Deaf U

OK so I will watch this TODAY.

Maybe it will help make up for what happened to Ryan in Black Summer. Red shirts and difference as ‘dead end’. They have to kill you, cure you or drop a helicopter on you [1]. But alongside what happens on screen – as deaf audience – you don’t get the option of overlooking the ways that the platform allows you to exist / not exist as deaf – because captions come and go and you just get blinked out. Like when you get blinked out by a VLE that does not have auto-captions – blinked out of conferences, blinked out of seminars and networks. I have deaf colleagues who are now expected to teach classes of masked students. I don’t think I can even begin to explain how ‘Jacob’s Ladder‘ that idea is. My guess is that I would be digging a pointless, painful hole in myself to ask how it feels and what it costs to participate in a network or a community, that is poised to erase your capacity to participate at any time, quick as a flicked switch. Weirdly – it also feels redundant given that a lot of (relatively normate) academics sound like they feel like that anyway: Like they are dangling by a finger tip grip over the edge of visibility, kicking away and working through the weekend.

I write more often about representation at a textual level than representation/construction as an aspect of hardware/software/social practice. It’s a choice, not an oversight. Being deaf comes with frequent reminders – at a platform, apparatus, textual and social level – that you can be dumped overboard at any point and the ship-of-normals will sail merrily on [2] – sometimes with somebody ‘nice’ waving goodbye and offering to send you a transcript or something. You don’t get the option of taking it for granted. I don’t know what the answer is, but reading my experience through your experience is not it (and I’m not pretending that deaf experience is ‘one thing’). On the upside – there’s Connie in The Walking Dead. This might be the only time I’ve ever seen someone’s family/community actually look like they’ve adapted in part to sign. Rather than one of the hearing people taking on the ‘burden’ of interpretation (because aw, they are so “nice”) it’s just part of how the group communicate. They evolved! A group of fictional hearing people can learn to sign when their lives depend on it – but it is also unusual because the deaf character is not being constantly shoved to the group’s margins by sight lines/onscreen space. Compared to Ryan in Black Summer, or The Quiet Place where I felt like a deaf person watching a deaf person looking through the eyes of a hearing person who kept looking in the wrong place.

[1] EG. The red shirt reference is a Star Trek thing. The helicopter thing – Romano in ER. The cure thing – e.g. Gil Grissom in CSI.

[2] See this paper for an example.

PS – I think Black Summer was good – like an antidote to whatever Z Nation had turned into.

For more on Audiences and death by difference : Cavalcante A. Affect, emotion, and media audiences: the case of resilient reception. Media, Culture & Society. 2018;40(8):1186-1201. doi:10.1177/0163443718781991