The deaf body in public space

"It’s rude to point,” my friend told me from across the elementary-school cafeteria table. I grasped her words as I read them off her lips. She stared at my index finger, which I held raised in midair, gesturing toward a mutual classmate. “My mom said so.”

*I was 6 or 7 years old, but I remember stopping with a jolt. Something inside me froze, too, went suddenly cold.

“I’m signing,” I said out loud. “That’s not rude.*”

Deaf woman and Rhodes scholar Rachel Kolb discusses how sign language – expressive faces, hand gestures, the direct gaze (to see what the other person is signing) – challenges Western norms of public behaviour. While as a child, she felt self-conscious, like she might be 'taking up too much space', as a confident adult, she sees the non-signing world as impoverished: a world of 'immobile talking heads, disembodied sound and visual inattentiveness'.

Sign language interpretations of hit songs is a whole YouTube genre now, but Shelby Mitchusson's interpretation of Eminem's 'Lose Yourself' is still one of the best.