Thursday, 19 December 2024

There Is No Real Question

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:

  1. "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.

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  2. 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

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  3. "We can make him better, we have the technology". But you'll have to do the sound effects yourself.

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