major- since the most common major for the deaf student at schools like Gallaudet, NTID, or CSUN is ‘deaf studies,’ it stands to reason that there are exceptions who do not fall into any homogenized categories. However, the assumption that a deaf person is exceeding expectations if he focuses on something not necessarily visually aided (technican, auto mechanic, art) he is bound to fail or be doomed to a life of misery or frustration is unfounded.

Perhaps this is a matter of semantics, that the people who happen to be deaf is actually a microcosm of the population at large, that the ratio stays fixed, that the majority of the people are not devoted to high-brow intellectual pursuits, but in more practical matters, and that the categorization of deaf/hearing is spurrious and unnecessary.

For subjective purposes, I do not find my disability a source of pride because I did not chose to be deaf. That may be a fundamental problem of my own, that I refuse to participate in a social thing that stems from an accident of nature (that translates as well to other elements such as those of racial origins, cultural background, social status). If I didn’t choose my ethnicity, my parents, my social class, my history, how can I take the credit for any of those?

Is the word ‘deaf’ a label? How does it denote a person? Today, in this post-structural age, labels are everything. We use labels everyday, speak in labels, and we encounter labels everywhere. Sometimes we use labels for convenience, as shorthand for complicated concepts. Other times labels are used in technical vocabulary, to marginalize error. So, we identify ourselves with labels. Hence, the word “deaf” is a label that connotes a particular characteristic of a person. The dictionary explicitly signifies a person who is not physically able to hear, and that definition is derived from the norm of a society of peers who can. The identification of a person as deaf is a discursive product, because it is relevant only within a set of classification that is established by a particular discourse of deafness.

In the Norma Groce’s book Everyone Here Spoke Sign Language, a description of an independent community isolated on the small island Martha’s Vineyard, which was rife with a genetic predisposition to hearing loss, serves as an example where “deafness” was not a label of disability. Disability in this sense doesn’t necessarily result from a handicap, but rather is manifested through a society that devalues and segregates people who deviate from the physical norms. Consequently, any label that connotes disability is a socioeconomic passport for institutionalization.

However, this marginalization as a disability is a negative concept and does not satisfactorily answer the question - what is ‘deafness?’ Is there an alternative, more positive, definition?

One possible candidate is a social explanation, which is a departure from biological or existential explanations. As a label, deafness functions as a discursive formation that is socially constructed by discourse. The phrase ‘social construct’ is a celebrated description those radical freethinkers use to question the ideological beliefs of a modernist (that reality is a homogeneous entity, that knowledge is the sole result of a pure, sincere will to truth, and the meaning of anything is disinterestedly given).

Discursive formations are derivatives of discourse, which is the semiotic structuring of all social phenomena as codes and rules. This is practiced by a unity of discourse, by consensual agreement. Discourse defines identity and describes what characteristics are possible for a person. A discursive formation constitutes its object and generates knowledge about these objects. That means our knowledge is discursively determined, and the world is constituted in this way by discourse. However, nobody writes a discursive formation. There are no authors of discursive formations because they are constituted by archives, or anonymous collections of text.

These archives is the sustained recording of the history of the individual, and in doing so, the person has a place, a name, a number, a task, a credit history, etc., and never stray from the steady observation of authorities. This constant observation of behavior leads to a certain discipline: the person behaves as if they were under sustained surveillance. In the deaf person’s situation, especially in the USA, his life is observed, recorded, and probed under a microscope by a collaborative and cooperative effort of specialists (deaf teachers, guidance officers, speech language pathologists, interpreters or notetakers, and audiologists): a continuum of psychological profiles, aptitude test placements, audiograms, educational performance, objectives and other documented efforts.

The increasingly complex and technical serialization of the disabled person is an ongoing process of a biographical production. The biographical sketch of the individual, chronicled to a greater detail than ever, results in the ‘real,’ tangible and physical snapshot of the self! Panopticism is a disciplined, rational, detailed and bureaucratic surveillance, which signifies how behavior is directed by the machinery of society- an ‘automatization’ and ‘disindividualization’ of power.

The individual actively construct their social world, as opposed to having it imposed upon them. Therefore, it seems that the concept of deafness does not necessarily signify a disability, but is contingent upon what context the individual chooses to define himself. If labels are constructs, and language is the limit of thought, then I am nothing more than a social construct, that ‘deaf guy.’ However, I do not identify myself as a deaf person because of my existential nature as a free human being. To act otherwise would be bad faith.

(Originally published by the 49er, the CSULB newspaper, February 6, 2003)