Cover next page > title: Seeing Language in Sign : The Work of William C. Stokoe author

< previous page
page_114
next page >
Page 114
guistics. Billand this is something we all say about him with typical generosity and graciousness, wrote back and said he just might have something for me. I should stop in and see him when I came back to Washington. I did, and he gave me a job fora project just funded by the National Science Foundation about social networks among deaf people.
You need to remember that my group came in at the very beginning of the legitimation of linguistics as a discipline applicable to deaf peoplethanks to Bill Stokoe. Ursula Bellugi's group had published some new, inventive work, and the discipline was just starting to create its own space, and that made it easier on a lot of us young ones. We could ride on
Bill's new transforming reputation, and it saved a lot of grief for us.
The administration, however, was generally hostile and just barely tolerant of Bill. How he managed to sustain a lab for as long as he did (and the fact that it closed so shortly after he retired is testimony to his tenacity and craftiness) still amazes me. We were always comparing the administration's attitude toward us with its support of the Cued Speech project (a truly wacko idea that continues to be wacko, and worse, truly harmful and disruptive. They got more extensive staff support than we did, got more equipment, got more space, more official recognition. We very quickly developed an us-them mentality. We revelled in our unusualness, held parties, and flaunted our status as the young turks from the lab. This did not go over well with our neighbors in College Hall. Continuing Education, one floor down, complained regularly that we were using space that could better be devoted to improving the reading skills of deaf adults.
I think most people at the time thought ASL was some kind of fiction. We (Bill and the other lab members) learned quickly how to behave like a minority. We spent much of our time in those early years giving workshops about the legitimacy of ASL, about the diglossic continuum, and how ASL had rules like all human languages. I gave workshops in the English Department and the Sign Communication Department on the new ideology of ASL as a name for the sign language that American Deaf people use (of course, at the

Download 2.48 Mb.

Share with your friends: