Lydia Callis, signed language interpreter for New York City’s Mayor Bloomberg, is getting a lot of attention these days for her interpreting during Hurricane Sandy. She’s been spoofed on Chelsea Handler’s show, she has Tumblrs dedicated to her, , and she’s even been named  Hot Slut of the Day by Dlisted. Why all the attention? Is it because she’s an attractive woman doing something “exotic” with her hands? Or is it [...]

Mansplaining has now become mainstream  – that phenomenon of an arrogant man explaining what he thinks he knows about a subject to a woman who knows more than he does about the subject. Or as writer Rebecca Solnit notes, the “intersection between overconfidence and cluelessness where some portion of (the male) gender gets stuck.” I’ve experienced my share of mansplaining, but in one of my lines of work, I get a different [...]

  The conventions behind name signs and naming are well known to members of the deaf community: what gets to be a name sign, who can give another person a name sign, when name signs are used and how to adjudicate duplicate name sign use in a local community, are just some of these cultural standards. There are conventions (past and present) about signing in public. In the past, before [...]

  He has selective hearing. People say this a lot about hard of hearing folk. Wives chide their husbands with this bon mot; parents do the same with their teenagers, who hear the vibration of their pagers in noisy rooms, but miss repeated requests to take out the trash. I’m interested in another phenomenon: selective mutism. There are deaf and hard of hearing people with clear speech who opt not [...]

  I work in an environment where one’s intellect is often a proxy for self-worth. I’m not endorsing this view, mind you, but it is hard to escape it. Deaf and hard of hearing people have a special version of this: what I call the ‘smart for deaf’ version. That is, we acknowledge that there is just no way we’ll be able to get all of the information that hearing people [...]

  Last week I went to see a silent movie. Well, truth be told, most movies I watch are “silent” – at least for me. I’d rather watch a captioned flick on my Macbook than watch a movie with hearing aid sound and floating captions on a weird bendy pipe arm, but that’s just me. Last November my mother sent me a link to a NYT review of a movie [...]

I’ve spent my whole life among people who use English as a second language. Most are Spanish speakers who learned English as a second language; others spoke Arabic or German first, then added English. Signing came later – I was 18 when I first met people who signed, and 19 when I started signing myself. I grew up where bilingualism was not rare.  In our world, the goal was communication.  [...]

I was probably born hearing, but I don’t remember any of it. The cooing of mourning doves in the morning is my only non-hearing-aid-assisted auditory memory. When I was very young, before I was old enough to start school, I heard the birds. I remember the dappled early morning sunshine on my walls, looking at the sky through the window high above my bed, and hearing the coo of the [...]

Unless you’ve been under a rock this week, you’ve probably seen this week’s troubling stories about gay teens committing suicide.  The deaths of Rutgers University freshman Tyler Clementi, Asher Brown from a small town just outside Houston, Texas, and Seth Walsh in Tehachapi, California have haunted my thoughts this week. Watching Seth Walsh’s sister’s Youtube clip made before her brother died  -while she still had hope that he would live- [...]

Hello readers!  It has been a long time, hasn’t it? Three cheers to administrators Bobby, Adam, and Chris for rising like the phoenix from the ashes of DeafDC to give us Deaf Echo.  I’m humbled to be invited to blog along, and grateful for another chance to engage in deaf community discourse. Another chance? Yes, another chance. You see, I have high hopes (because I am an optimist by nature). [...]