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Mel Gibson: Watch the Hands

On Saturday, August 29, at the Metro Toronto Convention Centre, Mel Gibson walked out from behind a curtain to begin a retrospective Q&A at Fan Expo Canada, the sprawling annual gathering billed as Canada’s largest comics and gaming event and the third-largest pop culture draw in North America. An American Sign Language interpreter stood at the edge of the stage, doing the work that makes such an event available to Deaf attendees, work interpreters were doing at panels across the hall all weekend. As Gibson passed behind the interpreter, his hands went up in a burst of empty flapping, a second or three of imitation nonsense played for the crowd, and then he waved and took his seat to talk about his career. Fans had paid 275 dollars apiece for photographs and autographs. The clip of the flapping traveled across social media before the weekend closed, and by Monday he had issued a statement through the trades, blaming the disorientation of being pushed into a spotlight and apologizing to anyone who took offense.

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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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