Deaf Muse

I had to take a break from watching porn, to attend to a very vexing issue that is threatening to drive a wedge between the Deaf and deaf communities. Pots were thrown, plates were smashed, daggers drawn and sign language was dismissed a freaking lifestyle!

Watching erotic movies can be a very edifying experience, compared to trying to explain to deaf people, why Deaf can be a culture and using sign language is not a lifestyle! At least Deaf people can claim to have stopped dragging their knuckles on the ground and put their hand to good use.

What is this vexing issue that is threatening to tear asunder, the good relations between Deaf, deaf and hearing people? Deaf4Life forum is canvassing its members for a change in name, to broaden its appeal and make other deaf and hard of hearing, AND hearing people feel welcome.

Aiming to broaden the group’s appeal is great. Trying to encourage greater participation from people with all types of hearing loss and hearing people, is greater still. I, for one support that.

To encourage participation, inclusion and understanding is good.

To be fair, the forum moderators ASKED people to come up with possible names. You can read the thread here. However, the campaign quickly derailed, for a number of reasons, but all hinged on one term that was submitted: “Hearing Loss Forum”

I was aghast. Why do we keep going back to stereotypical and clichéd terms reminiscence of the knuckle dragging era of humanity? I will admit, that I get sick of the inclusion of the word Deaf in titles, unless I can put a positive spin on it or it serves a practical purpose. That’s why my blogs and websites are called Radio666fm, Visual Instincts, Deaf Muse, or Deaf Media Watch. I will even play around with the word order to change the emphasis, hence Deaf Professional Australians became Professional Deaf Australians.

Without detailing the exchange of words on, The Future of Deaf4Life and How You Can Help, Are There Any Deaf Left?, on Twitter, and we wait with abated breath for MM’s inimitable input, the irony is, the moderators of Deaf4Life have stated that people won’t join or participate because of the name Deaf4Life, and the people who have responded positively to, and voted for Hearing Loss Forum, risk alienating those who find that label rather negative.

More irony abounds in that Deaf people attract criticism for their positive use of the word Deaf with a  capital D, that dismisses it as being hung up on a label, but betray ignorance or just plain ignore the meanings that people attach to words and labels, and how and why people use them.

We may all have a “hearing loss” or different degrees of deafness, but that does not unite us as a community. For the simple reason that one group defines it as a culture as is united by various cultural practices, whereas the others are all hearing united by their differing degrees of deafness or hearing loss.

If you want to unite the groups, bring them together and bridge that great aural divide, then people need to accept the way we use labels to describe ourselves. That also applies to not only to the hearing loss brigade, whom I wish would stop dismissing our use of Deaf as politically correct, but also us Deafies who curl our lips at those who recoil at the term deaf.  If you want to create a space, online or offline, then the way to do this is to create positive names that will bring the groups together.

If as one said:

I don’t think there is anything negative in the phrase "Hearing Loss" as that is exactly what happened to me at birth, well in my Mom’s 3rd month of pregnancy in ’66, when the German Measles my Mother had took away a good portion of my hearing, so to quote another before me, my LOSS occurred during foetal development, and it is a loss that i suffered. And to take offence to that is, well, in my humble opinion, silly.

Does that mean men suffer female loss, because we all start of as female in the womb, and with the addition of the X chromosome, we become men? Does the reverse also apply, that woman suffer male loss because they don’t become men? After all, the ugly sexist reality is, women are regarded as inferior to men, and have been treated [and often still are] rather shabbily by society. So………..

And if the use of words like Deaf, deaf, deafened, hearing impaired, hard of hearing, partially hearing, cochlear implanted, CI’ers, etc., etc., etc.…. is considered being politically correct, isn’t it also being politically correct to expect that any Deaf space created online be inclusive of all Deafies and people with a hearing loss?

Quite frankly, why is there this overweening need to make all Deaf websites, forums, blogs, aggregators, and websites in cyberspace inclusive of every fucking member of the aural spectrum?

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We Are DEAF! GTF Over It.