A Visual Landscape: My Experience with ASL and Deaf Culture
Like many college students, my degree program required a certain number of foreign language credits to graduate. With five years of public-school Spanish language education to my credit—including several transferred credits from a college Spanish course I took in 11th grade—I decided to take the path of least resistance. I enrolled in Spanish 201, planning to muscle through the course by leaning on my (admittedly distant) experience with the language.
Though I had studied Spanish for half a decade, I never gained fluency in the language in any meaningful sense, and wasn’t exactly sold on the idea that language could be taught effectively in a classroom setting. This was further confirmed when I swiftly dropped out of Spanish 201 a week after the semester began, because the class was taught in Spanish. I couldn’t understand enough to get by, even with my 101-equivalent high school course.
I decided to take American Sign Language 101 despite it nullifying my progression towards the language requirement—no more transferred Spanish credits to spare me a course—because I was interested in the language. It also fit my schedule, meaning it wasn’t an excruciating 9:00AM lecture three days a week, as Spanish 201 had been. So, at 11:00AM on the first Tuesday of the semester, I walked into ASL 101 and unknowingly began my journey into the beautiful and expressive world of American Sign Language.
My professor, Emily Glenn-Smith, is a warm, theatrical, and funny woman. She was born Deaf—yes, Deaf with a capital “D”—and learned to read and write English as a child. From the minute class began, I was enraptured by her signing. It was bold, fluid, vibrant. Meaning spilled out from every motion, every expression, every bit of space and time.
I quickly saw that American Sign Language was nothing like the signs with which I was passively familiar—which I later learned was a form of sign language known as “Signing Exact English,” or SEE. The entire body was in play, and each motion, pause, or lack thereof conveyed essential information. Even “finger spelling,” which entails simply spelling out the intended word using the ASL alphabet, was so streamlined that frequently used words seemed to be signs all their own, with a defined rhythm and fluidity of motion throughout.
ASL 101 was far from a pure language course. We learned about Deafness, Deaf Culture, and the history of Deaf people in America. When we weren’t learning new signs or grammatical structures, we read about Gallaudet University, Deaf clubs, Alexander Graham Bell, hearing aids, the Americans with Disabilities Act, teletypewriters (or TTYs) and more. Presented through the perspective of the Deaf, and interspersed with the lived experience of our professor, these lessons helped to illuminate a rich cultural identity and community.
I was transfixed by the beauty and efficiency of the language. Learning ASL wasn’t easy, but it was certainly enjoyable—to me, at least. I was no stranger to attention, as I’d once attended a summer theater program and performed in various community and school productions throughout my childhood. My fellow classmates, however, took to the course with varying degrees of enjoyment, as it frequently required us to sign clumsily in front of our classmates.
Though some students simply feared the spotlight, it was obvious that others had a different problem—they just weren’t comfortable enough in their own bodies, in their own physicality, to effectively use ASL. This necessary “theatricality”—for lack of a better term—remains to me one of the most unique and beautiful components of both ASL and Deaf Culture.
To watch an experienced signer was astonishing, overwhelming even. But in time, though I never fully broke free of my “hearing accent”—a term the Deaf use for the peculiar way some native English speakers sign—I slowly grew able to hold my own in conversation with my professor. Any gaps in my vocabulary could be quickly smoothed over with finger spelling the English word, upon which my professor would teach me the appropriate sign.
After a few semesters, I had fulfilled my language requirement, but I decided to continue with two additional ASL courses. Improving my ASL week after week was addicting. With each new sign, skill, and grammatical structure I felt a rich world of human connection opening to me, at once completely foreign but at the same time unmistakably familiar and intuitive.
There are five fundamental building blocks of a sign:
handshape, movement, location, orientation, and nonmanual markers. All these elements are plainly intuitive in meaning, with perhaps the exception of nonmanual markers, which refers to facial expressions or other body language. Combined, these simple elements can convey a torrent of information—I believe that ASL is, in many ways, a far more efficient form of communication than spoken language.
Take the ASL grammatical construction known as a “Classifier.” Though this is an oversimplification, a Classifier can be used as a stand-in for an object. You use a specific handshape to literally represent an object in space.
For example, let’s say I want to tell you where I’ve parked my car. Instead of telling you a nearby intersection and perhaps the name of a building near my parking spot, I can simply use a Classifier to represent a car, construct the intersection in space in front of me—perhaps using another Classifier to represent a nearby tree—and functionally convey a three-dimensional diagram of the area, placing my car precisely within it. To share the same amount of information to the same degree of specificity in English would take many sentences, and an absurd level of detail. In ASL, all this is conveyed in seconds.
By far the most compelling part of my ASL Journey was attending Deaf Community events. My professor made attendance at a few of these events each semester a requirement to pass the course, and they were among the most moving and memorable experiences of my life. At one event, I attended Bingo Night at the Buffalo Club of the Deaf. If watching one experienced signer was a waterfall of information—graceful, fluid, and continuous—sitting among a bingo hall of ASL conversations between native speakers was a tidal wave.
Out of everything I learned in my ASL journey, from the language itself to the history and cultural context of the Deaf, the piece that has most stayed with me is the overwhelming human connection and emotional vulnerability of the language. There is no written ASL, no way to make yourself known without taking up space, putting yourself out there, and connecting with others. In an ASL conversation, you make eye contact constantly. You take in the entire person—their physicality, emotion, and nuance.
The Deaf Community was incredibly welcoming to myself and my fellow students, while unapologetically expressing its own cultural identity for all to see. To them, Deafness is an important part of their identity, no more a thing to be lamented than one’s height, eye color, or family heritage. The Deaf community has persevered through decades of second-class citizenship and institutional abuse portrayed as charity, and through it all, they have refused to give up their identity. Their Deafness doesn’t define them—they define themselves as Deaf.
After completing my ASL course, my professor gave me my own name sign—a unique signifier for my name using the handshape of the first letter in my name, “J”—and I quite literally can’t tell you what it is in this blog. Like many aspects of the beautiful and nuanced world of ASL and Deaf Culture, I’d have to show you.