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Alumni Profile: Jennifer Nelson

A former GW student and now colleague at Gallaudet University, Professor Nelson discusses her experiences as a deaf student at GW, American Sign Language (ASL) in the academy, and the relation between deaf culture and disability studies with Robert McRuer of the GW English Department and Christy Willis of DSS

Jennifer transferred from Beloit College to GW in Spring 1986 after receiving a diving scholarship. At the time she planned on majoring in both English and Biology and continue on to veterinary school, but she says a call to meet with Professor Gail Paster in the GW English Department “changed her life”. . .

Robert McRuer: Why don’t you start by telling us your GW story, how you became an English graduate and what happened after that?

Jennifer Nelson: Well I showed up here in 1986, in the spring of ’86.  I came to Christy Willis’s office and said “I’m here” and Christy said, “oh really, interpreting services…” because I was a transfer from another school.  I got a diving scholarship here, so I transferred pretty quickly. I was a Biology major and English also.  I wasn’t really focusing on English.  I was balancing both.  I was planning to go to veterinary school, that was the plan.  I took organic chemistry, physics… Biology, calculus, everything and guess what happened?

My senior year here, suddenly, I was just a regular English major!  I was taking classes and several students came up to me and told me, “Gail Paster wants to talk with you.”  And I said, “why me?”  I didn’t even know the woman.  So I went over to her office at the beginning of the fall semester of my senior year.  My schedule was already set and I had just had a meeting with Christy to get the interpreting schedule set and then I went to Gail’s office and she told me she wanted me to take an honors English seminar.

She wanted me to go to the GW English honors program. I argued with her for about one to two hours.  I said “I can’t do that, those kinds of classes. I have to take a variety of classes, and with Biology labs it’s too much.”  So we struggled, we went back and forth, we argued for a long time.  She told me, “No, you’re taking the honors seminar.”

I ended up getting an honors English degree from here and she encouraged me to go to graduate school for English, not vet school; we got rid of that plan.  So I went to the University of California at Berkeley.  She changed my life I guess. 

RM: I would imagine that the translating would be very, very different when you’re suddenly taking a bunch of Shakespeare classes and other things that would have been requirements for the English major compared to the biology labs that you had arranged for translation!

JN: Right. Ask Christy about that! 

Christy Willis: Well, hopefully we just provide skilled interpreters for a wide spectrum of academic classes! 

JN: Interpreting English classes is tough stuff.

RM: Well especially when you’re doing Shakespearean English or Chaucerian English…

JN: I had a good interpreter, remember?  And that spring of my senior year, I took a graduate class in critical theory…

RM: And then what did you focus on when you got to Berkeley, what was your area of study in your PhD?

JN: British literature… 19th century British lit.

RM: Is that what you now teach at Gallaudet?

JN: No… and my publications are not in my area either. I have some publications in ASL literature. (I am the co-editor of an anthology with a DVD that is coming out this fall, edited with two other people.) 17th century manual rhetoric--John Bulwer, specifically--the function of deafness in Early Modern England and its literature, the body and science fiction, and women and deafness and/or muteness in films such as “The Piano.”

ASL in the Academy

RM: There are a range of issues we can talk about here.  Why don’t we start with the issue of ASL [American Sign Language] as a foreign language because it has been really charged here at GW. I’ll give you the story briefly and then you can speak to it because I think it’s going to be a great thing to have in the newsletter.  The Modern Language Association has tracked figures for foreign language study, and of course ASL across the country has exponentially increased so that…

JN: It’s like number two or something.

RM: Actually someone was recently telling me that it’s now equal to the number of people studying French, German and Spanish combined. The statistics are amazing, really, but at GW the debate has sort of stalemated.  There’s this optional requirement: students can fulfill the General Curriculum Requirement either by doing what’s called the foreign culture requirement, where you study about the land and literature of Spain or wherever, or you can do the foreign language requirement by studying a foreign language. ASL has been declared not to fit the foreign language requirement, just the foreign culture requirement, so it’s in the middle right now.  Certain majors, however, including English, do require a language, not simply a cultural requirement, and so right now we’ve had battles in the English Department over counting ASL for a foreign language. 

JN: That’s interesting because Berkeley required two foreign languages and was willing to accept ASL for one of them for my field of study.

RM: Well, Berkeley is way out in front of these issues.

JN: Well, UC Berkeley in general doesn’t accept it as a foreign language, but in my program… my graduate program accepted it for me. I don’t know the status of ASL as a foreign language there now overall.

RM: Some of the debates that I have had with my colleagues were absolutely illogical, absolutely contradictory, so that at times I would have some colleagues say “no, we can’t count ASL as a foreign language because it’s too different from other languages”; essentially, they were making a claim that cast it as too foreign.  And at times they would say “it’s too similar, it’s American Sign Language and we want our students studying something else that is not an American language” (though I’m sure the same case wouldn’t be made with a student who desired to study Cherokee or Navajo).  So, I’ve heard very contradictory arguments, but the main thing is that some people simply don’t want ASL to count. I think it’s inevitable. Eventually ASL will count, but right now, they’re not counting it.

JN: It’s interesting because the book that I’m doing for this fall is being released from the University of California Press.  We’re doing the DVD with ASL poetry and UC is putting the book together.  The collection deals with critical approaches to ASL literature, poetry, stories.  For example it had a chapter on film techniques, film technology, techniques of ASL.  I talk about deconstruction and have a variety of chapters that deal with different issues--not comprehensive of course, it can’t be.  There are other areas that need more work, but the book talks about ASL as a language and as a literature in its own right. It doesn’t take an old fashioned frame, so essentially it moves beyond the linguistic approach—taking those issues as already settled.  We’re moving into areas to use ASL as a literature, so something like this should hopefully help in the debates you’re talking about.

RM: When will it be published?

JN: October. University of California Press.

RM: Great!

CW: I don’t know if the book will help in these debates.  One of the arguments that I had way back when, when I was teaching, was a sort of catch-22: ASL didn’t have a full blown curriculum so couldn’t be offered as a language, but they weren’t going to develop the curriculum until it was approved!  And you need more than just a warm deaf body, you need a deaf linguist to be running these programs.  Scholars like this will attract people to GW.

RM: And this is actually one of those areas where deaf issues and disability issues broadly understood do dovetail because sometimes the same contradictory things are said about disability: “well, we don’t have any disabled people here so it doesn’t need to be accessible,” and yet there’s no recognition that there are no disabled people because it’s not accessible.  Again, it’s a catch-22.

CW: Build it, they will come.

RM: Right, exactly.

JN: You have to show that people are not recognized.

RM: There’s this book series out of the Modern Language Association: an “Approaches to Teaching” series.  It seems like a key thing to have happen sometime soon would be to get a book in that series that would be “Approaches to Teaching ASL literature,” because those books are widely used by professors around the country: Approaches to Teaching Toni Morrison, Richard Wright, Renaissance Literature, etc.  In that series we should get something that is Approaches to Teaching ASL Literature. 

JN: Your next project. [Laughter] Up until a few years ago, the Modern Language Association classified ASL as an artificial language.

RM: Do you think that things have improved in your estimation?

JN: That it is not classified like that anymore is a big improvement. 

Deaf Culture and Disability Studies

RM: Let’s talk a bit more about conversations about disability studies at Gallaudet.  I know there are more people doing work in disability studies at Gallaudet like Susan Burch in the History Department or like Kristen Harmon in your department, so maybe you could talk about some of the issues and conflicts and connections that there have been between the two fields.

JN: Well you know that Deaf people don’t always consider themselves having a disability, that’s one thing.  On the other hand, they do function as disabled within this society.  So my experience with disability groups has been mixed. They want the Deaf merely to support them but often it seems they want to ignore differences between us, and that’s where I have the problem.  For example, I published an article in the MLA’s anthology Disability Studies: Enabling the Humanities.  It was an interesting process.  My original paper was somewhat more political and more clearly showed divisions between Deaf and hearing, but some of the editors wanted something more “positive” or “happy.”  But that would mean that differences between Deaf and hearing are eliminated or downplayed.  I had to tone down the article a lot and make it much more cooperative.  I negotiated for a footnote, however, that explained that my original paper was more politically oriented.  I explained why in the footnote.  When I checked the final copy, the footnote was not there!  And when I got the book it was not there.  So if I wanted that article published I had to make it a more “cooperative,” “positive” article--which meant I had to tone down the realities.

RM: That’s very interesting. I wonder if that speaks to a certain moment in the field of disability studies.  Hopefully we will move beyond it.  But as an example, when I think about the development of feminism, there were these moments that were supposedly harmonious and then different groups started to say, “wait a second here, we have complaints, we have issues here, and feminism is not one, singular thing, it’s a fractious endeavor, and…

JN: Not one size fits all.

RM: Right! Disability studies similarly needs to move to a new position where that one size fits all model is challenged. Sometimes right now we keep saying the same things over and over and over again. 

JN: It’s like feminist theory: we have white feminists and feminists of color and others, and basically the white feminists were deciding how different groups should feel and those groups rightfully didn’t like it.  They disagreed and insisted that there must be a place for them also.

RM: There was a really important feminist theory book that came out in the mid-‘80s called Conflicts in Feminism, and I feel like that’s what we need in disability studies at this point: a book that is “conflicts in disability studies” rather than assuming just all harmony.

JN: Backing up a little bit, I can speak to my experience in the MLA disability group four years ago. They wanted me involved, and they had a meeting that had an interpreter for me.  But then they decided to continue business over dinner.  They didn’t arrange for me an interpreter, so I declined to go.  People got upset that I didn’t go to the dinner; they didn’t seem to understand the interpreter issue and felt I should have been there anyway.  I said no. They seemed to think I should I should give up my needs to fit theirs.

RM: I do think there is a real parallel with other movements; feminism is just a great example of this desire for a certain kind of unity that ends up homogenizing out of existence certain people’s experiences.  So I think the disability movement being younger is not always grappling with the ways in which we’re repeating some of the same errors that other movements committed.

JN: That’s interesting. We could write something that parallels the Deaf studies/disability studies divide with the feminist movement; we should do that.

RM: Right, I think that so far the comparisons that have been made have been the “happy” ones you talked about: like “here’s feminism as a sort of critical way of thinking about the world; here’s disability studies as a critical way of thinking about the world and they’re similar or they speak to each other!”  But what gets smoothed over there are the conflicts. 

JN: We do need a framework for explaining that kind of conflict, those kinds of conflicts.

Advice to colleagues

CW: I guess I have one question for you, since this newsletter is going out to faculty: what could you say to faculty members in terms of accommodating Deaf students?

JN: Don’t assume that you know what should be done for a student; students are all different.  Deaf students all have different needs and different backgrounds, and you need to sit down and talk with the student to ask them what’s best for that particular student because what fits one student might not fit another student.

RM: I think one thing that was useful especially in a critical theory class I taught was vocabulary. It was so advanced, so every week I came in with a list of terms that were likely to come into the conversation.

JN: For the interpreters?

RM: Right, right, I taught the interpreters the vocabulary. And it changed everything because we were talking about, you know, deconstruction and psychoanalysis and all sorts of very complicated issues that I think a lot of the interpreters are not automatically ready to, just at the drop of a hat, deal with. 

JN: I mean at Berkeley I had interpreters and ended up getting the same interpreters again and again and they knew, they learned pretty quickly after one semester, they knew exactly what the teacher was talking about.  So I ended up getting the same two or three interpreters again and again and again.  That’s another thing that might help.

RM: Well also I think class discussion needs to happen in a particular kind of way.

JN: Those can be tough! I was always behind the interpreter during class discussion, so by the time I was finished processing, watching, and thought about it, and came up with something to raise my hand, I was out of place; they had already moved on to something else.

RM: This should be something teachers should be aware of.  A teacher’s skill should be able to weave that into a conversation so that it doesn’t appear out of place.  I mean, after all, students who aren’t Deaf often say things that seem like they are coming from left field and I think a good teacher should be able to show how they’re all related, all the different comments are related or in conversation.

JN: In graduate classes at Berkeley the discussion was so rapid, so that was often a challenge.

CW: What about expectations? I remember some years ago with one of our other Deaf students, the faculty member was excusing the grammatical problems she was having in writing, you know “you’re deaf, I understand, I understand.”  And the student was thinking, “Wait a minute now, I want to be critiqued because otherwise how can I possibly improve?”

JN: Teachers should recognize that deaf students, even if they’re oral, are basically bilingual and English is basically a second language; but this should not excuse grammatical errors. They should address the issue in one way or another.

RM: It’s complicated because when I think about say other bilingual students--say, a student whose first language is an Asian language very different from English. . . .

JN: You excused the errors?

RM: On some level, I really want to send a message to such a student that the ideas are what I want to validate or talk about; what are your arguments and how are you working as a thinker here?  There is a danger that an over-emphasis on the grammatical errors will limit engagement with the student as a thinker.

JN: You stress the ideas but also you say that the packaging is important too?

RM: Right, but secondary for me; the ideas first, the packaging secondary.

A GW Success Story

CW: What do you attribute your own success to, and how does that impart to your own students?  Is there something that you have been able to take from your experience and convey to other Deaf students?

JN: I think I got the right parents! My parents just said read, read, read.

RM: Were you speaking ASL from the beginning or did you learn it later?

JN: Later.

RM: At Gallaudet?

JN: I grew up oral and had that mindset, sign language was bad, that was my mindset.  I didn’t want to be different, I didn’t want to be labeled.  I went to a small private college in Wisconsin, Beloit College.  I was a freshman and I met a senior there, a hard of hearing student from a Deaf family.  That Deaf family was strongly associated with Gallaudet, and strongly involved with that Deaf culture.  When I met this woman, we kind of looked at each other and we had fights right away.  We didn’t get along, but somehow, two months later we became good friends, I met her family, they encouraged her to go to Gallaudet, so I did as well.  The problem with Gallaudet was that it didn’t inform me about NSP, the New Signers Program, so I didn’t have that benefit.  I just showed up unprepared, totally unprepared really.  I started classes, I tried to pick up ASL that semester, and in the spring I transferred to GW. GW offered me a diving scholarship.

RM: By the time you got to GW had your ASL solidified?

JN: I was sort of intermediate.

CW: So where do you see your identity now?

JN: Now I’m not really either/or.  I don’t want anyone to tell me what I should do.  I don’t like it when people say act more hearing, act more Deaf. I should act like this, or like that.  I don’t like that.

RM: What do they mean by act more Deaf?

JN: Sign in a certain way, dress a certain way, behave a certain way. 

RM: Talk a little bit about Deaf culture in DC, since it seems to be one of the most thriving Deaf communities in the country.

JN: Yes. Because of Gallaudet, because there are so many Deaf professionals here.  But at the same time the community here is more varied, more diverse because we have Deaf people from so many different backgrounds here.  The DC Deaf community is not like the community in other places.

RM: What are the differences?

JN: You can pick and choose your group here.  If I was in Wisconsin, I would feel pressured to fit the grassroots group there and I don’t feel it. But here I can find my group, my friends, more easily.  I was so busy with school there, I had friends, but in California the Deaf community is not that close; they’re more spread out.

RM: What about the disability community in Berkeley?

JN: I wasn’t involved with that then.

RM: It’s really, in a way, the capital of disability culture in this country. 

JN: Really?

RM: Yes, it’s one of the most accessible cities, it’s the birth of the independent living movement. And it was one of the first schools to be integrated for disabled students.  They have a thriving disability studies program at this point. 

CW: Ah the good old days when I lived in Berkeley.

JN: Not my time I guess.  Maybe I was too focused on school back then.  I know one professor that’s involved with disability studies there, Celeste Langan… She was one of my teachers and  was on my comps committee also. 

RM: So now you’re a GW success story and so is Gail Paster, now that she’s in the high profile position at the Shakespeare Library.