The Deaf experience shows how impoverished hearing people's communication can be

“It’s rude to point,” my friend told me from across the elementary-school cafeteria table. I grasped her words as I read them off her lips. She stared at my index finger, which I held raised in midair, gesturing toward a mutual classmate. “My mom said so.”

I was 6 or 7 years old, but I remember stopping with a jolt. Something inside me froze, too, went suddenly cold.

“I’m signing,” I said out loud. “That’s not rude.” Pointing was a truly fundamental act for me; it was how I expressed what my grown-up scholarly self would call relationality — the idea of being in the world in relation to others.”

Rachel Kolb, talking about her experiences in The Deaf Body in Public Space.

When hearing people learn to use sign language, “they must overcome the cultural taboos about excessive movement, pointing and gesture.”

As well as gestures, sign language involves what hearing people would see as exaggerated facial expressions. Meanwhile the “listener” maintains a continual gaze (in order to follow the signing) which hearing people can find uncomfortably intense.

“Hearing culture presents us with ideals of speaking with good elocution, restraint and self-control. Now, I admit, I see these ideals as visually impoverished, inaccessible and uninteresting: They produce spaces full of immobile talking heads, disembodied sound and visual inattentiveness.”

This piece was originally published in The Whippet #05 – subscribe to get the next one in your inbox!

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