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sqbr: pretty purple pi (default icon)
Monday, August 18th, 2008 10:06 am
Am feeling particularly sick and stupid today, but before I forget two interesting ideas which came up in the second half of "Inside Deaf Culture":

Sign language poetry which uses the physical forms of the signs, and adds extra meaning through extra non-sign movements, like their position in physical space and the movement of eyes and head etc. Like those chinese/japanese etc poems which use the sub-symbols of the ideograms to make complex inter-references, I think that sounds really cool and am a little sad that as someone who doesn't speak/read the language (or any other non-alphabetic language) I can't truly appreciate them. But I guess they're not for me.

Also an idea I've encountered before but am still getting my head around: that being deaf is not being a "failed normal person", but a (hopefully successful) Deaf person.
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sqbr: Asterix-like magnifying glass over Perth, Western Australia (australia 2)
Friday, August 15th, 2008 12:49 pm
Having finished my Phd and had some time for my brain to bounce back, I've been filling my brain with lots of different things, including history. The thing is, I find most history books to be either too dry and technical for my not-so-arty brain, or very conventional and uninteresting: all about the lives of kings and other rich white men, and tending to uncritically regurgitate the traditional and nostalgic ideas people already have with just a few glosses of extra facts. I think the desire to try to fit morally grey people like bushrangers and colonists into neat little good guy/bad guy boxes is one of the reasons I find my own country's history so unbearably dull.

One solution to this is to seek out histories which are explicitly from a more non-conventional viewpoint. Tony Robinson is about the only tv historian I can think of who does this, mainly with the lower classes, ie with his Worst jobs in history.

Beneath the cut: a synopsis of what I've found so far, including "The Homosexual History of Australia", "Damned Whores and Gods Police: the history of women in australia" and "Understanding Deaf Culture".
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