Manual Labor

By Andrew Leland

In our new issue, Andrew Leland considers contemporary deaf art and writing, which navigates the contradictions of deaf life in America as the second Trump administration threatens to dismantle the ADA.

THIS PAST SPRING, I participated in a panel discussion at a writing conference in Boston. The panel consisted of me (a blind writer), Darcel Rockett (a black writer), and Rachel Kolb (a deaf writer). We were there to discuss the journalistic principle of objectivity and whether it made sense to try to write without bias as we reported on communities we belonged to. The Trump administration had recently begun attacking those very communities: just a few months earlier, the president fired all the American Sign Language (ASL) interpreters who made White House press briefings accessible, part of a larger backlash that dismissed disability rights as just another form of wokeness. When wildfires spread across Los Angeles that same month, the late right-wing influencer and White House adviser Charlie Kirk called the on-screen ASL interpreters during the LA mayor’s emergency broadcasts “distractions.” Trump’s other anti-wokeness czar Christopher Rufo soon piled on, asking why, if captions were available, the “wild human gesticulators” (referring to the interpreters) were necessary at all—as though they were a kind of literal virtue signaling.

This political climate added a sense of urgency to our panel discussion at Boston University, which had, unlike the White House, made no complaints about hiring two ASL interpreters, who were there to provide access to the panel discussion for Kolb. She answered her questions verbally, describing the ways the Americans with Disabilities Act had paved the way for her education and career, in contrast to the right wing’s active dismantling of those rights playing out at that moment in the capital.

Kolb, who is white and grew up in Albuquerque, has said that strangers, upon hearing her speak, often wonder if she’s from Australia or Scandinavia. They don’t recognize her deaf accent, which is common among deaf and hard-of-hearing people who speak verbally. The title of her new memoir, Articulate: A Deaf Memoir of Voice, alludes (in part) to the condescending appraisal that hearing people in Kolb’s life frequently offer about her verbal abilities (hard-won after a lifetime of speech therapy), an experience that brings to mind the old racist trope of well-meaning white people expressing implicit, delighted surprise at a black speaker’s “articulateness.”

“In English, she wrested control of her words from the interpreter, but also had to exert a tremendous amount of cognitive labor to perform speech she did not hear.”

After holding forth for a few rounds of questions, Kolb suddenly turned off her voice—that is, she stopped speaking orally and abruptly began talking in ASL instead. One of her interpreters, who was holding a mic, seamlessly began to voice Kolb’s reflections.

The transition had an electric impact on the room. Kolb’s voice was, in a basic, important sense, unchanged—she was still there, after all, the same poised, alert presence. There was an audible continuity between her speaking voice and the interpreter’s; one could hear her methodical and sharp style of thinking in both. But it also felt radically modulated: her voice had suddenly switched genders, for one, and her deaf accent had given way to a hearing-accented voice. The effect was unmistakably sonic, even musical, like a song that begins with an autotuned vocal and, after a few bars, gives way to a less processed voice.

But which voice in this analogy is the “natural” one, and which one is artificial? Which voice was more authentically Kolb’s? This was, she told the audience, the point of her decision to switch: each mode of communication—and, indeed, each language—had its own affordances, its own advantages and pitfalls of expression. Speaking in ASL, Kolb could articulate herself with unmediated nuance and specificity; it was a language she had unfettered access to—but she had to rely on the extemporaneous ability of the interpreter to capture not just her meaning but the spirit and style of her expression. In English, she wrested control of her words from the interpreter, but also had to exert a tremendous amount of cognitive labor to perform speech she did not hear, with a new set of anxieties about how intelligible her voice really was. Is her “true” voice oral, or manual? To Kolb, this binary is a false one.

Articulate tracks Kolb’s life through an evolving linguistic journey, structured around her education, from preschool to Rhodes scholar to PhD. The book burrows into the interstitial linguistic spaces that she finds herself caught between at every stage of her development, an experience she describes as “floating between split worlds and not knowing how to suture them back together.”

She shares this in-betweenness with a new generation of deaf writers and artists intent on charting that liminal territory. Their work describes a contemporary deaf subject grappling with a range of twenty-first century contradictions.

Continue reading “Manual Labor,” an essay by Andrew Leland, on our site.

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