Midterm:

This class is interesting to me for multiple reasons. Firstly, the idea of identity being multifaceted and changing is something that I always been wondering. I am glad to have been randomly place into this class because I don't think I would have chosen it on my own. That aside, the class offers a safe space for dialogue on identity. 

Something that I found particularly interesting was Bauman's discussion of the language of disability in the piece "Designing Deaf Babies". He discusses the two distinctly different approaches to taking about disability: medical and social. As a society, we tend to focus almsot entirely on the medical aspects of disability. From a purely medical standpoint, it is easy to make the claim that a disabled individual would have a harder life than someone who was not disabled; it is complete logic, like in the writing of Peter Singer. However, when we shift to a social view, the questions become more complicated as disability, culture, and identity all mix together. I think that generally, people stick to the medical standpoint because it is easier to understand.

The Construction of Lies: The Novel vs. The Play

Why is Suzan-Lori Parks’s Getting Mother’s Body A Novel? 

I really enjoyed Train Go Sorry. I thought the book was really well written and I was engaged every step of the way. One of the things I found most interesting was all the information I gained about Deaf culture. I didn't realize how much of a community it is. I think that Train Go Sorry really does a good job of explaining the nuances of the culture, for instance, why it takes deaf people so long to say goodbye. What I wanted to talk about and hear the opinions of others on was ASL to English and English to ASL interperters. Leah talks a lot about how she grew up feeling apart of the Deaf community but then when she grew up to be an interperter she had a lot of internal struggles with the concept.

While reading "Designing Deaf Babies and the Question of Disability" I found close connections between many of Bauman's words and some of the topics brought up in "Train Go Sorry." In Bauman's piece, the author speaks a lot about how hearing children that have deaf parents are not able to fully participate in Deaf culture. This immediately made me think of Leah Cohen's experience as a hearing child surrounded by Deaf culture during her childhood at Lexington. Despite her hearing abilities, in her heart, Cohen aligned more closely with Deaf culture, yet always felt like an outsider as she was not able to fully assimilate.

The father-daughter relationship between Yumi and her father, Lloyd, is an interesting clue which went through the whole novel. When Yumi was a small girl, their relationship (a lovely daughter and a caring father) was just as normal as a father-daughter relationship could be. And the conflict between them began when Yumi started to “dressed like a begger”. (p.20) Then Yumi act far and far from her father’s expectation. And when Lloyd found the affair of bYumi and the history teacher, Yumi made the decision to run away.