dodgingwndshlds

A young Deaf man I know is spear-heading an effort to get his university to move the ASL classes out from the Speech/Hearing Pathology department and under the Foreign Language department where it belongs.

He is meeting with the dean tomorrow, and asked me for letter of support*.

( Read it here. All names and identifying information redacted. )

*Normally, a letter of support would have much less ME in it and be much more about XXXXXX.. But, he was explicit in what he wanted from me.

Please, say a prayer, think good thoughts, whatever it is you do to affect positive change... He needs to win this.

Sylvie got spayed today.

It's not a remarkable thing, except, she has Manx Syndrome, a form of Spina Bifida most prevalent in cats with no tails. Her back legs don't move independently, and her left rear leg drags a bit when she walks. She moves just fine at high speeds, hopping like a bunny. This is relevant because believe it or not, it wasn't easy finding a place that would even do the surgery... And the place we did take her charged extra because the vet would not do it without a full blood panel and a battery of tests.

Even Disabled kitties are scary for the able-bodied.

The aftermath is different, too... They trimmed her claws while they had her out. Which was nice of them, except, we don't trim her front ones short, as she needs them to get up on the bed. It's a running jump, sink claws in, catapult up onto bed. Now, they are too short and she just bounces off...

And yes... She is bouncing... That seems to be another difference... We also had them give her on-board pain medication for after. It was supposed to help with pain plus make her sleepy and quiet, so as to get her safely through the first twenty-four hours. She seems to have had the opposite reaction. She is freaking nuts.

They told us to keep her quiet this evening. (She made a point of telling me that I should not let her "Run up and down the stairs. Stairs are bad, keep her away from stairs." I looked at her, from my wheelchair, and said "No problem. No stairs in my house.") I tried to keep her calm. I swear I did. There's just no freaking way....

Lately, I had occasion to be in a discussion rehashing the age-old stereotype of the church lady interpreter....Those stereotypes have never sit well with me....

I've seen the most open-minded, socially conscious interpreters refuse to use something like the n-word, even when the very vitriolic nature of the signed message being produced makes it the best English word choice. It's not done consciously... It's just that our values don't allow us to use words like that. But in our profession, with what we do, our consumers could possibly see our values as coming from a place of power and privilege and the exercising of them, consciously or not, as an act of oppression.

And if we just come to that conclusion, then we don't have to make it about different groups. I think we all have the same struggle to be as value-neutral as possible and even though our values are different, that struggle isn't.

</soap_box>

Today was the first day of a class that I was going to interpret at a local institution. I say "was going to," because the classroom is on the second floor of a building with no elevator.

We all know how this should turn out. But here's the thing.. The laws? They are so riddled with loop holes and caveats that really, they are not very useful.

This is the danger of pointing to existing law and saying "See? You have recourse! I know you do, because there's a law!"

I am not a student at this institution. I am also not an employee of this institution; I am a contractor contracted by an outside, private agency. So guess what?

That's right.... Loop hole.

Seriously, I know some of you are lawyers and brilliant activists and KNOWERS OF THE LAW. What I am here to tell you is that, in my experience, the law is useless because it still funnels all the power to others. I (and those like me) don't get to decide how the law is interpreted, applied, enforced or even what the definition of "reasonable accommodation" is. The school gets to use the building, because it was purchased before a certain date, and they will bring it up to code when they do a remodel later in the year. Just like the law requires.

In the meantime, I can crawl up the stairs, asking someone to haul up my chair for me...but that is painful and humiliating and exhausting. I know... I did it today. And once the rain comes, they'll be wet and probably muddy.

Or I can quit and request that another interpreter take my place.

There goes a healthy chunk of change a month.

Yes, I could have fought. But frankly, I have a busy schedule this term, and I am still not sleeping well... Plus I have had some almost-to-the-point-of-scary-serious health problems within the past month that I am just this side of over and I am just not fucking up to fighting... And it feels like I never am up to fighting and I get so mad at myself.

According to the US Census, of men and women in the state of Oregon with physical disabilities between the ages of 21-64 years old, of all races and all ethnicities and all education levels, only 4.5% are employed. That's also a good way of avoiding law suits... But for me, I can't go on disability because I love what I do so much that my identity and happiness are wrapped up in it. I have to keep working, and in that 4.5%, I hear generations of stories of folks like me. And even though I am so sad and angry about this incident today, I just want to be allowed to work and be the friendly, jovial, happy guy that I am. I don't want to have to file complaints and protest and assert my rights and all the other crap.

( For the screen readers: this is a sign with the silhouette in the international shape for MAN standing next to a much smaller international shape for Disabled: A little wheelchair with arms, feet, and a dot for a head. Underneath the figures, it says "Men." It's a Men's Room sign, in other words.)

So I am finally ready to write about what I thought when I saw this sign. It's under the cut. Before you click on the cut to read it, please remember that I am fully aware that what this sign actually is is a marker of the location of a Men's Restroom and nothing more. It has no direct intentions other than to point out where a guy can find the can.

But also remember that this sign exists within the larger context of my experiences as person who is not only Disabled but uses a wheelchair as in the symbol itself. It hangs on a wall that is part of a building that inhabits a world that is not set up with me in mind, that has in it people whose belief structures belittle and oppress me, even when they don't mean to. This sign also exists in my perception.. Me... A human being with flaws and character defects and issues and problems like everyone else. My reaction to this sign exits in all these contexts and more. You totally don't have to agree; it's kind of besides the point.

( Read more... )

I am pretty good at sociolinguistics. What I mean is, I have a knack for seeing the ways that our languages influence our behaviors as a society and how our behaviors as a society influence our languages. The intersection of the "hard" science of linguistics and the social sciences seems like an obvious one, and it is hard to believe that the field was new in 1972 with the publication The Sociology of Language by Joshua A. Fishman out of Yeshiva University in Jerusalem. (This is the first definitive text for the field, although there was "Basic introduction" to the idea of sociolinguistics written by another guy in 1968...It was not published until 1970 and really was a discussion of the field itself, rather than a discussion of field's area of study.)

It's important because "hard" science linguistics is focused on the invariant usage or behaviors of language, while sociolinguistics gets its thrills, if you will, from the variations in the ways that speech communities use the same language in different ways for reasons based on factors other than geography. A good example is the word "ain't." The use of the word ain't would be considered dialectical if it was used in one geographical area, such as the South. That's what the hard science of linguistics tell us: that dialect is a function of geography and isolation. Which is great, except the word "ain't" is not used invariantly, even in the South. It doesn't cross registers: folks tend to avoid the word in formal settings. Register is a function of social norms and culture, making it exolinguistic or a free variation that was thought of as outside the scope of code-oriented linguistics in the early days of the field.

Sociolinguistics gives us the ability to define sociolects, or differences in language use influenced by social factors. It's an idea that synthesized so well that even in "hard" linguistics today, there exists a lot of overlap.

Sociolinguistics allows us to see language in terms of social strata, and by doing so, I feel it also illuminates the power of words to create, maintain, or change the way things and groups of people are viewed by society.

Hang in there, I am getting to a point.....

Recently, I made a statement while teaching my workshop on Disability Paradigms for Interpreters that is still with me. It was an idea that I had been chewing on, but had not yet formed to a point of articulation, when the perfect storm of circumstances presented itself during the discussion and out of my mouth popped a statement; spontaneously and fully formed, like Venus from the clamshell...

The statement was this: the ADA is not a civil rights law. It's a list of instructions of how not to get sued, and that makes it about them, and not about us.

It's a bold statement, I know. But I think it holds up, and I think so more strongly since I have had a few weeks to think about it and apply some concepts of sociolinguistics to the idea. The ADA and much of the fight for Disability rights is about access. Accessibility is not only our hot word, but it is set before us as the goal of our movement: we want unfettered access.

So I thought about the word "access" and its usage in this context. Implicit in the idea of me wanting access to something is the fact that I start outside of it. This is true when we are talking about issues of physical access like ramps and elevators and the like. It's true even when talking about language access and the use of interpreters. But, that our "civil rights" law is one that deals exclusively with the mechanics of physical access does nothing to address the larger fact that I am still in a place of other, of outside. And don't get me wrong: access is a cause worth fighting for, I am clear on that. But does calling a law about not getting sued for not providing physical access a "civl rights" law limit our aspirations as a movement to only issues of access? Is this another prime example of the Medical/Rehabilitative Paradigm of Disability hegemony? Is that paradigm so entrenched that even our civil rights struggle deals only with issues of the mechanics and therefore the impairment?

The ADA is a wonderful and awesome thing, I am grateful we have it. I am afraid, though, that if we keep calling it our "civil rights" law, that, as sociolinguistics cautions us, it will encapsulate and limit what the term "civil rights" means for Disabled people.

We've all seen some amazing (and not so amazing) interpretations of songs into Sign Language... But this is ASL singing... the prosody in this is freaking mind-blowing....

This is the Goddess of Friendship, the fabulous Ms. M's daughter!! I love this!!!


http://web.me.com/critical.focus/VickyVixen_Online/Welcome.html

I've been feeling pretty sad lately... It's not like me, and I am sorting it out. In thinking about it all, trying to get to the bottom of the issues at hand, I have come up with some more ideas around the issues of identity that constantly haunt me, and how I use them to my advantage in dealing with illness and impairment and the identity politics of Disability.... It's not a full idea yet... I'm still mulling them all over... But it seems to me that I am saddened at times by my impairment, and what it means to me as an individual. Not as a member of society, with all the barriers and the like, but what it means to my own psychology: I am saddened, at times, at the things I will not do again.

And I think that's ok.

I can still be a proud and loud member of the Disabled community, because even from this dark place, it's still about my identity, not my impairment. My impairment is merely the thing that brought me here.

As I said.. It's not a full thought.. I am still mulling it over.... Ideas, anyone?

I admit, I am addicted to information. This age of the internet is the perfect time and the perfect place for the existence of someone like me: I am the opposite of anachronism. My iPhone has four news apps, and I check them for up-dates obsessively. With my iPhone, I am also constantly connected to my email, Facebook, LiveJournal, AOL Instant Messenger, Weather Bug, Wikipedia, YouTube and everything else via Google, complete with maps and GPS. The Ruling Reddcub says my nose is constantly in my iPhone.

I don't know about anyone else, but this ability to be anywhere on the planet where there is news almost instantly has made me more sensitive to witnessing atrocity. When everything and everyone one the planet can be streamed to my cell phone, I lose my American-made skill of hiding behind my little piece of the hegemony shield.

I grew up watching sterilized moments on television news, shot through the rose-colored lens of corporate media and censored by the need to sell advertising. If we show the true, horrific images of the end results of our endless political turmoils, people get overwhelmed and turn away, missing the commercials for the products that make our lives better. Peaceful. Comfortable. It's not the over-exposure to violence on TV that makes us callous to it, it's the sanitizing of it.

So because of this sensitivity, I have to spend time to steel myself before I can face what I perceive to be my duty of bearing witness. Until tonight, at two thirty in the morning, when I can't sleep and move out the couch in the living room, so as not to disturb my honey, until this time when I finally felt ready, I had not witnessed the YouTube video of Neda dying on the street in Tehran.

I searched YouTube and found several versions, including one from TV news in which her face was digitally obscured, and the video edited and looped.

I am sad to say that I watched that one. Perhaps I am not steeled enough, but I could not look Neda in the face as she died: a young woman killed by a system so much infinitely bigger than her.... Even now, I tear-up at the thought that in her face I would recognize surprise. I am terrified that what I would see in her un-obscured face on video would be an utter disbelief at the fact that righteousness was not, after all, a shield. And then I think that my naive faith in righteousness probably stems from viewing the world through the filters of a privilege of censorship, and berate myself for failing to know that someone else, somewhere else in the world probably knew better than to believe that Disney crap and I think: "Maybe Neda's face didn't show surprise."

And then I become even more afraid.

This tandem handcycle starts at $7500.00... Single person ones start at around $2000.00...Also interesting to note, there are no tandem handcycles available for two riders who crank by hand, only with the foot pedals in front and the handcycle in back....

I get so weary of it all.....

On Friday evening, I am facilitating the first of what I hope to be many workshops/professional discussions of the issues facing Disabled interpreters. I’ll be honest: the real point is to have a discussion about Disability Paradigms 101 for the non-disabled, and less about the “issues” that the Disabled interpreter has to “face.” Those of us that are, in fact, Disabled interpreters have (at least every one that I have met has) already worked out the issues for ourselves. The same way we have worked out the issues in the grocery stores, sidewalks, office buildings, schools, buses, you name it. When these experiences aren't successful, it's normally not because of us. We are nothing if not resourceful.

I write it out as a speech just to order my thoughts, it will not be read and may not get delivered in anything even remotely resembling this….( Read more... )

And then comes the real part, the discussion... This is the part that you gotta attend to get, and this is where all the good stuff will happen.

Wanna attend? Visit: The Language Door's website and click on "Educational Opportunities."

In the days since the travesty in California, I have not seen any news reports regarding the protests that are happening. (Now, to be fair, I don't watch TV, nor do I read a traditional paper newspaper. I get news feeds from the Associated Press and ABC News on my iPhone.)

What I have seen is:

1) A story about the horrible oppression and violence against gays in Iraq (Wednesday).

2) A story about the horrible oppression and violence against gays in Afghanistan (Thursday).

3) A story about the horrible practice of "corrective rape" perpetrated against lesbians in South Africa (Thursday).

4) A story about a teenage gay boy in LA winning Prom Queen at his highschool and congratulating the school on being so "tolerant"--No kidding... the story contained the word "tolerant" a few times. (Today).


I sense a message... Don't you?