Writting deaf: Textualizing Deaf literature
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In this article, the author discusses why it is difficult to transliterate American Sign Language (ASL) and the visual realities of a deaf individual's life into creative texts written in English. Even on the sentence level, she says, written English resists the unsettling presence of transliteration across modalities. A sign cannot be "said." If a deaf individual uses the conventions of written English, then the results are awkward and imply a one-on-one correlation between signs and English words. As such, to evoke a resistant perspective, some deaf writers and deaf poets make use of code mixing, untranslated ASL gloss, and other hybrid forms that show the postcolonial possibilities for textualizing deaf lives and sign language. The author also explains why deaf individuals simply do not bother with writing literary forms of English. Deaf individuals are a people of the eye, so it is easy to see why so many have not bothered with aesthetic or literary forms of written English.