Early on, Deaf people embraced teletypewriter (TTY) technology and emojis, and they’ve long relied on the internet to foster intracommunity rapport.
“Digital communication methodologies have been something that Deaf people adopted very quickly,” says Carrie Lou Garberoglio, 41, director of the National Deaf Center in Austin, Texas, where the first-ever A.S.L.-accessible video game, a choose-your-own-adventure called Deafverse, was developed in 2019. Since going viral, Sutton has continued to use TikTok both to showcase her dance and to educate her large contingent of hearing followers, placing her among a wave of Deaf creatives who, consigned to their homes during the pandemic, are leveraging their popularity to advocate for Deaf awareness and, by extension, a greater understanding of sign language in the culture at large. “But she’s talking about different scenarios, right? She’s talking about him paying off her college, she’s talking about taking pictures on his phone.” “There’s a part where Megan is, you know, talking about different types of … ” she says with a laugh, hesitant to invoke the song’s title. For Sutton, the song’s irreverent hook could take numerous shapes in A.S.L., depending on the context. Further distinguishing it from English is A.S.L.’s topic-comment structure, in which the object of a sentence is often introduced before it’s described: If someone wishes to say they “liked a book” in sign, they’d mention the book before they do their feelings about it.
Sign tends to set the scene, placing the relevant characters in a given sentence in spatial relation to one another, much like stage directions. It is not merely English in gestural, transliterated form, as hearing folks often assume, but a visual language no less grammatically and syntactically evolved than any other, whose descriptions and sentence constructions utilize space and time multidimensionally. Such questions were expected, given how widely misunderstood American Sign Language remains, more than 200 years after it was enshrined as the language of the Deaf. Others, Sutton told me in a video call moderated by a sign language interpreter (as all interviews for this article were conducted), wondered why she signed the song’s titular refrain several different ways, once connecting both hands to make a V shape, another time gyrating her hips back and forth. Some asked if Sutton was really Deaf, so exacting was her choreographed interpretation. and its bountiful possibilities for creative expression, the video piqued curiosity. She returned to thousands of likes, comments and, eventually, a retweet from Cardi B herself.įor hearing audiences, long dismissive or at least ignorant of A.S.L. Sutton posted the 35-second video and then closed the app for a few hours to get on with her day. But having danced since childhood, she’s found ways to channel her intuitive feel for rhythm through the vast, lexically complex language of sign, paying close attention to the vibrations of the bass pounding through her speakers or holding an eight-count so she knows when the words begin. Sutton, of course, can’t “hear” the music in a conventional sense. Wearing a tan crop top and hoop earrings, Sutton signs Megan Thee Stallion’s verse, maintaining coy eye contact with her camera as she reimagines lines like “Gobble me, swallow me, drip down the side of me” for a Deaf audience. In it, Sutton, a 25-year-old Black Deaf dancer living in Washington D.C., covers Cardi B’s song “ WAP” in American Sign Language, or A.S.L., which she’s used, alongside English, her entire life. LAST AUGUST, several months into lockdown, Raven Sutton posted a short clip on TikTok.
0 kommentar(er)
