Thanks to the COM352 students for contributing a bunch of new pages! I'll be moving these pages into the main area of the wiki soon.

From UMassWiki

Disability comes in all shapes, sizes, modes, and effects. There are legally-recognized versions, emotional varieties, and indeterminate cognitive and psychiatric manifestations that interfere with intimate relationships and social interactions. People look at me and see a woman with a mullet who appears physically fit. What do they know? No, I don’t meet the federal criteria of “impairment of a major life function” (Americans with Disabilities Act 1990). I can breathe, walk, grasp, talk, feel, think, and otherwise function within the range of physicality deemed normal. Who decided to limit “normal” and impose such a measure for judging character or the potential worth of one’s contributions to society? Individuals will not claim responsibility, of course. Such boundaries and markers of difference are established ‘out there’ by impersonal forces of culture. The representations are propagated through the media, religion, and a disturbing range of incidental, informal taboos and negative sanctions. Questioning these norms is often considered problematic, disruptive, or unpleasant. When I do wonder about the so-called normal, people situate me clearly: I am deviant.

Fitting few standard stereotypes, I have learned to live through language. Sentiments not spoken affected me first. Often, the untold still wounds me. The silence of non-recognition echoes in words I hear and reverberates in perceptions left unsaid. The speech of my family was self-focused and therefore distancing, functional not relational, unaware and unreflective. My parents opposed each other on gender's fulcrum: mom never swore, dad often did. Anger was the palpable emotion of my formative years. I checked out, merely passing as present. When I woke up, twenty-seven years of my life were gone. How can one speak from pain without blame? I yearned a language I did not know.

I needed words I could feel, a language that would bring me into my body. I sought belonging among lesbian communities and found that we were not much better at handling distinction than the dominant heterosexual society was at accepting us. Our bodies, full of longing, could not manage questions of dis/ability: our own aesthetics, potentials, possibilities. What is valuable if the body itself is constrained? I have never consistently been able. I fail much more frequently than I succeed. I celebrate small triumphs with all the gusto of athletic championships. Why not?! Yet I notice how the smallest movements can invoke urgency, feeding speed, haste, a rush to . . . where? Meaning constructed by assumption, cues missed, opportunities lost: wisdom becomes elusive. How much have I learned from friends' contemplating solitary visual horizons, or analyzing power’s most intimate nuances? Stillness inspires depth. I lament how long it has taken me to learn to enjoy listening for its own sake.

I cannot explain the random movement of the universe (or the privileges of being white and middle-class) that brought me into contact with Deaf people and American Sign Language. I discovered my own emotions, investigating the boundaries of my expressive capacities. I spent years training to interpret others’ words, to translate their meanings into sensibility for those who could not see. This practice, of sensing and conveying the intellectual and emotional meanings of others, prepared the ground for me to expand my range. Through this visual-gestural language I excavated buried wounds and static ambitions. The embodied kinesthetics of signing ASL allowed access to hidden and repressed parts of myself.

Through friendships, relationships, teaching and parenting I have observed the effect of words to inspire or deaden, enliven or thwart, create or sunder meaningful relationships. Uttered words (signed or spoken) leave their imprint yet vanish into insubstantial memory. Written down, words are a commitment. I mean this, right now. Writing was not, at first, something I felt called to do. It does not come easily, as signing usually does. The labor of compressing four-dimensional geometrical perception into one-dimensional linear text remains a challenge. I practice daily. When I write, I feel the energy of my being streaming out into the world. I am here. I matter. I want to make a difference. I care.

I sign to know myself. I write to live.