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ately, I’ve noticed Deaf people and ASL all over my TV screen. From Sue Thomas, FBEye, to episodes of the ever popular Glee, to Kay Jeweler commercials, to re-runs of The West Wing, deafness seems to be everywhere lately. While I think it’s great that deaf people are getting wider media exposure, I think we should be asking ourselves if this is the kind of media exposure deaf people want. I have never seen an episode of Sue Thomas, FBEye, so I don’t really feel that I can make judgements about it, but the other three I’ve seen several times. It seems to me that The West Wing portrays a positive and empowering picture, while Glee makes fun of deafness and the Kay commercial violates a common value held by the deaf community. Hearing and deaf people alike can be getting the wrong ideas from these negative portrayals, and I think the impact should be discussed.
The West Wing, with Marlee Matlin as Joey Lucas, is an ideal portrayal of what a deaf person’s life in politics could be like. Joey is considered one of the team, equal to anyone else on the show. The President suggests she run for congress, she’s trusted with intimate and important secrets, and some on the staff start to learn sign language so they can communicate with her better. Not only that, but she upholds most of the values of the Deaf community. Joey has an interpreter who follows her everywhere and is her voice. Although she does speak on very rare occasions, mostly she speaks only in sign language, and reads what’s going on in the room from her interpreter’s hands. She has a bit of a flirtation with the Deputy Chief of Staff, but they never date or even kiss. Any serious relationship she has is not with a hearing man. By treating her in the script as an equal, The West Wing has given a wonderful deaf role model to Deaf America.
I do have a few good things to say about Glee. The students in the choir actually performing the song were wonderful, and their ASL was wonderful as well. That being said, Glee was awfully insulting to deaf people in general. While things like the deaf “soloist” speaking above the music, and the fact that they didn’t show much of the ASL , felt like minor violations of deaf culture to me, what really bothered me was the way the advisor of the deaf school was portrayed. He was played for laughs, insisting he was hard of hearing and yelling back and forth in silliness with the regular staff. I like to think that I’m not quick to take offense, but to me, this heavily implied that officials in the deaf world are unprofessional and ridiculous. I felt the same embarrassment for the show as I would have felt if they had decided to do a choir number in black face. It was extremely inappropriate, and it made me sad. Normally I really like Glee.
My Deaf Culture teacher has told me that, much like catholics marrying outside of Catholicism, Deaf – Hearing marriages are very frowned upon. And yet in the Kay Jeweler commercial, we see a hearing man with inferior sign language skills giving a deaf woman an expensive piece of jewelry. In my world, girls only accept expensive pieces of jewelry if they’re romantically involved with the man giving it to them, so I think we can safely assume that the two in the commercial are seriously dating. So let’s look at this from a not necessarily deaf point of view. The man admits that his sign language skills aren’t very good, and for Deaf people, lip reading and writing things down are great for communicating basic needs but aren’t very good for substantive thoughts and feelings. By this, we can infer that they have never had a real conversation in their whole life, and why, why, why, would a nice girl like that have anything to do with a man she has never really spoken to? Maybe because he buys her expensive jewelry. But then what does that say to deaf little girls about what they should be dreaming of when they grow up? Nothing good. It’s upsetting to me that Kay couldn’t come up with a less ludicrous idea for a commercial featuring sign language and deafness, but obviously they couldn’t.
Deafness and ASL has been everywhere lately. While the portrayals aren’t always the most flattering, or the most in line with Deaf Culture, there could be some truth to the saying “any advertising is good advertising”. After all, wider exposure of ASL only makes more people realize what a beautiful language it is. Hopefully this will incourage more people to get into a classroom, where they will be exposed to the truth of what Deaf Culture really is.
inda Bove was born on 1945, to two Deaf parents. She grew up learning to speak ASL, and attended the New Jersey school for the Deaf. After graduating, she attended Gallaudet University where she studied Library Science and performed in plays for fun. One summer, she attended a program set up by the National Theater for the Deaf, and decided to join their company after graduating from Gallaudet instead of becoming a librarian as she had previously planned to. She met a man named Ed Waterstreet who was also a member of the National Theater for the Deaf company and they were married in 1970.
When the National Theater for the Deaf was asked to do some work for Sesame Street, Linda was excited to join them, and when Sesame Street decided they wanted to create a position for her, she was thrilled. Linda became Linda the Librarian to millions of children around the United States. She was able to show hearing people a positive portrayal of a proud Deaf woman who was capable of anything. She also taught American Sign Language to children through the show, and published several books designed for teaching ASL to kids. Her role as Linda the Librarian lasted from 1971 – 2003, and brought Linda the distinction of holding the longest roll of any Deaf person in the entertainment industry.
In between her work on Sesame Street, Linda also appeared on the soap opera Search for Tomorrow, and on Happy Days. She also understudied the roll of Sarah Norman in Children of a Lesser God. In 1991, Linda and her husband founded Deaf West Theater in Los Angeles. Deaf West puts on plays and musicals, performed simultaneously in ASL and spoken English. They won several awards for their adaption of Big River, and premiered the first revival of Pippin since the 1970’s at the Mark Taper Forum in 2008.
Today Linda continues to perform on the stage, sometimes with her husband Ed. She is also a big supporter of an organization called the Non Traditional Casting Project, which encourages the casting of minorities and people with perceived disabilities. Through her work in spreading the knowledge of sign into mainstream communities, and also by providing a positive roll for deaf children everywhere, Linda has been a great ambassador for Deaf Culture.
s part of an assignment for school, I watched 3 regular TV shows in Closed Captioning with the sound turned off completely. It was a really interesting experience, and less disruptive to my regular TV watching habits than I would have thought. I watched The Bonnie Hunt Show on NBC 4, Divine Design on HGTV, and Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares on BBC America.
To be honest, I really hated the Bonnie Hunt Show without sound. It was the nightmare I expected Closed Captioning to be: far behind on the action and riddled with misspellings. I know I missed a lot of the jokes because of how far behind the CC was, and it was really hard to decipher what was going on because of all the misspellings. The words were going by so fast on the TV that I had a hard time translating what all the misspelled words were supposed to be and keeping up with the text at the same time. Also, because the words were so far behind the action, large portions were cut off at the end of the show to make way for the CC on the commercials. I absolutely love The Bonnie Hunt Show as a hearing person. Her sense of humor is great, and they’re always doing something fun and ridiculous that you aren’t expecting. It was sad for me to realize that I would never want to watch this show if I was deaf.
Divine Design was a completely different CC experience. Maybe it was because the show is pre-taped and not done live, but all the words were keeping up with the action, there were almost no misspellings, and there was even a little fuchsia line around the black CC box so even if the background was dark you could pick out the words easily. I really enjoyed myself, having a quiet afternoon with my TV without the incessant din surrounding my usual Television experience. I felt almost rested afterward, like I had curled up with a good book. I might actually choose to watch Divine Design in CC on a regular basis.
I took a lesson from my previous experiences, and chose to watch a pre-taped show, Ramsay’s Kitchen Nightmares, as my third option. Again, it was great to watch. I gave it my full attention without outside distractions and I liked it. Maybe not better than watching it with sound, but certainly as well as. Another show I would consider watching in CC on a regular basis.
There was one thing I realized about my regular TV viewing habits. A lot of times, I turn on my TV at home for background noise while I’m doing things like knitting or making dinner. It keeps me company while I’m alone at home. If I was deaf, I wouldn’t be able to do this. In some ways I think that would be nice, because I would only watch TV if I was truly paying attention to it, but in other ways I’m afraid I might get bored or lonely more often without it. TV with sound is certainly disruptive in my house, we don’t talk or communicate almost at all when it’s on. I think it’s the same in a lot of other hearing households.
All in all, my experience with Closed Captioning was really positive. The only real problem seems to be with live programming. This brings up an important point in my mind. If there’s an emergency happening in the community, are deaf people going to be able to understand 100% of what’s going on? Or is the Closed Captioning going to be misspelled, far behind, and partially cut-off like it was for the talk show I was watching? If there’s even a shadow of a doubt that there will be a mis-translation of information it’s important that we work to change that. Surely in this modern age of computers there’s a better system out there for live CC. Someone who knows about computers should get out there and figure out what it is, and soon.
If My Hands Could Speak... 
