So my sister in law came across a deaf blog ranting about some dude from The Voice, Andy Dexterity doing Auslan when he is not deaf. There was a lot of anger about cultural appropriation and comments about Andy signing badly.

It prompted my interest because obvious reasons aside (Yes, I’m deaf), I’ve been raised in a backwater community where there was (and still is) a lot of prescriptivists who had rules about the correct way to be deaf, to sign, to raise a deaf child (me) etc. So when I was reading this blog post that seemed to contradict itself repeatedly talking about how thing should be, and how dare Andy…. rah rah… I decided to go check out Andy for myself.

So what happened was this physical performing artist dude – Andy Dexterity decided to perform “Imagine” at a blind audition using physical movement and dance… and *gasp* shock horror, AUSLAN! There was of course, a furor over this.

My SIL wanted to know what I thought.

Fucking A, Andy! Now I don’t know if this was deliberate or not, but I thought this was fucking hilarious he decided to perform his song in physical movement and Auslan instead of verbally, knowing full well the judges would be facing the audience and not the stage.

I was reading about one of the judges saying this:

‘I was a bit confused, if I’m honest. I thought that maybe you were too scared to come on… I couldn’t see what was happening,’ explained Guy afterwards.’
All I could see was every single person in the audience saying turn around.’

Guy Sebastain – one of the audition judges. See article here.

Perfect! How d’ya like them apples!? These judges couldn’t hear anything happening. They could see the entire audience clearly knew what was happening. Welcome to the life of a deaf person. You can’t hear anything hey? Well neither can I! Ha!!!!!

I wish that point had been made more clearer, but it seems to have been lost in all the fuss over how dare Andy!

And to the Karen who wrote that blog post my SIL shared with me…. (yes, her name really was Karen 😂) if you were going to namedrop Trevor Johnston and yet make all these judgemental comments about Andy appropriating Auslan, using it badly, isn’t natural or proficient, how dare he try to represent Deaf people without their permission etc yadda…. then maybe you should know this about Trevor Johnston:

Good ole Trev was a linguist. That means someone who is interested in how people actually use language (the study of linguistics), and less interested in how people THINK language should be used (the prescriptivist approach). So his research focused on the facts of how Auslan was actually used in the Australian deaf community.

Auslan is only the native language (acquired since birth) of only a minority of deaf signers, which has been traditionally estimated at between 5-10 percent of the deaf community. Johnston’s own research found that only about 3 percent of deaf children attending the RIDBC had deaf parents.

This means the majority of Auslan signers who are deaf, will not have Auslan as their native language. Should all these deaf signers be pooh pooh’ed too?

Trev also acknowledged there were many varieties of signed language in the Australian deaf community. He also said “Importantly, although Auslan is not English in signed form, it must be recognised that signed communication can be used to represent the spoken language of the surrounding community (this type of language-mixing may in fact be unique to deaf communities).”

He went on to say “However, like other minority languages in the Australian community, it is impossible for users of Auslan to avoid contact with English, the majority language of the country. Consequently, as explained above, there are several distinct types of English -influenced signing behaviour.”

One of these such behaviours is described by Trev. “Signing in English is a natural and spontaneous development within the signing community, and in this respect differs from contrived artificial sign systems such as ASE.”

Another behaviour is “contact signing” where the communication is a mixture of English and Auslan vocabulary and grammar, with English word order patterns and the spatial and non-manual features found in Auslan.

So really Karen, English and Auslan CAN be used at the same time, are often mixed and used together. Many deaf people do this because they don’t live in bubbles.

Anyway, Trev goes on to acknowledge that “Auslan exists in a complex linguistic environment and, as with all languages, there are different forms of signing which are appropriate to different social situations.”

What, you mean like art? Hell yes.

There is even a statement by Trev that I can relate to Andy – “Fluent signers use the language’s enormous potential for visual metaphor to modify and extend the meaning of existing signs as well as to create new lexical items. “

While Andy might not be a fluent, proper deaf native Auslan signer, he most certainly is fluent in physical theatre and art and he has simply incorporated Auslan into this as it certainly fits in with other physical communication mediums like performance art and dance. Andy has even explained this himself –

“I am not specifically just translating the lyrics,” he explained. “There is also the instruments and the music, there’s the feel of the song, there is my specific interpretation of the song as well.”

News article here.

From one deaf woman to another, get over it Karen. If you want to talk cultural appropriation, I certainly hope you don’t own any items made outside of Australia, or are indicative of other cultures. Furthermore, I most certainly hope you only cook traditional Aussie BBQ’s. No Italian or Mexican food for you! Oh and that Trivial Pursuit game? Better bin it before the Canadians start accusing you of cultural appropriation.

Yours truly,
– deaf in Society