Disability

The article about Ashley and Deborah called How to Curse in Sign Language was very informative. I learned some new things about how people think and act towards people with disabilities. What really saddened me was that fact that a lot of churches were not very supportive of Ashley and Deborah. I would think that the church would be the one place that people could go to and they would be accepted no matter what but, unfortunately, this not the case. According to the article, “most of the major religions of the world have a long history of associating disability with sin, evil, or the devil. The Church has often been one of the leading institutions to dehumanize people on the wrong side of normal” (502).

Another thing that was very troubling was that Ashley’s school district decided to abolish sign language instruction in favor of speech instruction by way of cochlear implants. Teachers were even told to cover their mouths so the students could not lip read. It is really horrible that people with disabilities are forced to conform to hearing/speaking society instead of being able to be who they are. I do not think that people should be forced to use cochlear implants if they do not want to because they should decide if they want to learn to “hear” or if they want to sign or read lips.

I suppose Gimp changed my notion of the human body because it does not really matter if I have two arms or one – I still have a body. The movements of everyone in the video seemed very graceful, and sometimes I could not tell who was dancing. All the participants in the video pretty much danced the same. I did not notice anything different between the dancers so I suppose this could address the fact that everyone (disabled or not) can do the same stuff. Also, I think this video showed disabled people as doing something when a lot of non-disabled people think they cannot do anything at all. It seemed very empowering of disabled people.