"Hard of Hearing" in a Deaf World

I thought I should mention this because it's such a great illustration of the social model of disability: the idea that the structures and methods created by the dominant majority, abled people, create the handicap experienced by disabled people and that disability exists in the intersection rather than in the individual.

For those who don't know, I have a movement disorder which causes me to experience tics and spasms including in my eyes, eyelids, and neck. This makes looking at things at length difficult.

This week is my first week of instruction and yesterday I had my first introductory ASL class. Our teacher is Deaf and, in order to go over the course material and green sheet in a way that we would be able to understand, she was speaking though an interpreter. I have a little bit of knowledge about sign language so I was focusing on her pretty intensely, seeing how much of what she was saying I could understand without the terp.

Turns out, my difficulty regarding my eyes caused me to miss a tremendous amount of what she was saying in terms of me not seeing her signs due to either compulsively looking elsewhere or though having my eyes clamped shut/fluttering.

So I thought to myself: In a Deaf world, I'm handicapped.

This is all very basic and rather 101 in terms of disability rights. Nonetheless, the illustration is pretty cool.

For those who are wondering: Yes, I'm still following though with trying to learn ASL, it's a language that I've wanted to learn for quite some time. The professor is being very accommodating so I think I'll do just fine. Once I start to get a grasp on the use of ASL I'm hoping that my predictive language abilities will help me fill in the gaps for the words I miss.