BUG: Deaf Identity and Internal Revolution

Strip Club Literacy

B U G 195 Strip Club Literacy Every night, millions of international businessmen end up in strip clubs near American airports. It matters very little whether or not they can speak or read even a single word of English. From Japan to Hawaii (in either direction), everyone knows that Paradise Oasis isn’t a fruit-drink store. The blinking neon Exotic Dancers sign isn’t advertising night class opportunities for Apache Rain Dance students. So how do we account for the advertising success of strip clubs? I personally think they do well because their owners don’t have the same literacy hang-ups as do quite a few teachers in the American Deaf education system. A lot of these teachers believe that if something wasn’t spat out of a typewriter, it’s not English. This may be why the last public school I taught in was still using dusty sentence-pattern textbooks from the 1970s with nary a picture to be found in any of them. This may also be why ASL has had as many classroom-survival problems as it has over the years. That particular language isn’t about actual paper and pens and print—we kept saying all along that our “paragraphs” were being “written” in the air, all to no avail. In the end, people couldn’t make the leap. The problem wasn’t just that they couldn’t change the way they thought about deafness (medical malady → cultural identity). They also couldn’t change the way they thought about text. 196 C H R I S T O P H E R J O N H E U E R I wonder if that still has to be the case. Today, a child can call up a paragraph about World War II on his computer, click on the word Nazis, and get thirty seconds of film showing Hitler at a military parade. That child probably learned as much from the footage as he did from the actual English paragraph. In fact, he may have understood certain words only because he could connect them to specific pictures. Strip club owners understand this—thus the redundancy of the flashing neon boob-girl next to the Paradise Oasis sign. Hiss at the inappropriateness of the image if you must. But you can bet on this: Those are the two English words an international businessman will surely remember when he sees them again. I say we go with what works. (P.S. Did the arrow above do as good of a job as the English preposition to? I think it did.) ASL Is aVisual Language . . . Just Like Printed English! Why do Deaf people keep making such a big thing about how ASL is a visual language? I mean, it is, sure, but they emphasize this as if ASL is the only visual language in God’s Known Universe. As if that’s what makes it unique and special. Now I bet you’re going to leap ahead and say something like, “Yeah, I see what you’re getting at, and you’re right. British Sign B U G 197 Language is visual too. So is every country’s native sign language . It’s a bit arrogant of us to keep emphasizing American, American, American all the time.” Well . . . true; but that’s not what I was getting at. I speci fically mean that Deaf people emphasize that American Sign Language is a visual language—as if printed languages, solely by virtue of the fact that they are printed, are not visual. Okay, let’s run an experiment. Read the sentence below: Kiss my bald, pimpled ass. That’s printed English, an example of a printed language. Can you actually see the print? Yes? Okay, so that’s score one for printed English as a visual language! But wait, there’s more! Using raw imagination, can you visualize my ass? Seriously, try! Let me use more printed English to describe it. . . . Oh, you don’t need me to do that? Okay, so that’s score two for printed English as a visual language! I’m not trying to detract from the beauty of ASL, nor the pride that many people (myself included) place in it. But if people are going to use the adjective visual for bragging rights, shouldn’t they at least make sure that isn’t something ASL has in common with every other...