sethg@athena.mit.EDU ("Seth A. Gordon") (06/04/91)
STATEMENT OF PROBLEM A while back, there was some discussion on this list about gendered pronouns in English. As luck would have it, I happen to be studying American Sign Language, a language which has *no* gendered pronouns. (See Appendix B for details.) So when this issue came up, I wondered: is Deaf culture more sexist than mainstream American (Hearing) culture? If so, why? [Incidentally, if any of y'all out there know ASL or are trying to learn it, please send me e-mail ... we'll compare notes.] ("Deaf" with a capital "D" is used to refer to Deafness as a culture; "deaf" with a small "d" refers to the biological inability to hear.) MATERIALS AND METHODS I asked these questions to eight people: one of my ASL teachers, who is white, male, hearing, and has about ten years' experience signing; one white hearing woman who is in an interpreter-training program; two white deaf men; and five deaf women, two of them white and three of them Hispanic. RESULTS None of the people asked knew an ASL sign for "sexism"; I had to either fingerspell the word, or sign "sex" and fingerspell "i-s-m." One deaf woman and one deaf man did not know what "sexism" meant. I defined it for the woman by saying something in ASL like, "Suppose I believed that men should do all the work and women should stay home, cook, and take care of the kids. That would be sexism." (There is probably a way to define "sexism" in more abstract ASL terms, but I've only been studying the language since February, so I don't know how to do it.) The hearing woman that I surveyed defined it for the deaf man; I think she used a similar definition, but my comprehension skills aren't good enough to follow. My teacher said that Deaf culture is slightly less sexist than mainstream culture; he said this is because the majority of ASL interpreters are female, not because of the language. One of the deaf men said that Deaf culture was slightly less sexist *after* I explained that I was exploring the connection between the languages and the cultures; before this, he said they were equally sexist. One of the deaf women said that deaf culture was slightly less sexist, but didn't know why. The rest of the informants said that the two cultures are equally sexist. CONCLUSIONS Obviously, the sample size is small and biased, but I tentatively conclude that Deaf culture is about as sexist as mainstream culture. Since "sexist" is an emotionally loaded term, responses that Deaf culture is less sexist may simply reflect informants' bias toward that culture. If future research suggests that I should change this conclusion, I will, of course, post a correction. APPENDIX A Those of you who like to reflect on the connection between language and culture should consider this: In mainstream culture, deafness is a disability and a stigma (see Goffman, _Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity,_ 1967). In Deaf culture, however, deafness is treated as an ethnicity (see Barth, _Ethnic Groups and Boundaries,_ 1969). It has--in social-science jargon--"high identity salience." When I meet people who are using ASL, one of the first questions they will ask me is "Are you deaf?" Sometimes, they will want to know this *before* knowing my name. Within Deaf culture, "How did you become deaf?" is a perfectly acceptable getting-to-know-you question, in the same way that college students will ask one another, "What's your major?" Despite the importance of being deaf within the culture, there is no *syntactic* structure in ASL to distinguish between deaf and hearing people, in the same way that there is no syntactic structure in English to distinguish between black and white people. APPENDIX B American Sign Language has two grammatical features equivalent to English pronouns: localization and classifiers. Localization is the association of a region in space with a word or phrase, such that pointing to that region is equivalent to signing the word or phrase associated with it. They are not inflected in any way for gender. For example: suppose I sign "[my] father" and then point ninety degrees to my left. Later in the conversation, if I want to refer to my father again, I just have to point anywhere from sixty to a hundred and twenty degrees to my left. Fluent ASL signers can localize up to five different objects in a normal conversation (think of a CPU with five registers) without straining one another's memory. Classifiers are used to describe the relative position or motion of objects. They are not inflected for gender, but they are inflected in other ways. For example: make a fist, stick your thumb up, and stick your index and middle fingers forward (fingers spread). This is the "3-classifier," and it can refer to any land vehicle; the tip of the middle finger is the front of the vehicle. I can use the 3-classifier to describe a car race, a row of bicycles on a bike rack, or my (lack of) ability to follow an ASL conversation. If I use it to describe an airplane dogfight or a row of stationary houses, I am making a grammatical error. There are some gendered nouns in ASL; the signs "man," "woman," "boy," and "girl"; most signs denoting family members; and some explicit anatomical and sexual signs. Unlike in English, the signs for all professions are gender-neutral. Signed Exact English, an system for transliterating English into signs, does have explicit signs for "he" and "she." However, in actual conversation between Deaf people, these signs are almost never used; SEE is the COBOL of the Deaf community. -- "I am a socialist. I love humanity; I hate people." --E. St. Vincent Millay : bloom-beacon!athena.mit.edu!sethg / standard disclaimer : Seth Gordon / MIT Brnch., PO Box 53, Cambridge, MA 02139
sethg@athena.mit.EDU (06/04/91)
ERRATUM
>I asked these questions to eight people:...
^^^^^
For "eight", read "nine". Ahem.
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I can't stand intolerance.
: bloom-beacon!athena.mit.edu!sethg / standard disclaimer
: Seth Gordon / MIT Brnch., PO Box 53, Cambridge, MA 02139