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Contemporary Language Ideologies of American Sign Language Anya A Claremont Colleges Scholarship @ Claremont Scripps Senior Theses Scripps Student Scholarship 2014 An Ethnographic Inquiry: Contemporary Language Ideologies of American Sign Language Anya A. Leyhe Scripps College Recommended Citation Leyhe, Anya A., "An Ethnographic Inquiry: Contemporary Language Ideologies of American Sign Language" (2014). Scripps Senior Theses. Paper 473. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/scripps_theses/473 This Open Access Senior Thesis is brought to you for free and open access by the Scripps Student Scholarship at Scholarship @ Claremont. It has been accepted for inclusion in Scripps Senior Theses by an authorized administrator of Scholarship @ Claremont. For more information, please contact [email protected]. AN ETHNOGRAPHIC INQUIRY: CONTEMPORARY LANGUAGE IDEOLOGIES OF AMERICAN SIGN LANGUAGE by ANYA A. LEYHE SUBMITTED TO SCRIPPS COLLEGE IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE DEGREE OF BACHELOR OF ARTS SEO YOUNG PARK, SCRIPPS COLLEGE CLAUDIA STRAUSS, PITZER COLLEGE APRIL 25, 2013 TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION: ROADMAP TO LINGUISTIC IDEOLOGIES OF ASL……………3 Terminology Theoretical Perspectives Chapters Methods Positionality CHAPTER ONE: THE INTERSECTIONAL POSITION OF ASL…………….………29 ASLs Position from Evolution to Colonialism, and Colonialism to Nationalism Signers, Who Are They? (In)visibility and (Un)awareness Prestige CHAPTER TWO: POPULAR CULTURE REPRESENTATIONS OF ASL…………...61 Representations of American Sign Language in Contemporary Popular Media Mainstream Success Paradox of Success Trivialization of Sign on the Global Stage CHAPTER THREE: ASL LEARNERS’ MOTIVATIONS TO STUDY SIGN………...89 How People Learn ASL: Meetup Motivations and Methods of Hearing People to Learn ASL Motivations of People who are D/deaf to Learn ASL Family Dynamics in Motivations to Learn ASL CHAPTER FOUR: IMPLICATIONS OF ASL PRACTICE…………………….…….111 Discrete Worlds, Bridge Builders, And Assimilation Commoditizing ASL From Machines To Appropriation CONCLUSION…………………………………………………………………………132 Technology and the future of ASL 3 INTRODUCTION Roadmap to Linguistic Ideologies of ASL Language has fundamentally three roles in bonding a group of speakers to one another and to their culture. It is a symbol of social identity, a medium of social interaction, and a store of cultural knowledge. Lane, Hoffmeister, and Bahan 1996:97 Introduction: Roadmap To Linguistic Ideologies of ASL 4 A pump expands and contracts while cords vibrate in staccato and chop an even flow into audible pauses to be pulled and released. Particles vibrate, jumping and dancing, compressing into slinky piles that shove each other along, relaxing into spread out refractions. Articulators control the power of this process and make sound. In order to hear it, your ear must funnel sound waves into the inner ear, sense fluctuations in air pressure, and finally translate these oscillations into an electrical signal that your brain will understand. On a daily basis, animals utilize their auditory senses to receive messages through waves of vibration. Humans have developed complex systems of meaning by manipulating articulators—tongue, cheek, palate, lips—to produce auditory language, assigning arbitrary sounds to particular meanings (Saussure 1916; Gentilucci et al. 2006). Manual languages, like American Sign Language (ASL), also convey complex systems of meaning through gestural signs (Frishberg 1975). This noiseless transmission of messages serves those who are hard of hearing (HOH) or deaf, which generally refers to people who do not have one hundred percent audiometric hearing because something blocks the process of receiving sound. Deafness is also a cultural construction. As I will explain in this paper, deafness through the cultural tool of a sign language becomes a positive, enriching, even defining, part of one’s identity, cultural membership, and community rather than a failure or disability of the body. That said, signed languages also appeal to those with the ability to hear. Many who are motivated to learn ASL are hearing. Since the majority of Americans are not deaf, hearing culture is an unmarked norm, a default identity one automatically earns (or is subjected to) regardless of their Introduction: Roadmap To Linguistic Ideologies of ASL 5 membership in other subcultures. As a hearing woman who became a teacher’s aid in a special education classroom for deaf students, Mary, illustrates the pervasiveness of hearing culture, expressing that she “never thought about [being hearing]. It was just normal.” Robert, a professional disability advocate, refers to the way mainstream hearing America handles deafness as a medical challenge. He says, for deaf people “70% of your parents are hearing, the only person that was deaf was crazy uncle Joe. And then your babies are born deaf and you have a bunch of people sittin’ around you in white coats, sayin,’ ‘well what do you do?’” Medicalizing deafness constructs it as a problem to be solved, rather than cultural capital to be gained. This clinical treatment stigmatizes and overshadows symbolic wealth of Deaf communities. April, a 47-year-old woman, has described herself as deaf since thirteen. From an early age, April was trained to read lips and vocalize clearly. She began learning American Sign Language two years ago. Not until then did she become incorporated into the Deaf community, what she now identifies as another indigenous or native culture. As of spring 2014, April is on track to earn a bachelor’s degree in ASL and English. In this introductory section, I aim to present the topic of ASL and its popularization, especially amongst hearing people. Here, I hope to ease into an eventually complex and contradictory discussion on language ideologies (ideas and objectives an individual or group holds concerning roles of language in society) surrounding ASL. This roadmap foreshadows what you will read in order to contextualize the discourse on ASL by operationalizing several key terms, introducing particularly relevant theoretical work in a selective literature review, explaining my methodological approach, and rendering transparent my positionality and limitations. Introduction: Roadmap To Linguistic Ideologies of ASL 6 American Sign Language serves as a unique cultural asset to the Deaf community. So then what happens when hearing people attempt to learn ASL? As a beginning student of ASL myself, I endeavor to find out who is entitled to learn Sign Language, how and why, to explore the controversy I discovered concerning the way hearing Signers use ASL. I argue that there is a general consensus that ASL has earned a certain “cool factor;” it is trending in mainstream United States English-language society, making a guest appearance as fad, relishing in an ethnolinguistic renaissance. All my interviewees agreed that hearing people learning Sign is a positive phenomenon. Hearing ASLers with whom I spoke viewed themselves as apolitical users curious about ASL and Deaf culture, motivated to express themselves creatively and build connections between communities. However, my informants, Deaf and hearing alike, persistently critiqued the motives and practice of other hearing Signers. They displayed concern for the status of ASL in mainstream hearing society as invisible, worrying that it is being colonized through commodification and cultural appropriation. Hearing people learning ASL in our highly interconnected and technological society popularize the language, as do natives of the D/deaf community. However, according to ASL natives, not everyone is entitled to learn and use ASL without regard for how their engagement of Sign risks reconstituting power structures that reify a hierarchy of the mainstream hearing world as imperial over the subordinated Deaf world. In this paper, I hope reveal the position of ASL in mainstream popular culture to show who is using sign language, what motivates them to learn and practice the language, how they use it, and what they can (or do) accomplish by signing. Specifically, it is my Introduction: Roadmap To Linguistic Ideologies of ASL 7 goal to understand why so many hearing people are learning Sign Language. Throughout the paper, I share perspectives of many students of ASL to discover “extralinguistic realities…the social variables, attitudes about language, etc. that affect language use” of Sign (Woodward 1972:1). Terminology The meanings of words and phrases are not codified; they are constantly under construction and reconstruction. Meanings are not completely consistent or universal. Therefore, it is especially important for me to clarify the meanings of several words and phrases that I use before I continue with a discussion of ASLs place in hearing culture so that readers understand the ideas behind socially conscious diction I have chosen. This is a significant necessity specifically for this paper because it concerns language, language use, and people’s thoughts about language. First, I will establish what I mean by culture. As an anthropology major, I constantly keep Clifford Geertz’ Interpretation Of Cultures (1973) in mind ever since I was inspired by his work in my introductory class. He defines culture as “an historically transmitted pattern of meanings embodied in symbols, a system of inherited conceptions expressed in symbolic forms by means of which men communicate, perpetuate, and develop their knowledge about and their attitudes toward life” (Geertz 1973a:89). Geertz takes inspiration from anthropologist Max Weber “that man is an animal suspended in webs of significance
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