Deaf Man Research Articles

‘A normal life’: Karel Tuytschaever on the dramas of Easy Tiger

In this interview, actor–director Karel Tuytschaever and I examine his first feature film, a critical-creative project entitled Easy Tiger (2022). In it, the meeting between a psychologist (Mickaël Pelissier) and his client (Casper Wubbolts), a deaf man, proves revelatory for them both. The client speaks of a dying man with whom he was deeply in love, which leads him to explore his feelings about the possibility of finding true love. These confessions prompt the psychologist to re-evaluate his relationship with himself and with the world. Tuytschaever and I discuss how he brings together his roles as a director, an actor and an academic, before examining the film and how he communicates his complex vision with us and with his actors. Much of the film involves stillness, and it unfolds in silence. We discuss how Tuytschaever speaks volumes with it, making the film of significant interest for both hearing and other/non-hearing people. Easy Tiger received an Honorable Mention as Indie Feature Film in the Paris Film Awards; and it has earned Best Queer, Best Directing and Best International Film awards at the SENSEI FilmFest. This interview advances scholarship by introducing us to Tuytschaever’s critical work and by examining how it informs his artistic project.

What Jesus Did, Does and May Do in Future: Gospel Miracles, Human Augmentation, Transhumanism and the Future of New Testament Studies

The quest of New Testament studies for a well-resourced future would be substantially aided by its explicit abandonment of a narrow methodological focus in favour of building links with other disciplines and by its acknowledgment that exegetical insights may arise from examining the impact of biblical texts down the centuries. In the potential appropriation of Jesus by Christian transhumanists interested in human bodily enhancement, for example, the healings of his earthly ministry are ignored because they are understood to restore human bodies to a previous form (a position recognizable in much of New Testament scholarship) rather than augment them to a new one. Building on deaf nineteenth-century interpretations which see the mental abilities of the deaf man in Mk 7.32-37 as being enhanced beyond human norms by Jesus, this article examines the healings of three blind men (Mk 8.22-26, Mk 10.46-52 and Jn 9.1-41). While the Johannine blind man is explicitly said to be blind from birth (whatever New Testament translations have often been made to say!), this article proposes that Blind Bartimaeus in Mk 10 should also be viewed this way. While their becoming sighted restores them to a common human pattern, their lack of prior sighted-experience means that it is their ability to see instantly that strongly implies the presence of an augmentative element to their healings. A postscript notes the different attitudes to the permission required to transform the human body within these narratives and suggests transhumanists consider the ethical implications of each story carefully before they incorporate the earthly Jesus into their arguments.

Deafness, Gesture, and Sign Language in the 18th Century French Philosophy by Josef Fulka

Reviewed by: Deafness, Gesture, and Sign Language in the 18th Century French Philosophy by Josef Fulka Edna Edith Sayers (bio) Fulka, Josef. 2020. Deafness, Gesture, and Sign Language in the 18th Century French Philosophy. Vol. 8 in the Gesture Studies series, edited by Adam Kendon. Amsterdam/Philadelphia: John Benjamins (174 pp., $135, hardbound ISBN 978-9027205-03-2; ebook ISBN 978-9027261-48-9). How familiar are you, really, with the philosophy of the French Enlightenment that informed the thought of Épée and Sicard? Could you characterize the era's intense interest in language, its origin, and its role in human thought processes? Are you confident discussing the work of Condillac, which so decisively influenced Sicard, or that of Joseph Marie de Gérando, who used the evidence of deaf education to argue against Rousseau but that has never been available in English translation? Well, join the club: me neither. And we're in good company, because neither was Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet, who studied under Sicard and another Condillac disciple, the Scottish philosopher Thomas Brown, yet scorned to expose himself to the writing of any French Enlightenment philosophe on the grounds that all these men were infidels! But now, no more excuses, because we have a terrific new book that goes a long way toward repairing this weak point in our understanding of the philosophical roots of our disciplines: Josef Fulka's Deafness, Gesture and Sign Language in the 18th Century French Philosophy. Despite its rather pedestrian title, Fulka's summaries and explanations are so engaging, lively, and accessible that I read every single footnote and was sorry when I finally had nothing left to read and had to put the book down. And that's amazing, because, clearly, English is not the man's native language. Yet Fulka, who teaches deaf studies in the Czech Republic, appears to be perfectly at home not only in English, but also in French (he provides fresh translations of [End Page 496] Gérando and others) and, presumably, any number of sign languages, as he makes informed statements concerning home signs, methodical signs, contact signing, and natural sign languages. There is one recurrent "foreignism" (or "deafism"?) in his written English that at first seemed odd but soon felt natural, and that is his use of the word "deaf" as a singular, not collective, noun, as in the noun phrase "the deaf of Chartres" meaning "the deaf man of Chartres." Is this a conscious choice on his part? After showing how the seventeenth-century English philosophers Hobbes and Locke cleared away the medieval claptrap about our minds being endowed with innate ideas, and thus established that everything we know comes to us by way of our sensory perceptions, Fulka makes it obvious why the existence of deaf people posed an interesting question for philosophy: what kinds of things could any person be able to know without auditory input? Fulka begins by explaining that he has organized his study into three parts: (1) philosophers who see deafness as a deficiency; (2) philosophers who see deafness as a difference; and (3) philosophers who see deafness as an opportunity to study the origin of language. As he admits, there is a lot of overlap, but this grouping gives him a rough outline for presenting his material. He cautions readers that in the eighteenth century, there was no clear distinction between gesture and sign language (note that this book is published in Adam Kendon's Gesture Studies), and, further, that any signing deaf persons mentioned in the text would surely be using home signs. He also points out that it was common for nonfiction writers to use fictional or "conceptual" examples, so we should not take their deaf men (and they are always men) to be actual persons. Fulka covers just about everyone who wrote on the topic, not excluding Desloges. He begins with the deficiency model and Condillac's "impossible beginning" of human language. Condillac's "deaf of Chartres" is a young man who, prior to his rather abrupt acquisition of hearing and speech, had had no communication with others, no language and, therefore, according to Condillac, no capacity for abstract thought, imagination, or memory...

Slovak Realia in the Czech Translation of the Novel The House of the Deaf Man by Peter Krištúfek in Contrast to its English Translation

The article deals with two groups of realia in the Slovak novel by Peter Krištúfek (1973–2018). The first one are those concerning Slovak traditional culture, which are used in a form of theatrical scenery by the author. The second one are those connected with Slovak identity, as the writer understands it. The article offers the comparative analysis of the Slovak text with its translations into Czech and English. The conclusion is made about different translators’ strategies according to the translation purpose and extralinguistic circumstances and the necessity of the Czech translations of Slovak fiction despite the unique closeness of these two Slavic languages.

The consequences of very late exposure to BSL as an L1

Mayberry and Kluender (2017) make an important contribution to our understanding of the CPL, reporting the striking differences in regions of brain activation in Martin, a deaf man with very late exposure to an L1, compared to other deaf individuals, when processing single signs of ASL. They conclude: “The unique effects of AoA . . . suggest that the hierarchical structure of language and the architecture of the brain language processing system arise from their interaction over the course of early childhood when brain maturation and language acquisition are temporally synchronized.”

Switched at Birth: A Game Changer for All Audiences

Switched at Birth: A Game Changer for All Audiences

It’s a Small World: International Deaf Spaces and Encounters. Michele Friedner and Annelies Kusters, eds. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2015, 336 pp. $70.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-56368-653-5.

<i>It’s a Small World: International Deaf Spaces and Encounters</i>. Michele Friedner and Annelies Kusters, eds. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press, 2015, 336 pp. $70.00, cloth. ISBN 978-1-56368-653-5.

Being deaf in court

Based on cases involving deaf people as complainants, victims, the indicted or as affected parties, we endeavour in this study to explore how the judiciary facilitates accessibility and participation during the court process and how it takes into account language differences when reviewing cases and as mitigating circumstances when deciding the outcome of the case. The study is based on data from observations of court cases – both civil and criminal – on court documents and decisions, and on interviews with complainants, defendants and others involved in the judicial process. We focus in particular on one deaf man, Lars, who brought to court his compulsory admission (sectioning) to a psychiatric ward. The cases can be understood as ‘critical events’ by addressing injustice in terms of communicative barriers that have led to debate within and outside of the deaf community. The cases illuminate issues about accessibility, accountability and discrimination as well as the limits to and opportunities for indiv...

Differential Diagnosis of Psychosis in a Deaf Inpatient with Language Dysfluency

This case report demonstrates challenges diagnosing psychosis in language dysfluent deaf patients. Treatment of a 34-year-old deaf man on an inpatient psychiatric unit is described. He had a history of physical aggression and possible symptoms of paranoia and thought disorganization, in addition to learning difficulties and minimal language skills. The patient was placed on a combined hearing/deaf inpatient unit, received specialized programming for deaf patients and was prescribed risperidone and divalproex sodium to treat his aggressive behavior and possible psychosis. Uncertainty if the patient were having psychotic symptoms remained throughout his hospitalization, although he improved behaviorally and was discharged after 13 months of treatment. The patient's pre-existing language deficits made accurate diagnosis and appropriate treatment challenging. It is important for clinicians to be aware of the frequency of language dysfluency in the deaf inpatient population and have a strategy for evaluating and treating this complex subgroup of deaf people.

Justaposições: o primeiro dicionário brasileiro de língua de sinais e a obra francesa que serviu de matriz

Este estudo documental buscou investigar a constituição em 1875 do primeiro dicionário de língua de sinais do Brasil, a "Iconografia dos Signaes dos Surdos-Mudos", cujo autor, Flausino José da Costa Gama, fora aluno do Imperial Instituto dos Surdos-Mudos no Rio de Janeiro. Essa publicação foi analisada à luz da obra de Pierre Pélissier, surdo francês, que produziu uma obra anterior, a qual Flausino reproduziu na íntegra. A compreensão de como se constituiu a publicação deste dicionário exigiu a contextualização histórica da educação do surdo, e a pesquisa sobre a expansão dos processos de produção litográfica na segunda metade do século XIX. As duas obras foram analisadas quanto a aspectos gerais, forma de indexação lexical, verificação dos sinais que perduraram (38 entre 382), erros de tradução do francês para o português e o que estes verbetes nos dizem sobre os preceitos morais e religiosos subjacentes à educação do surdo à época. A conclusão destaca a importância da iniciativa de propagar da língua brasileira de sinais, com a primeira tentativa de registro há cento e trinta e sete anos atrás.

Words made flesh: nineteenth-century deaf education and the growth of deaf culture

Acknowledgments Introduction 1 Thomas Hopkins Gallaudet and Laurent Clerc: A Yale Man and a Deaf Man Open a School and Create a World 2 Manual Education: An American Beginning 3 Learning to Be Deaf: Lessons from the Residential School 4 The Deaf Way: Living a Deaf Life 5 Horace Mann and Samuel Gridley Howe: The First American Oralists 6 Languages of Signs: Methodical versus Natural 7 The Fight over the Clarke School: Manualists and Oralists Confront Deafness Conclusion Notes Index About the Author

No Dummies: Deafness, Baseball, and American Culture

This article begins by examining the historical and social factors that led to 1901 being the "deafest" year in major league baseball history with four deaf players. In particular, the author discusses the career of William Ellsworth "Dummy" Hoy, a deaf man from Ohio who became the most celebrated deaf player in history and explores the reasons why he is not more celebrated in the mainstream culture.

The Politics and Practice of Voice: Representing American Sign Language on the Screen in Two Recent Television Crime Dramas

The Politics and Practice of Voice: Representing American Sign Language on the Screen in Two Recent Television Crime Dramas

Narrative Function of Deafness and Deaf Characters in Film

Narrative Function of Deafness and Deaf Characters in Film

The Singh libel case and 'alternative medicine'

Simon Singh, a physicist and a leading science writer, authored bestsellers on Fermat's last theorem, the Big Bang and code breaking. Recently he co-authored with Edzard Ernst, Professor of Complementary Medicine, a book on alternative therapies entitled Trick or Treatment? . When published in April 2008, Singh wrote an article for The Guardian which coincided with chiropractic awareness week, ‘Beware the spinal trap’. The article has been retracted by The Guardian but is easily googled, republished widely on the web by a band of bloggers, publishers and sceptical organizations. Chiropractic therapy was invented by faith healer Daniel David Palmer in 1890s America. Inspired by the miraculous recovery of a deaf man whom he treated by ‘racking’ his back, Palmer thought that 99% of all diseases are caused by nerves trapped by misaligned vertebrae, causing blockages in the flow of energy from the spinal column. While modern chiropractors focus on treating back problems, traditional chiropractors still believe Palmer's mythology. Singh discussed the risks of chiropractic treatment, which he noted have been associated with dislocations and fractures, potentially leading to stroke and death.1 He challenged the evidence base for these treatments in various childhood conditions. The British Chiropractic Association (BCA) claimed Singh had defamed their reputation and threatened to sue him in libel. Singh decided not to back down. He wrote: ‘The article was about an issue of public interest, namely childhood health and the effectiveness of particular treatments for some serious conditions. Hence, I was not prepared to apologize for an article that I still believed was important for parents to read, and which I believed was accurate and legally defensible. (http://www.senseaboutscience.org.uk/index.php/site/project/340, …

‘I am bodied’. ‘I am sexual’. ‘I am human’. Experiencing deafness and gayness: a story of a young man

This paper examines experiences of Deaf gay people through the eyes of a young Deaf man growing up in the predominantly hearing and heterosexual society of the Czech Republic. In the current disability and gender studies discourse there are several personal accounts of people with disabilities who also identify as gay or lesbian, but narratives about Deafness and gayness are rare or missing. To ‘queer’ the issue of Deafness and disability a little further, most Deaf people claim to be a linguistic and cultural minority, not disabled. Being Deaf and gay suggests a double identity and quite often exclusion from the majority hearing and heterosexual society. The story of 24‐year‐old Jan illustrates the struggle and challenges of a minority within a minority.

PALILALIA IN SIGN LANGUAGE

Sign languages, which use the hands and arms as articulators, are the natural languages of deaf people. Research indicates that sign, like speech, can break down at the level of motor control, in the context of a movement disorder such as Parkinson disease (PD).1 This article describes the first known case of a deaf sign language user with progressive supranuclear palsy (PSP). PSP affects the rostral brainstem and its projections to the basal ganglia, cerebellum, and cerebral cortex.2 Dysarthria typically emerges early in the course of the disease and disrupts several aspects of speech.3 The characteristic features of PSP dysarthria are articulatory incoordination and palilalia—the repetition of entire words at decreasing amplitudes without pause.2 This descriptive case study suggests that those same features are prominent in the sign production of a deaf man with PSP. ### Methods. #### Participants. The individual with PSP was a 79-year-old right-handed man, who was born deaf. He learned British Sign Language (BSL) at school at age 7, and it became his primary language. He developed left-sided weakness and dysphagia at age …

“They Found and Left Her an Indian”: Gender, Race, and the Whitening of Young Bear

“They Found and Left Her an Indian”Gender, Race, and the Whitening of Young Bear Jim J. Buss (bio) . . . Mourning the lost. At length, a rumour came Of a white woman found in Indian tents, Far, far away. A father’s dying words Came o’er the husbandman, and up he rose, And took his sad-eyed sister by the hand, Blessing his household, as he bade farewell, For their uncertain pilgrimage . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . At length they reach’d a lodge Deep in the wilderness, beside whose door A wrinkled woman with the Saxon brow Sate [sic] coarsely mantled in her blanket-robe, The Indian pipe between her shrivell’d lips. Yet in her blue eye dwelt a gleam of thought, A hidden memory, whose electric force Thrill’d to the fount of being and reveal’d The kindred drops that had so long wrought out A separate channel . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . A trembling nerve Thrill’d all unwonted at her bosom’s core, And her lip blanch’d. But two daughters gazed Reproachfully upon her, to their cheek Rushing the proud Miami chieftain’s blood, In haughty silence. So, she wept no tears; The moveless spirit of the race she loved Had come upon her, and her features show’d Slight touch of sympathy. . . . —Lydia Sigourney, “The Lost Lily” (1846) [End Page 1] On an autumn evening in 1835, the elderly, diminutive Miami woman Maconaquah (Young Bear) welcomed the weary white Indian trader George Ewing into her home at Deaf Man’s Village in northern Indiana.1 According to Ewing, the indigenous woman joined him near the cabin’s hearth after her family went to bed. He surmised that sick, tired, and perhaps wanting to confess before she died, Young Bear revealed a secret she had kept for nearly half-a-century; Indians had taken her from her white family as a child.2 His “discovery” launched a national search for Young Bear’s eastern relatives that eventually raised the woman from obscurity to national recognition. Ewing, informed by Young Bear that she had once lived among white people in Pennsylvania, wrote to Eastern newspaper editors, who subsequently published Ewing’s letters in their papers. “There is now living near this place,” he wrote the postmaster at Lancaster, Pennsylvania, “an aged woman, who a few days ago told me, whilst I lodged in the camp with her one night, that she was taken away from her father’s house.”3 Two years later, Ewing received a letter from Joseph Slocum, who was living at the time in Pennsylvania, inquiring about the woman. Slocum wondered; could she be his sister, Frances, the “Lost Sister of the Wyoming”? He packed his bags and set off for Indiana. White authors have recounted tales about Frances Slocum many times over the past century and a half. And, while these stories appear to mirror the many other captivity narratives that dominated eighteenth- and (to a limited extent) early nineteenth-century American literature, the narrative of Maconaquah’s capture, discovery, and later life differs in important ways. These differences reveal dynamics about gendered constructions of race in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries that others do not. Moreover, Frances Slocum’s story continues to be written and rewritten as a captivity narrative, and that process illuminates the ongoing colonial project that has long typified the relationship between whites and Indians in America. Historically, captivity narratives have served as powerful fables that stress the undesirability of race mixing and place the events of colonization, settlement, and conquest into narratives of violent conflict.4 But modern scholarly treatments of the genre raise the possibility of seeing beyond typical nineteenth-century bifurcated categories of race that stress opposition. Historian June Namias believes that “the captivity drama presents us with an intersection of cultures” as intermarriages rest at the center of many of these stories.5 In the case of Frances Slocum, however, writers have historically underplayed the violence of her captivity and seldom focused on Slocum’s marriages to two separate indigenous husbands. In fact, they rarely discuss her half-century living among the Indians at all. Instead, writers have spilled much ink upon paper trying to explain how the elderly Frances Slocum [End...

Source localization of auditory evoked potentials after cochlear implantation

Little is known about how the auditory cortex adapts to artificial input as provided by a cochlear implant (CI). We report the case of a 71-year-old profoundly deaf man, who has successfully used a unilateral CI for 4 years. Independent component analysis (ICA) of 61-channel EEG recordings could separate CI-related artifacts from auditory-evoked potentials (AEPs), even though it was the perfectly time-locked CI stimulation that caused the AEPs. AEP dipole source localization revealed contralaterally larger amplitudes in the P1-N1 range, similar to normal hearing individuals. In contrast to normal hearing individuals, the man with the CI showed a 20-ms shorter N1 latency ipsilaterally. We conclude that ICA allows the detailed study of AEPs in CI users.

A concise history of Western music

Prehistory Part I. Time Whole: 1. From Babylonians to Franks Part II. Time Measured 1100-1400: 2. Troubadours and organists 3. Ars nove and Narcissus's clock Part III. Time Sensed 1400-1630: 4. Harmony, the light of time 5. The radiance of the High Renaissance 6. Reformation and heartache 7. To speak in music Part IV. Time Known 1630-1770: 8. Baroque mornings 9. Fugue, concerto and operatic passion 10. Rococo and reform Part V. Time Embraced 1770-1815: 11. Sonata as comedy 12. Revolution's momentum Part VI. Time Escaping 1815-1907: 13. The deaf man and the singer 14. Angels and other prodigies 15. New Germans and old Vienna 16. Romantic evenings 17. Nightfall and sunrise Part VII. Time Tangled 1908-75: 18. To begin again 19. Forwards and backwards, and sideways 20. The people's needs 21. To begin again again 22. Whirlwind Part VIII. Time Lost 1975-: 23. Echoes in the labyrinth 24. Interlude Glossary Further reading and listening.