Technical Analysis

Race and Culture: I'm hoping my professor remembered that she said I could write on Deaf culture... I'm not terribly interested in racial profiling or affirmative action, (to be honest, I hate politics with a passion) but I am interested in deaf culture. So.

Culture and oppression: Ooh, I'd like to do a paper on Oralist oppression on Sign language and deaf culture. That, apart from anything, bugs me to no end that hearing people think they know best when the deaf keep trying to tell them it's not working.

Components of oppression:

* Attack on language itself:
France outlawed it until very recently-- like the mid 1900's
Teachers slapping their student's hands
Teachers physically tying student's hands so they can't move them
AGB influencing councils to ban sign language
British making the alphabet 2-handed to slow it down
SEE sign: Hearing invention based on a language of puns
Oralists refusing to teach kids sign because it's the "easy way out"


* Attack on culture:
More subtle:
Stigma of signing being "dirty" or "low" (both U.S. and France)
Phrase "deaf and dumb" widely used, though actual deafness does not affect brain function
Oralists insisting that the deaf should be treated like everyone else, and should blend in, despite the biological difference: deafness a social disease


* Political attacks:
Deaf man jailed until he could find his own interpreter
Judge yelling at the deaf man (see D-PAN video... actually, look up their slideshow.)
Account of police shooting a deaf man standing in his front yard with a shovel
DPN: school board passed up (3?) very qualified deaf candidates in favor of a hearing one.
Businesses and organizations' refusal to pay for interpreters


--probably can't use the experiments people used to do on deaf kids... something they were trying to cure, but not usually outright oppression. (Still, they ended up killing a bunch of little deaf kids or making them worse.)

FW: The Crazy Gene

So, I've officially decided my family is crazy. In a good, highly amusing way, but I think it's genetic. I just spent much of the night with my family at my aunt and uncle's house with my grandpa... we're so funny. We spent dinner making wisecracks and puns, joking about French and American culture (my uncle is full-blooded French, so it's totally legal), and scarfing mints and brownies in weird ways, after making faces out of the food.

We then proceeded to playing a card game called "Crazy Louie", where you make bets about how many tricks you can trump that round. The game was replete with sounds of "ohh-ing" and "doh-ing", and making loud obnoxious noises when someone got too cocky and bid a lot more than they actually got. The end round of Crazy Louis consists of passing just one card to each player, then betting whether or not you have the highest trump card... the catch is that you can't look at your card, but have to hold it on your forehead while the other players look at you and gauge if your card would possibly be higher than theirs. It looks absolutely ridiculous; therefore, perfect for my family. We polished off the night with a slideshow of my family's trip to St. George, and couldn't stop laughing as every single picture had something bizarre about it. We've decided that we should make a calendar, with the full 365 days, of the weird faces my little sister makes, because she probably has at least that many different goof faces, if not more. We have pictures of how contorted we can make our hands look, how long our tongues are (it seems to be genetic) and how wide my mom's side of the family can spread our toes.

We're so weird. I love it.