Deaf Poets' Society: Subverting the Hearing Paradigm

Abstract

Susan Burch gives her audience a privileged look at American Sign Language (ASL) poetry, a genre in which the body rather quite literally is the text. The hands, facial expressions, stance, and movements of the signer are critical ingredients of the language and the meaning of the poem. Living only through embodiment, ASL poetry signifies that moment in which language circulates through the writer and emerges as a corporeal signification as well as a metaphorical one. Burch brings us to the state of affairs in which metaphor, gesture, meaning, and corpus are one. The work of Bernard Bragg, Clayton Valli, and the Flying Words Project serve as examples.

Application of the truth and reconciliation model to meaningfully engage deaf sign language users in the research process.

“…Deaf people are accustomed to paternalism at the hands of well-meaning hearing parents, educators, medical professionals, policy-makers, and politicians who make decisions on their behalf (Bauman, 2004;Gournaris & Aubrecht, 2013;Lane, 1992). The implicit message embedded in this dynamic is that "hearing knows best," a popular phrase among Deaf people that has become a satirical commentary on Deaf-hearing cross-cultural interactions (Burch, 1997;Robinson, 2018). By asking Deaf community members how we should conduct our research, we a first step towards reversing the typical power dynamic between hearing researchers and Deaf people.…”

To Deaf or not to deaf: That is the Question

“…Oral deaf adults and late-deafened adults usually consider that they have a hearing impairment and do not self-identify as members of the Deaf-World" (p. 291). In her article, Burch (1997) felt it necessary to add emphasis when she defined the usage of deaf versus Deaf, "for the sake of efficiency and clarity…" (p. 1). Additionally, Stapleton (2015) added a footnote in her article defining d/Deaf to make it consistent with all of the arguments and perspectives mentioned above.…”

NetWrite: A New Breed of Communication

“…Burch, in her study of Deaf poetry and performance, attacks an assumption she sees as prevalent that deafness is a communicative disability, arguing that ASL's reliance on hand movements to communicate words, letters, and ideas to its audience is a valid alternate means of communication (Burch, 1997). ASL and NetWrite share the distinct characteristic of being non-verbally-based languages, and because of this shared property, they are similar in the ways that each use the given communication medium to decorate word choice.…”

“…When ASL users choose the appropriate words for a given context, it is not only the meaning of the word itself that is a factor but also the aesthetic of the hand movements that accompany the word, and its place in the overall flow of the conversation. In the tradition of Deaf poetry, language moves into the visual realm; hand movements, pauses, facial expressions and other visual factors must all be factored into the interpretation of the poem (Burch, 1997). Deaf poetry can only be adequately experienced visually, while NetWrite can only be adequately experienced on the screen.…”