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From: sethg@athena.mit.EDU ("Seth A. Gordon")
Newsgroups: soc.feminism
Subject: Gendered Pronouns and American Sign Language
Summary: The results of my not-necessarily-scientific investigation....
Message-ID: <1991Jun2.232140.19357@athena.mit.edu>
Date: 3 Jun 91 19:17:44 GMT
Organization: Institute for Dangerous Research, Diplomatic Corpse
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STATEMENT OF PROBLEM

A while back, there was some discussion on this list about gendered
pronouns in English.  As luck would have it, I happen to be studying
American Sign Language, a language which has *no* gendered pronouns.
(See Appendix B for details.)  So when this issue came up, I wondered:
is Deaf culture more sexist than mainstream American (Hearing)
culture?  If so, why?

[Incidentally, if any of y'all out there know ASL or are trying to
learn it, please send me e-mail ... we'll compare notes.]

("Deaf" with a capital "D" is used to refer to Deafness as a culture;
"deaf" with a small "d" refers to the biological inability to hear.)

MATERIALS AND METHODS

I asked these questions to eight people: one of my ASL teachers, who
is white, male, hearing, and has about ten years' experience signing;
one white hearing woman who is in an interpreter-training program; two
white deaf men; and five deaf women, two of them white and three of
them Hispanic.

RESULTS

None of the people asked knew an ASL sign for "sexism"; I had to
either fingerspell the word, or sign "sex" and fingerspell "i-s-m."
One deaf woman and one deaf man did not know what "sexism" meant.  I
defined it for the woman by saying something in ASL like, "Suppose I
believed that men should do all the work and women should stay home,
cook, and take care of the kids.  That would be sexism."  (There is
probably a way to define "sexism" in more abstract ASL terms, but I've
only been studying the language since February, so I don't know how to
do it.)  The hearing woman that I surveyed defined it for the deaf
man; I think she used a similar definition, but my comprehension
skills aren't good enough to follow.

My teacher said that Deaf culture is slightly less sexist than
mainstream culture; he said this is because the majority of ASL
interpreters are female, not because of the language.  One of the deaf
men said that Deaf culture was slightly less sexist *after* I
explained that I was exploring the connection between the languages
and the cultures; before this, he said they were equally sexist.  One
of the deaf women said that deaf culture was slightly less sexist, but
didn't know why.  The rest of the informants said that the two
cultures are equally sexist.

CONCLUSIONS

Obviously, the sample size is small and biased, but I tentatively
conclude that Deaf culture is about as sexist as mainstream culture.
Since "sexist" is an emotionally loaded term, responses that Deaf
culture is less sexist may simply reflect informants' bias toward that
culture.

If future research suggests that I should change this conclusion, I
will, of course, post a correction.

APPENDIX A

Those of you who like to reflect on the connection between language
and culture should consider this:

In mainstream culture, deafness is a disability and a stigma (see
Goffman, _Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity,_ 1967).
In Deaf culture, however, deafness is treated as an ethnicity (see
Barth, _Ethnic Groups and Boundaries,_ 1969).  It has--in
social-science jargon--"high identity salience."

When I meet people who are using ASL, one of the first questions they
will ask me is "Are you deaf?"  Sometimes, they will want to know this
*before* knowing my name.  Within Deaf culture, "How did you become
deaf?" is a perfectly acceptable getting-to-know-you question, in the
same way that college students will ask one another, "What's your
major?"

Despite the importance of being deaf within the culture, there is no
*syntactic* structure in ASL to distinguish between deaf and hearing
people, in the same way that there is no syntactic structure in
English to distinguish between black and white people.

APPENDIX B

American Sign Language has two grammatical features equivalent to
English pronouns: localization and classifiers.

Localization is the association of a region in space with a word or
phrase, such that pointing to that region is equivalent to signing the
word or phrase associated with it.  They are not inflected in any way
for gender.  For example: suppose I sign "[my] father" and then point
ninety degrees to my left.  Later in the conversation, if I want to
refer to my father again, I just have to point anywhere from sixty to
a hundred and twenty degrees to my left.  Fluent ASL signers can
localize up to five different objects in a normal conversation (think
of a CPU with five registers) without straining one another's memory.

Classifiers are used to describe the relative position or motion of
objects.  They are not inflected for gender, but they are inflected in
other ways.  For example: make a fist, stick your thumb up, and stick
your index and middle fingers forward (fingers spread).  This is the
"3-classifier," and it can refer to any land vehicle; the tip of the
middle finger is the front of the vehicle.  I can use the 3-classifier
to describe a car race, a row of bicycles on a bike rack, or my (lack
of) ability to follow an ASL conversation.  If I use it to describe an
airplane dogfight or a row of stationary houses, I am making a
grammatical error.

There are some gendered nouns in ASL; the signs "man," "woman," "boy,"
and "girl"; most signs denoting family members; and some explicit
anatomical and sexual signs.  Unlike in English, the signs for all
professions are gender-neutral.

Signed Exact English, an system for transliterating English into
signs, does have explicit signs for "he" and "she."  However, in
actual conversation between Deaf people, these signs are almost never
used; SEE is the COBOL of the Deaf community.

--
"I am a socialist.  I love humanity; I hate people."  --E. St. Vincent Millay
: bloom-beacon!athena.mit.edu!sethg / standard disclaimer
: Seth Gordon / MIT Brnch., PO Box 53, Cambridge, MA 02139