Elements of Queer Theory deal with the social construct of gender; the post-modern belief that gender isn’t regulated to the possession of certain dangly bits, but to an abstract concept of self. Releasing gender from medical definitions derived from biological fact has a two-fold impact:
- Expanding the possible gender/biological combinations and enabling Genderqueer or Genderfuck
- Allowing other elements of medical fact to achieve abstract concept solidity
Disability as a Social Construct
The often very visual and starkness of disability precludes it from being a social construct in many people’s minds. For many disabled peoples, their disability defines them visually. Little people are shorter than average. Folks who can’t walk, wheel around. For non-visual elements of disability, the barriers created by the disability itself often trap the disabled within established medical boundaries. The deaf have different communication difficulties depending on their level of hearing loss. The autistic have different learning and social difficulties depending on the severity of their autism.
Although I’m considered disabled, my type of disability gives me only one perspective and I can’t presume to speak for disability as a whole. So, I’ll be focusing on the social constructs of deafness.
As referenced earlier, the medical definitions of deafness depend on the amount of measurable hearing loss. The level of hearing loss determines everything from schooling to intervention strategies to the type of hardware worn to counter hearing loss. The numbers are even used to create identity labels. Whether or not someone is
deaf, hard of hearing/hearing impaired, or late onset hard of hearing depends wholly on the level of loss coupled with the age of the loss itself. We all go deaf some time. The difference between me and some of my older readers is the age that I became deaf, the levels of my hearing loss, and the fact that my brain adapted to being deaf.
This brain adaption is the core of Deafness as a social rather than a medical construct.
Post-Modern Deafness
There are few neurological changes that happen when the brain is beset by deafness at a young age. There are many when the brain learns visual language at a young age. I’ll sum the latter below:
Changes to Memory
We’ll be starting with the premise that the two types of memory storage are short-term and long-term memory. The generally accepted expanse of working memory (short term) for English speaking peoples is 7 +/- 2 items. That gives people enough space to briefly memorize a phone number, or even 9 phone numbers, depending on whether the space is limited to individual numbers or individual objects (Phone numbers). For those who learn ASL as a child, the working memory expanse is only 5 +/-1 item. That doesn’t mean that those who use visual language have less memory overall, but that visual language requires more processing space in the brain. A computer music file is much smaller than a video one, isn’t it?
Changes to Attention Span
Those that use visual language have shorter attention spans than those who use spoken languages. This relates to the shorter working memory capacity of the visually language inclined. As working memory fills up, the ability to concentrate diminishes accordingly. The medically inclined often declare that the deaf are unable to pay attention because they’re deaf. The socially inclined say our brains are wired differently, so nyah.
Changes to Perception
The visual language inclined are able to shift attention and refocus at much faster rates. This shows up on scientific tests as better periphery vision. It also means that because those who use visual language are more dependant on visual cues for information. The brain has to bounce between many possible visual signals and filter them out for valid information. The visual world is infinitely more complex than the aural world, yeah?
Language as the Determining Factor
The neurological changes discussed above hand are fundamentally tied to the use of Visual Language. Most deaf people who learn visual language at a young age share these neurological elements. Oddly enough, hearing children who learn visual language also share the same neurological elements as their deaf counterparts. Scientific studies show that these hearing children can switch between visual and spoken language mental elements. Simply put, hearing children have both the spoken language 7 +/- 2 capacity and the 5 +/- 1 capacity in working memory depending on the language they’re using at any particular time.
If we tie this into Post Modern theory on language as a constructor of reality, then we can see how Deafness becomes a social construct rather than a biological one. By using the neurological changes as a result of visual language use as the indicator rather than the hearing loss, we can expand the label “Deaf” to all early adaptors of visual language.
Tying it all Together
If Deafness is wholly a social construct rather than a biological one, then the lack of access afforded to the deaf becomes a linguistic barrier rather than a medical one. Simply put, I don’t have access to radio, movies, and internet streaming because the choice of language is ignorant and limiting, and not because any part of me is broken in the medical sense of the word. There’s a moral imperative to provide accessibility to achieve social equity rather than to grudgingly accommodate a medical disorder.
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Comments
You say:
"If Deafness is wholly a social construct rather than a biological one"
"This brain adaption is the core of Deafness as a social rather than a medical construct."
Nevertheless, it seems to me that there is a non-negligible and undeniable biological, organic component to my poorly functional ears and your nonfunctional ones. How is it merely a "social construct"? Is it simply that one is "disabled" only as compared to others in society who establish a norm? In which case, I find this assertion to be tautological to the point of meaninglessness, to be perfectly frank; the fact that deafness is constructed socially doesn't negate its fundamental reality or its underlying organic fact.
"Simply put, I don’t have access to radio, movies, and internet streaming because the choice of language is ignorant and limiting, and not because any part of me is broken in the medical sense of the word. "
Yes, part of you, and part of me, is broken in the medical sense of the word. My cochleas do not function properly. You don't have access to those media because the apparatus for taking them in doesn't work right. Can you help clarify what am I missing here? I truly don't see how the fact that the world isn't saturated with sign language and subtitles is some damning statement of ignorance and inequality. It's a reflection of the fact that the vast majority haven't the faintest idea what it's like to be you or me, and couldn't anticipate our needs and provide us perfectly equal access even if they knew what that meant.
"There’s a moral imperative to provide accessibility to achieve social equity rather than to grudgingly accommodate a medical disorder."
What is the world obligated to do to meet our needs? How can it do more, realistically, than it's already doing? With, for example, gay rights, there's obviously things the world can be doing to improve social equity - structural, policy-based, easily defined things. But if my own mother occasionally forgets and speaks to me while facing away from me, how can society be expected to provide much more in the way of accommodation than it already is?
Maybe my own strategy of compensation and adaptation has served me too well, but I think the notion that society is obligated to bend over backwards to make itself indistinguishably acessable to us as it is to those with normal-range hearing is unrealistic to the point of absurdity.
As I read over my post, I realize it may take on an aggressive tone at times, and for that I apologize; I'm a tenacious debater and argue with passion, and my tone is emphasis, not one of contempt. I disagree, but I'm hoping to understand more about where you're coming from here.
As somebody who's struggled with and adapted to a society that's occasionally insensitive to my particular situation, I've got a lot of respect for LGBTQ people. I respect your struggle and sympathize with you a great deal. I get a taste of the buffet you must gorge on. I think your conflation of the struggles that the disabled face with those that you face implies a lot of respect. But I've got to disagree with you too, in a sense. We, I have to say, have it vastly easier than you. Even those with total disabilities - deafness, blindness, paraplegia, et cetera - deal with practical problems. Even the most avowed homophobe and bigot will speak louder for me; even the least conscious of my friends will graciously turn on the subtitles when we're watching TV. Those with disabilities are rarely treated with prejudice or hatred; if we're treated without sensitivity it's because people are embarrassed at their inability to help, or insecure about their physiological normalcy in comparison to your percieved deficit. We're not fighting against denied rights, we're fighting against denied access - access that's fundamentally not possible or less possible to those with disabilities. We're also working with the support of things like ADA, which already mandate accomodations that would be hard for the world at large to better.
So that, combined with the sheer number and scope of disabilities, makes our fight different than yours. We, I'm sorry to say, have the law and public sympathy on our sides. You don't. On the flipside, it really is possible for gays to be treated with perfect equality, given a change of heart in enough people. No amount of sympathy or consciousness or accommodation will make music accessible to Jon, or classes easy for me - even if it were reasonable or possible to expect that society at large could be conscious and responsive to the particular needs of every disabled person.
While far more deaf kids are born to deaf parents than queer kids to queer parents, we're nonetheless the two most common examples of children born to "other." We both routinely face parents who wish to be loving but who are hostile or even abusive out of ignorance. We both live in a culture where conforming to accepted norms is impossible or destructive.
Both deaf and queer people have, oyster-like, created a pearl of culture around the irritant of difference. Both live in a larger society almost universally incapable of distinguishing biological fact, behavioral expression, and cultural construct.
Sloppy language strikes me as part of the problem. Shifting to my personal side of my imagined double soapbox, when trying to communicate with the Earth people, I've sometimes found it helpful to deconstruct the noun "homosexual." Since there are arguably no such people, only homosexual behaviors, this points out the flaw in the underlying concepts. From there, it's not so hard to explain how Gay culture (a construct) doesn't necessarily coincide with gay people (i.e., those who commit homosexual acts).
Would you agree that, similarly, deafness (e.g., being born without eardrums) does not automatically imply Deafness (i.e., Bernard Bragg). I've known deaf people who aren't Deaf, just as I've known horny truckers with no gag reflex who most definitely were not Gay. I've eaten dinner watching Deaf people try to discuss this with others, and noted that deafness was the least of the communicative handicaps at the table.
Whatddayathink? I think I'm gonna go annoy some more people, telling them how to talk about me.
(This is why I routinely eat in a café where the tables are covered with paper and crayons are available, even though the food isn't all that great.)
I find this sort of deconstruction/analysis/interpreting stuff through the lens of academic theory to be intensely annoying and futile and tend to take the conclusions that come out of it not very seriously.
Right off the bat I can see that our true conflict is not ideological, but in a value-neutral discussion on the worth of the phenomenon (thing) noumenon (thing-in-itself). Since I was never a great student of Kant, I’ll substitute “tangible” for phenomenon, and “intangible” for noumenon.
Many people who prefer the tangible to the intangible don’t realize that the intangible provides a foundation for which the tangible can teeter about and get its face dirty. For example, mathematics is an intangible field, whereas physics is a tangible one. Physics relies extensively on mathematics and mathematics, unapplied, is worthless. To seize one over the other invalidates the uses of both. Some readers may be nickering and claiming that mathematics and physics are truly practical examples of the intangible and tangible. Math and physics gets us computers and cars. What does bloviating about disability and gender studies get us tangibly?
Here, you seem to briefly touch on what happens when we make tangible a lot of intangible abstract talk.
With, for example, gay rights, there's obviously things the world can be doing to improve social equity - structural, policy-based, easily defined things
The tangible aspects of the so-called hot air of disability, gender, and other studies are Policy Change. By understanding deafness and gender at the abstract level, we are better able to implement effective policy that is equitable and better applied.
Understanding the intangible aspects of Deafness will help you see how I’ve framed my argument that Deafness is a social construct rather than a medical one. Right now, we’ve, in Lorraine Berry’s words, allowed the enemies of disability to tell us what we are or are not. Our entire lives have been based on our ability to function in a hearing society. We’ve been sequestered and provided support and services depending on the degree of hearing loss. The argument on Deafness is not only framed by medical and biological fact, it’s been nailed, glued, then welded to the floor for good measure. This is evident in your own statement:
Yes, part of you, and part of me, is broken in the medical sense of the word. My cochleas do not function properly.
Damn skippy my cochleas are dead. However, that alone doesn’t make me Deaf any more than having a penis makes the Transgendered person a man. Here, we’re going to run up against the tangible and intangibles of social construction and biological fact.
Take the Transgendered woman. She is tangibly a man (biological fact) but she is intangibly a woman (social constructed fact). Because of her biological facts, she needs to be aware of many things that biological women do not – like prostate cancer, for example. These mundane biological factors don’t detract from the intangible truth that she’s fundamentally a woman.
Let me pull another example from Bryan. He writes
Since there are arguably no such people, only homosexual behaviors, this points out the flaw in the underlying concepts. From there, it's not so hard to explain how Gay culture (a construct) doesn't necessarily coincide with gay people (i.e., those who commit homosexual acts).
I’m going to go ahead and frame that within my own argument. Homosexuality doesn’t exist in a biological sense of the word. Sexual Attraction is a biological factor (tangible). Homosexuality is a social construct (intangible). Not everyone with sexual attraction to the same gender acts out on those biological impulses, and not everyone who engages in sexual behavior with members of the same sex have biological impulses to do so.
Bryan further distinguishes between behavior and biological fact, which parallels the ability to be biologically deaf, but not deaf within the boundaries of social construct. In our culture, the act itself, the homosexuality, is more abhorred than the actual biological attraction. I can make the argument that the same applies towards disability theory. Acting deaf is unacceptable and the prevailing thought is that those who are deaf should make themselves as hearing as possible.
Reframing the concept of Deafness isn’t an idea that’s popular even in the Deaf community because it attacks notions that have been ingrained in us through our entire lives. But, there is precedence with other forms of theory. I’ve already given examples.
Deafness, the social construct, focuses on the Visuocentric Brain – the brain that has been modified through the use of visual language. Using this concept, deafness isn’t limited to those who are biologically deaf, but also abled people who grew up using visual language. Understanding the social construct of deafness allows us to implement policy accordingly, from accessibility to educating the visuocentric brain.
Lets jump paradigms here.
You write that your experiences with abled people have been mostly positive:
Even the most avowed homophobe and bigot will speak louder for me; even the least conscious of my friends will graciously turn on the subtitles when we're watching TV. Those with disabilities are rarely treated with prejudice or hatred
That’s a pretty broad brush you paint there, but it is representative of your experiences. I’ve had similar experiences. Many of the people I interact with are avowed homophobes and racist to boot, but they’ll go out of their way to make sure that I’m accommodated to the best of their abilities. The fact that I’m a white male with the according privilege may help, but I think that much of their efforts have to do with their association with me. Simply by being around them, they’re made aware of my needs and my capabilities. I’d venture to say that these people don’t have GLBTQI or minority friends.
Some years ago, I was drinking with a fellow motorcycle rider. We had been friends for some months and were getting along nicely. During the course of our night, he began ranting about the Jews – the Jews this, the Jews that. Fuck the Jews. I listened patiently and nodded my head in all the right places. When he finished, I let him know that he was Jewish. Wha, guh? That was an educational moment for him. I never heard him talk bad about Jews again, at least not in front of me, and he continued to be my friend.
On the other hand, a few days ago, some asshole rolled his eyes, said “Nevermind”, and haughtily walked away from me once he found out that I was deaf and needed a bit of work to communicate with.
I’ve been fighting for access for long enough that I’ve met more people who needed to be educated about deaf rights than not. Your positive experiences may be a factor of many things. I can’t make assumptions about why you have them without more information. But, I’m pretty sure that for the most part, the Deaf are pretty pissed upon.
We're not fighting against denied rights, we're fighting against denied access - access that's fundamentally not possible or less possible to those with disabilities.
It wouldn’t do us good to get into an argument about the difference between access and rights. Is access a right? Are rights access? How many more times can I bounce around that question?
For me, access is a very simple thing. Non-accessible media is akin to hanging out a sign in front of a club saying “No Deaf Folks allowed.” If any business were to do that to women or minority races, you bet your hat and blue backpack they’d be sued into oblivion. But, it’s acceptable for media to discriminate against the deaf. If you flip back into the early days of my postings, you’ll see I waged a mini-campaign against the Broadsheet component of Mama OS. It absolutely blew my mind that journalists purporting to fight for the equality of women would discriminate against me in the process. When after a year of writing Broadsheet, I finally got response from the Editor. She gave me three reasons that Broadsheet wouldn’t make their media accessible.
* It would make the information redundant
* It would make the page look ugly
* They didn’t have the time or money to do it
See, being a feminist or being anti-racist is very easy to do. You just mouth platitudes that you’re against so-and-so oppression and badda-bing-badda-bam, you’re fighting the good fight. Maybe you’ll put some articles up on your blog and commiserate for a bit. But, being an activist for disabled rights requires people to do some actual fucking work, and that’s the dividing line for many.
That’s why I respect Lorraine Berry. She doesn’t just say she’s a feminist, she goes and does stuff for all the women in Africa. That’s ovaries , ya know?
At many points in your comments, you reference the ADA and how much accessibility is appropriate. I’ll parse one of them
I think the notion that society is obligated to bend over backwards to make itself indistinguishably accessible to us as it is to those with normal-range hearing is unrealistic to the point of absurdity.
The goal here isn’t indistinguishable accessibility, but reasonable and appropriate accessibility. There are times when I look at an accessibility claim and think it’s utter nonsense. I’ll post more on that another time. But, there are accessibility claims that are possible, reasonable, and morally right to perform. It is a moral impetus to make sure that deaf individuals have the same access to legal and medical care as hearing individuals. It is an ethically appropriate imperative to ensure that deaf individuals can access businesses using all conventional forms of communication (Those fuckers need to take Relay calls, yeah). It is just that Media provided for public consumption be made accessible through captioning, subtitles, or transcripts.
The ADA was written well before internet media became the hothouse it is today (isn’t that an inane statement?). I’ve been trying to work with my congressman to provide ideas on how we can make the internet accessible to the deaf within a reasonable construct. I don’t expect Joe Schmoe to make his Youtube video accessible to me. Some are willing to send transcripts to me when I ask for them, because they’re reasonable people and want more individuals to consume their media. Others are just assholes. But, I do expect the Syfy (Sci-Fi) to make their Hulu offerings accessible because they are an appropriately sized media company.