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The Name You Cannot Give Yourself

Every semester it happens by the second week. A student in ASL 1, bright and eager and already half in love with the language, waits until the room empties and asks me for a sign name. The asking is shy and confident at the same time, the way people ask for something they assume is a formality, a small ceremony the teacher performs on request, like handing back a quiz. I tell them no. Then I tell them why, and the why takes the rest of the semester, and if I teach it well, it takes the rest of their lives. I want to set the why down in one place, because the question deserves a fuller answer than a hallway can hold, and because the answer opens a door into how Deaf culture actually works, which is what my students came to learn whether they know it yet or not. Two notes on words before we start. Students usually say sign name; the scholarship says name sign; I answer to both terms and grant neither on request. And when I write Deaf with a capital D, I mean the culture: the language, the schools, the clubs, the families, the jokes, the weddings, the funerals, the whole inherited world of people who live in American Sign Language. Small-d deaf is an audiogram. Capital-D Deaf is a people. The name sign belongs to the people.

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Every Face Is Doing Something

A viral post claims the West never once produced the Buddha’s expression across twenty-five centuries of art. The claim collapses in the first wing of any decent museum, and the thing that killed it spent thirty-five years walking through Janna’s ASL classrooms. There is a post moving through social media that stakes an entire theory of civilization on one face. Every Buddha statue, it observes, from Thailand to Japan to China to Tibet to India, wears one expression: lids lowered a few degrees, the corners of the mouth lifted by a hair. The styles vary by country and by century while the face holds steady. The post rules out the easy readings, smile and peace both, and names the look “the absence of wanting.” Western religious art, the argument continues, produced this expression at no point in twenty-five hundred years. Michelangelo’s Last Judgment strains, Bernini’s Teresa swoons, every Annunciation leans toward its angel. Western faces reach; the Buddha’s face has stopped reaching; and that difference, the post concludes, compresses the whole philosophical quarrel between East and West into a single expression. It closes with a slogan engineered for the share button: “your face is where you are.”

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The Voice Goes Off: Writing My Half of Back to Willowbrook

On the first day of my classes at New York University, the voice goes off. I stand at the front of the room and I do not speak, and no one else will speak for the rest of the semester, because the language my students have come to learn does not live in the throat. It lives in the hands and the face and the shaped space between two people, and the fastest way to teach that is to stop pretending otherwise on day one.

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The Golden Age of Deafness: 1991, Tanya Towers, and the Long Erosion After

There was a year, exact and bounded, when the world we built held together. 1991. David and I had just celebrated our third wedding anniversary. He had finished his MFA at Columbia that spring under Peter Stone. I had just started teaching ASL at New York University, where I have now taught for thirty-five years. I had come east from Iowa, where I attended the Iowa School for the Deaf from first grade through twelfth, and from CUNY Lehman, where I would graduate the following spring as the first Deaf graduate in the school’s history. We were in our twenties and newly credentialed, and we felt as if we owned every inch of the city.

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Where Are the Deaf Children at Aladdin?

Yesterday I sat in the New Amsterdam Theatre for the interpreted performance of Disney’s Aladdin. The show was fine. The interpreting was fine. Neither held my attention the way the audience did. It was Scouts Day. The hearing children came dressed as princes and princesses, sashes weighed down with badges, parents fussing over phones and snacks. The aisles filled with the small chaos that always attends a children’s matinee. Within all of that, in a designated seating block to the side, sat the Deaf audience. I counted, roughly, sixty of us. The youngest among us looked sixty herself. Most of those sixty people were between sixty and eighty-five years old. A handful of hearing family members translated stage business in side conversations. Deaf children were absent from the section. Deaf teenagers, if any were present, were too few for me to identify in a careful sweep.

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My Language Is Not English: A Deaf Educator Answers JB Mitchell

I have taught American Sign Language at New York University since 1991. My credentials and history sit on the public record: first Deaf graduate of CUNY Lehman College in 1992, Master’s in Deafness Rehabilitation from NYU in 1997, SCPI rating of Superior Plus, Iowa School for the Deaf from first grade through twelfth, twenty-three years as a Vocational Rehabilitation Counselor for Deaf services at the New York State Department of Education, and in Spring 2023 the first Deaf dual tutorial instructor at NYU Gallatin, where one of the two tutorials I taught was Black Sign Language. I write today because a man on TikTok who calls himself an ASL Communication Coach has been telling a generation of young people that my language is English. It is not. Marlee Matlin has said so publicly, clearly, and with the moral authority she has earned across forty years of Deaf advocacy. JB Mitchell has responded by calling Marlee an actor rather than an educator. That is the move of a man who has run out of argument.

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Arm Angles in American Sign Language: The Textbook That Teaches What Other Textbooks Ignore

Watch any native signer and then watch an intermediate student. The difference is not in the handshapes. It is not in the facial expressions, though those matter. The difference lives in the arms. The native signer’s shoulders engage when emphasis requires it. The elbows extend and contract with meaning. The signing space expands for formal address and contracts for intimacy. The student, trained to focus on hands and face, moves through space as if the arms were merely transportation for the fingers. This is the gap that Arm Angles in American Sign Language addresses. It is the textbook we wished existed twenty years ago.

Arm Angles in American Sign Language by David Boles and Janna Sweenie

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