Like most hearing parents of deaf children, my first close relationship with a deaf person was with my child. Despite a relatively broad cultural education, I knew next to nothing about hearing loss or deaf culture. What little I had absorbed was an incomplete and almost entirely inaccurate patchwork of pop culture snippets – the mother’s horror when her baby doesn’t react to the fire engine’s siren in the film Mr Holland’s Opus (1995); Beethoven’s struggle to hear the first performance of his Ninth Symphony; the lift scene in Jerry Maguire (1996) where the loving boyfriend signs “you complete me” to his partner; Quasimodo’s apparent industrial deafness from the bells of Notre-Dame; and, worst of all, the appalling memory of my university housemate imitating a deaf accent for laughs.
This woman's dilemma is whether or not to put her child under the knife to install a cochlear implant that would allw them to hear. Why is this even a dilemma?
But what I had experienced as a genuinely caring, evidence-based and pragmatic attempt to empower deaf children and give them the widest set of options had been singled out as an example of “audism” by influential deaf and deaf-adjacent critics – a sinister assimilationist model with paternalistic colonial overtones and a complicated history.
Ah. Yes. The nutters...
Not only was it inaccurate (no hearing technology makes hearing easy or natural for deaf people), but it spoke of, at best, a normative desire to correct or fix something that was not in their view broken – only different.
Humans should be born with functional hearing - if they aren't, then it's a defect. Not a sign that they are part of a community with its own culture.
5 comments:
"But Pakistan's cultural mores aren't our problem to fix" Unfortunately that's where you're wrong. Pakistan's culture - indeed the culture of representatives of the Umma (all 4.5 million of them) over here - is now our problem. Its effects spread like a nasty smog over everything in this country.
Go shopping in what was until recently the white, middle class North London I moved to over half my life ago and you could be in downtown Karachi. I say to myself that this can't last, that the English will wake up and reassert themselves but we've been betrayed by our political class and the Blob. I fear that it really is too late.
Wow! What a pile of left wing, woke garbage. I often say 'Poor kid doesn't stand a chance', when I see a child of lefty or woke parents, but this poor kid is also going to suffer a disability because of it
It's criminal, or SHOULD be.
Yes, it is far too late.
"We can make him better, we have the technology". But you'll have to do the sound effects yourself.
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