Review: Sound And Fury (Documentary about Deaf Culture)
Turned in my essays and found myself a new cheaper room with a window settee where I plan to read forever and ever, and also walk to uni from quite easily. Monday I'm moving my stuff and Tuesday I’ll be off to Barcelona for a month to stay with my dad and my little sisters. While there I'm also meant to read a lot about gender and fanfic since that’s why I’m writing my dissertation on next semester.
Recently I became very interested in deaf culture. I have always wanted to learn to sign so even though it’s a sappy family tragicomedy I was drawn and then drowned in Switched at Birth, one of the switches being a deaf girl without implants, although she does wear aids that allow her to get some ambient noise. I’m seriously considering looking into taking some kind of class but for now I’m watching a lot of tutorials on youtube.
[Deaf documentary review (spoilers)]
Sound and Fury (2000): I was torn about the issue but I thought Heather's parents were so repulsed by the little cochlear!implant girl who didn't know she was deaf that they lost all perspective. I also felt terribly sad about Shelby being unable to sign. If a child gets an implant and still lives with deaf parents they will behave like any other bilingual child, although, unlike a child from a Spanish speaking home growing up, say, in London, the deaf child will never cease being deaf and will always find it easier to sign. There was not a big enough sample but Shelby did not seem like she was very aware of her surroundings, unlike Heather, who, as her grandma pointed out, looked extremely bright and was speaking a little just with hearing aids. I think it’s clear that a deaf child getting zero exposure to deaf culture and particularly signing is a terrible mistake because again, that reduces their options (and their ways to cope) the same way not giving them a cochlear implant would.
Deafness IS limiting, saying otherwise is absurd. The father even admits it.
That's why when they go the deaf community they feel 'safe' and not 'held back', because everybody is limited there.
Why does NOBODY makes a bilingual analogy? Are monolinguals inferior or simply less educated? Also, if the world makes it hard for deaf people, does it make sense to refuse implants and expect it to change? It is not a reasonable expectation. It is what feminist/queer movements expect, BUT the difference resides in the fact that those prejudices and impediments are merely psychological/ideological, there is no physical impediment. It is a fact that deaf people are deaf. They have 4 senses instead of 5, it's not a difference merely but a handicap. It is naturally possible to live happy fulfilling life with them, the same it is while being discriminated against constantly for other reasons, but it is not logical to assume most of the population will learn to sign and that a whole layer of reality based on sound will cease to be important to the development of humanity. Deaf culture is expanding the other senses further out of necessity, which is highly valuable. The same way blind people have developed the amazing 'echolocation' system for seeing through hearing, the way bats do, something a sighted person would have been highly unlikely to think up.
Nobody ever asks people to take their glasses off, I don't know about deafness from personal experience but I know about blindness, how very helpless you can feel without glasses, how they become a part of your body because without them you cannot function. How you don't have enough peripheral vision and how everybody forgets you cannot see without them. And glasses aren’t good for you either, if they were perfect ‘implants’ sight lose would stop once you started wearing them, instead it keeps worsening.
Regarding the disappearance of deaf culture, nobody notices that the hearing couple with the twins are both from deaf families, that they are connected enough to deafness (even the woman, who wanted to escape it) to feel a special connection to someone that is, too. You don't need to stop signing just because you talk, it's like becoming bilingual and it was clear the twins mum’s first language was ASL, she even pushed her tongue out of her mouth and was completely silent while signing as deaf people do. Her mother was a bitch, so it’s understandable she grew a little resentful of the whole interpreter situation.
Furthermore, indeed, if deaf culture is so great, why would implanted people migrate the moment they are able? If suddenly you can do more than one thing, will you then cease to do the one? The logic is faulty. Particularly as language is for communicating and that is the impulse that keeps it alive.
As with gay rights, I feel it is more important than people be happy than to make a statement/preserve a culture. Cultures are alive, in the sense that they made by people, but not in the sense that they care whether they exist or not. If you feel your culture is important, that's super, but that does not give you the right to sacrifice other people's happiness for the continued well-being of the culture or your own continued comfort (there are a number of ways of being happy, but only what is known is comfortable)
Not because the truth is not important to me, I want to make statements and that is the only way in which I can be happy but I can’t impose the way I achieve happiness on everybody, that in itself is a form of discrimination for psychological difference. In the same way I will not let other people's squimishness change my behaviour (silly example: my sister thinks wearing multicolored thights is embarrassing) and I will not stop thinking I'm right about certain things and others are wrong, I will not force anybody else to follow my example. Trying to explain your POV to someone is good, trying to make them have your own POV is not. Keeping someone deaf is doing that, as much as it pains me to say, and that is why even the National Asociation probably change its mind, because the quality of life implanted people get is simply better because they have more choices, that is, more chance to find the right one for them. Of course, cochlear implants don't make deaf people hearing, not really, and, like with other minorities, educating the general population is essential, having everybody learn basic sign language in school would be as productive as having them get music or art lessons or sports, all pretty extracurricular subjects in the curriculums of most countries and it's probably easier to remember how to finger spell than how many points win you a basketball game (this shit was in my exams, i kid you not!).
Definitely go watch this!
P.S: I'm anxious to watch the sequel S&F: 6 years later and see how everybody is doing.
Edit: Turned out to be less than half an hour long and have a LOT of fragments from the original. Heather, 5 originally, got an implant at 9 and at 13 can get by in the hearing world and at hearing school (but she requires an interpreter to go with her to class since she can't quite follow, even as her results are above average). Her speech is noticeably clumsy but her understanding seems normal, although everybody in her life seems quite used to speaking for lipreaders, that is, slowly and clearly. Her younger siblings and her mother also have implants and they share speech therapy with 2 cousins, sons of a Peter's previously unknown and unmentioned deaf sister (I'm confused because in the original he said he grew up as the only deaf kid in his family). The twins' parents said their kid was fine but refused to participate.