Deaf rappers who lay down rhymes in sign languages are changing what it means for music to be heard
Dip hop is one of many styles of rap that have developed over the years. But it stands apart from other subgenres of hip-hop because rappers lay down rhymes in sign languages and craft music informed by their cultural experiences within the #Deaf community.
An American friend of mine, Alex (not their real name), just got accepted into an OT Master's program in England. Alex is #Deaf and #ActuallyAutistic. Alex has an extremely large number of barriers being multiply disabled, living in poverty, etc. This university has even arranged for interpreters to be provided for them.
However, the UK is refusing Alex a visa on the grounds that Alex's passport gender marker says X. That is the whole reason.
Alex was homeless in the US for 15 years, until very recently. There are very few options to survive in America for disabled people, especially those who need language access. This is the best opportunity they've had since I've known them.
Can anyone help or suggest places that can? Alex's only recourse right now is to try to defer a year and change their passport to a binary gender option at great cost. This is such a trivial, transphobic reason to lose such an amazing opportunity and chance at safety.
When making video media, stop fucking censoring your captions when you don't censor your voice. It is unbelievably shitty to #Deaf and #HoH communities and just generally horrific #accessibility practices.
I don't give a fuck about your video being demonitized. I don't care about your video being hidden. If you say "fuck" your captions should say "fuck", not "fudge" or "frick". If you can't do this extremely simple thing, don't swear or don't make it, I guarantee your video is not that important.
It is such a simple thing to do. People who rely on captions shouldn't get your censored information just because you care about them so little that the pennies you'll get from YouTube are more important than accessibility as a whole.
Profoundly #deaf man awarded £50K after mistreatment by job centre staff
‘Although he had not met him and knew little of his background, the official advised colleagues that Rimmer’s deafness was not a significant barrier to work and suggested his complaints about lack of deaf-friendly support were a way of trying to wilfully “sabotage” efforts to help him find a job.’
‘As you go about your business – shopping, walking, playing a sport, riding a subway – someone may notice that glint of silver behind your ear, or that almost-imperceptible plastic wire entering the pinna…’
And this is when the magic happens. The fact someone can see your hearing aid makes you an advocate for addressing your hearing loss.
Do #deaf kids today have a better experience than I did going to a mainstream UK state comprehensive school?
I wanted to think so.
But the statistics are not as good as I’d hoped…
78% of deaf children in the UK attend mainstream schools where they may be the only deaf child.
6% of deaf children attend mainstream schools with resource provisions –
a resource provision provides specialist support to deaf children as part of a mainstream school.
"I am a CODA, a child of a deaf adult, which, I guess, makes my mother a COHA, a child of a hearing adult. Two actually," says stand-up comedian and writer Moshe Kasher in his new book, "Subculture Vulture." LitHub has published this extract, in which Kasher discusses deaf history, language and education. "The decisions of people with zero experience in the deaf world, who have never really thought about deafness in any way, shape the future of the deaf, again and again," he writes.
#Doctors and #Therapists, who work with #Disabled people. Let me put it to you straight. You don't know shit about the disabled experience. No matter how many degrees you have. No matter how many classes you've taken or how many books you've read, acting like you do automatically makes you the asshole. Until you're #Blind, or in a #Wheelchair, or #Deaf, or in #CronicPain or even have mental disabilities like crippling #Anxiety or #ADHD or anything that can be mentioned, you can't say you know what you're doing and how to help when you don't so actually take the time to listen to the people you are sworn to take care of under oath and show some human empathy and because you're doctors you're held to the highest standard. There is no excuse as a doctor not to believe your people and not to do everything within your power, even if you have to bend the rules slightly to make sure your patients get taken care of to the highest degree and anything below that and you've failed.
Sat down to watch A Sign of Affection today. Every time I see a series highly recommended that features disabled people, especially a romance, my defenses go up. I have seen far too often that abled people thinking they mean well tell stories other abled people enjoy and that those of us with said disabilities despise with how we're represented.
Not going to lie, I see some red flags here in terms of tropes being used that deaf folks have mentioned. I'll make a thread here to go into some details to watch out for for those interested, but encourage people specifically to learn from deaf folks in particular on the subject outside of anime.
With this in mind, not everything here is terrible. There are absolutely parts of this show that deserve praise as disability representation. It's just very much messy as many stories like it are.
The irony is that the story presented in the silent medium that is the original manga is probably EXTREMELY better as representation than the show can ever be. That making this show into an anime without having the guts to really make bold decisions makes it the worse adaptation. It makes it so all the little red flags you might ignore otherwise are that much more noticeable.
So yeah... This show is going to go on to be a massive success probably. Be absolutely loved by folks. Because if I know anything about people trying to educate abled folks from disabled perspectives, people want to ignore folks "being downers" and just wanna enjoy the stuff they watch uncritically, not realizing how it will affect real lives. This is how abled folks want disabled folks to act, so seeing it positively put in front of them on a screen is going to reaffirm those beliefs hard while being a comfort in a sick way.
There's no way I'm going to be able to enjoy this show. It's going to hurt watching abled friends and colleagues in the anime space deeply love what they're watching, affirming no matter how much they espouse allyship, they have so much more to do and grow before having true solidarity with disabled people.
It's already been so damn hard seeing this from the Covid pandemic in general. Having it shoved in my face in everyday life. Seeing it in my happy place, a space where I tend to escape for enjoyment... That's gonna suck.
I think it's time for me to drop this show. No point in even continuing to watch it purely to write an essay on it later. Especially since I suspect if I could even get said essay published anywhere, I'd be attacked beyond belief because abled people wanting comfort in their ableism can be really horrifying from experience.
Just blegh. Disabled folks deserve better. We should be given the opportunities to tell our own stories. Abled folks should stop being praised for doing the bare minimum with their works and still fucking up royally. But we don't live in a world where that's gonna happen in my lifetime.
I GOT IT! I know why A Sign of Affection has such bad vibes! If you're abled and reading this, you're going to feel uncomfortable. Don't let cognitive dissonance kick in, really try to absorb this.
This show is for abled people to be voyeuristic about living as a disabled person.
This show is made so abled folks can imagine a little bit what being deaf must be like. To feel like they "get it" when they have absolutely no clue.
This show is made so abled folks can engage in empathy only to feel better about themselves, to feel morally superior to others without having to practice self reflection. The kind of empathy that does not lead to active compassion.
So much of the show's praise so far has come from how good the audiovisual work on the show is. Like in the first episode, as things turn to focus on Yuki's perspective, the background sounds and music become quiet, sometimes just becoming white noise. Or when she cannot lip read what someone is saying, the audience can't hear the voice acting in the show.
Ya know what's interesting about all these things? They're all praised as being amazing ways to represent deafness in the main character, to allow someone to experience a bit of what their life must be like, while not doing a damn thing for someone profoundly deaf.
Can you imagine how many people would deem this show unwatchable if the creators made the bold decision to make it completely silent, only providing subtitles? If someone like Yuki in the show, who is confirmed to be 100% unable to hear this show were to watch it, that's how she'd experience it. So why isn't it made in that way if the idea is to give people a true taste of what her experience is like?
The answer is that this is made to be entertainment for abled people, hearing people, not for the people it is supposedly representation for. It's made so people can say, "Wow, it's awesome we have an anime with a deaf protagonist presented pretty realistically" while the show gets so many things wrong, especially how lipreading works.
The show is representation the way abled folks want to imagine it should be, not in ways that are realistic or grounded in actual deaf people's experiences. Abled folks can do all the research they want, they will never be able to craft a story that truly captures our perspectives. ESPECIALLY if the goal is to make something marketable to abled folks. Which is how you get A Sign of Affection green lit as an anime. It's not offensive to abled sensibilities and will be just enough inspiration porn (a disabled person finding love with a "normal" guy while striving to live in "normal" society instead of embracing deaf society and culture) while getting a few things right that people will overlook it because they not only don't know better, they won't choose to learn so they can know better after watching.
Vibrating haptic suits give deaf people a new way to feel live music (www.npr.org)
To celebrate Disability Pride Month, Music: Not Impossible brought vibrating haptic suits to a Lincoln Center dance party.