Mitzi wrote
>
> Well, there's also the perception of impairment to
> contend with. I think many of us would argue that in
> a "deaf culture" situation, deaf people aren;t
> impaired (heck, *I'm* the one who was impaired the
> last time I was at a meeting where the majority of
> attendees were deaf, since I don't know any BSL.
I find this statement a little confusing Mitzi, and I hope my response
doesn't sound pedantic. A lot of people within "Deaf (big D culture", which
bares all the hallmarks of identity politics taken to the extremes that
Anita describes (and yes, Anita, this is what I meant), would see a deaf
(small d) person as impaired, and this is precisely how deaf people i.e.
people with impaired hearing who do not use sign language come to be
excluded from Deaf politics. It is a matter of ready-made 'identities' that
are supposedly there to be stepped into - something I've always been
sceptical about. Often the method of exclusion is in the form of access
given. So in that meeting you describe, if there was a failure to provide an
STT reporter or lip speaker (as there often is), then a deaf person would be
disabled BY THE EXCLUSIVE USE OF BSL. However, if a hearing person were in a
similar meeting, I think it is problematic to refer to their being
'disabled' by BSL use because this is to depoliticise disability by claiming
that everyone experiences it at some time or another when the fact is that
everybody doesn't. True, if you are a hearing person you could be regarded
by Deaf people as having a language impairment, but you most certainly
wouldn't be perceived as having a language impairment by those who oppress
both Deaf and disabled people. I feel it's really important to be clear
about the specific mechanisms of power that underline different forms of
oppression. So, when you say:
> What all three possibilities have in common is
> disablement--social exclusion, discrimination,
> maltreatment, etc.--and it's that disablement that we
> need to address from a social model perspective.
this perhaps misses the point I was trying to make, and which Anita (and
Mark Sherry in an earlier post on 'identity') put well. If disabled people
don't address these cross-impairment issues 'within', and their implications
not only for who 'speaks for' whom but also for who is prevented from
speaking for themself, how can we expect those 'without' to take
responsibility for oppression (social exclusion, discrimination,
maltreatment). It would worry me if someone who was already socialised into
the movement AND who demonstrated negative attitudes towards neurodiverse
people took it on themselves to 'speak for' neurodiverse people. (Of course
this usually translates as neurodiverse people not getting a voice at all,
which is one reason why neurodiverse people have become so prominent on this
list in recent years). But if that person had demonstrated that they had
substantively engaged with neurodiverse people to the extent that they were
able to have some understanding of neurodiverse people's perspectives on
disability, then there is a possibility for alliance. Personally, I prefer
alliances to 'speaking for', but the ideal position is always to empower
people to speak for themselves. I wish I could be, but I am not confident at
the present moment in time that the movement's political message is as
'common' or collective as it could be, insofar as this is possible, because
the rules of engagement across difference still leave a lot to be desired. I
also think that, in addition to being perpetually silenced, the groups of
people who feel excluded from the movement have another important thing in
common. They trouble disabled people's hard-won theories and practices in
very 'real' ways, and so they are seen as a threat to the unity of the
collective. But there's more than one way of arriving at unity...
Mairian Scott-Hill
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