Pretty soon, you may be seeing this icon in malls, airports, and restaurants, near the restrooms or in other designated areas, as well as on product packages: an international symbol for breastfeeding, designed by one of our community’s foremost designers, Matt Daigle, who is also known for his Deaf-related comics.

One of my co-workers, who is currently breastfeeding her son, alerted me to this news article on www.mothering.com, which is run by Mothering—Natural Family Living. They hosted a contest inviting designers to submit icon designs for breastfeeding, and to the thrill of Mothering and mothers everywhere, Daigle came up with the winning design: 

If you look through the news article and its related links, you’ll see the other design submissions. Now let me emphasize, icon and symbol design is incredibly difficult. IBM, Coca-Cola, and Apple (Macintosh) paid millions in developing their logos, mainly because in order to sell or promote a product, the image must be memorable and instantly recognizable. Daigle has achieved this effect with his design.  

The other icons submitted to Mothering…some of them have the quality of being recognizable in the sense that they represent breastfeeding, while others were more obscure…and none of them achieve the same fluid simplicity that infuses Daigle’s design. They all had flaws such as gender bias, too much detail, awkward sharpness, or graphic explicitness.  

Most societies could not cope with an icon that showed the female breast in plain terms, which some of the submitted designs did. Daigle was smart enough to avoid this while still evoking a relationship between the baby’s head and the breast, simply by using a circle positioned in just the right place. In his interview with Mothering, Daigle said he wanted to invoke a feeling of femininity, without being too blatant about it, and indeed, his choice of shapes, especially in how the contours are soft, carry this out very well.  

Daigle’s sensitivity to the needs of motherhood and breastfeeding stems from personal experience, both as a father and husband, and as a deaf person. His wife breastfed their son, and he recalls the difficulty in finding public facilities that catered to the needs of young families. Furthermore, he said that as “a profoundly deaf individual, I know how important it is to communicate through visual means.” Of course, this icon would be beneficial for all mothers, but as a deaf woman myself, I can’t help thinking about how nice it would be if deaf mothers everywhere could now just look for this icon and go take care of their babies, without having to go through the embarrassment of inquiring after such facilities, when communication with service personnel might be difficult.  

Daigle has signed his design over into the public domain, making it free of copyright and royalty restrictions. This means corporations, small businesses, organizations and individuals everywhere can now use this icon. Kudos to you, Mr. Daigle, for making a solid contribution to humanity!

One night last summer, at my parents’ home in California, I was sitting outside on the porch by the junipers, thinking about the usual things–art, ASL, deaf symbols–when I started imagining different covers for some of the projects knocking around in my head, and my ILY Barbie came to mind. Wouldn’t it look cute, say, on the cover of a Hallmark-type card? Yes, it’s a desperate cuteness, I know, but read on…

I was trying to envision a nice and ideal way of photographing the ILY Barbie and somehow I felt stumped. I had the doll clearly in my mind’s eye, hitting all the usual angles (worm shot, bird’s eye, frontal, profile) but nothing looked right. Then I realized that the problem wasn’t my compositional efforts. The problem was the doll itself. Its arm, the one with the ILY hand shape, is too stiff, sticking out to the side at a very awkward angle—the only thing it makes me think of is (disclaimer: pugnacious cliché about to be used) a soccer mom waving her kids down the walk as they set off to school. Observe:

The arm on Barbie does not have the intimate kind of look, with the forearm cozily tucked in toward the chest, with the ILY tilted in a sort of charming sideways flounce, which is used in close interactions, nor is it capable of accurately depicting the way real deaf women would hold their arms way out above their heads when waving ILYs at the departing party. Soccer mom, this Barbie is, and a non-signer at that. Bad for accuracy in regard to the deaf experience, although I reckon the photograph above has got some appeal.

So my frustration turned to focus on the issue of the ASL photographer and artist. With Barbie out of the picture, I wondered about other objects we could work with. All the good 3-D drawing models I have seen feature well-articulated heads or torsos, and sometimes good arms and legs, for posing (let’s not even consider those mannequins from IKEA—they articulate so poorly, just what’s deserved for their puny price tag). I rarely see plaster models of hands in a drawing studio (they are incredibly difficult to mold). So what about well-articulated hands? Of course the permutations of the hand and its digits are so fine, it would require an intricate job of engineering, but for a life-sized wooden modeling hand, the ball joints could be small but effective enough to respond to manipulation. I realized that I have never seen a fully-articulated hand with joints that could actually function in close semblance to the real human hand, opposable thumb and all (I’m sure they exist, with very high price tags attached).

How come we don’t have a plethora of such hands on the market? For drawing practice, or for decoration, such as on fireplace mantels and in entry nooks. On the cheap side, we should be seeing shelves full of hands in a variety of shapes, all the hand shapes of ASL in plastic, with cheerful colors for kids, buffed dark for urbanites, plump country for cottage grandmas, and yes, an assortment of gaudy reds and pinks for Valentine’s Day, with extra stock orders on the ILY model. Manufactured in China to the tune of $1.00 per item. I dream of a consumer-based paradigm that pays proper respect to the creative potential of the hand and the language that depends on it.

What I do have at home is a variety of (ahem) “hearing-produced” objects in the form of various hand shapes, most of which are intended for purposes such as holding toothbrushes, cigarettes, letters or incense, as well as for displaying gloves or holding flowers. I also have a novelty item, a Balinese wooden carving of the “F” word. And like the Barbie, they all have their compositional problems. Oh well.

By Sara Stallard

The Super Duper Speech Company (circa 1989) would like to emphasize ten things which you need to understand about the person who does your speech therapy:

1. It’s not “speech therapist;” it’s “speech-language pathologist.”
2. Your speech-language pathologist is definitely a woman.
3. Your speech-language pathologist hides behind her desk.
4. Your speech-language pathologist has bugged out eyes.
5. Your speech-language pathologist has crazy hair.
6. Your speech-language pathologist writes notes to your parents.
7. Your speech-language pathologist is responsible for your behavior on the school bus.
8. Your speech-language pathologist hoards her trash.
9. Your speech-language pathologist is proud to be a speechaholic.
10. Your speech-language pathologist is a wannabe expert in fine arts restoration.

I have a penchant for collecting visual material of all sorts, and during one of my regular foraying expeditions, I discovered this gem among a bunch of other equally cheerful posters, such as one featuring a magenta brontosaurus imploring us with the entreatment, “Don’t let good speech become extinct.” Hoo boy, what a masterpiece: the Super Duper Speech Company definitely hit on the formula for marketing speech as the pinnacle to attain, the reward at the top of a long arduous winding alpine path, the one so many of us have traveled and given up on.

No effing way… In regard to my supposed admiration of this masterpiece, I’ve been lying through my clenched teeth… The speechaholic poster is one of the strangest things I have ever seen, in the long and illustrious history of all graphic materials ever produced (for those not in the know, I received a few years worth of quality education in graphic design and art history at RIT). Good design means good communication—but just what exactly does the speechaholic poster communicate?

Consider the garish red of the background. How much more aggressive can color get? Also observe the absolute insistence upon authority, in all matters linguistic and vocal—it’s imperative that you understand how “notes” are sent to parents, instead of “requests” or “recommendations.” The intention behind this poster is to establish the boundaries of the speech-language pathologist’s territory—the poster is designed to go up on an office door, and I am sharply reminded of the alley cats who leave their pugnacious spray marks on my front door in their fight over the exclusive right to occupy the porch.

Only a nutcase would believe that this poster could put clients at ease—wait, did I say “clients”? Sorry, I meant “patients.” But then again, in the pathologizing of deaf people, it’s not only “patients” that we are, we’re also invisible subjects, seen nowhere in the speech-language pathologist’s megalomaniac bubble. In this remarkable piece of work, there are no deaf children with chubby cute fingers in the picture, nor gap-toothed stutterers or doe-eyed angels with Down Syndrome (and this is from before political correctness!)—in this picture, the speech-language pathologist exists for herself alone. She’s completely disassociated from those who are supposed to receive the fruits of her benevolence, and the Super Duper Speech Company wants to make this absolutely clear to everybody. The speech-language pathologist is a giant in her own right.

Some kid out there protested this insanity long ago. I applaud the little upstart for his or her truly courageous act of resistance: the little poster-within-the-poster, with the proclamation “I [heart] Speech!?!”, was violated by graffiti. Our unknown hero brandished a pen and did a Zorro on the little poster, making a thin but clear X over the image. This ultimately resulted in number ten on the list above. Our crafty and talented speech-language pathologist used white-out to lovingly restore her poster (along with red marker for the heart—how evocative of grammatical corrections this is!). My, my, this makes for a cute case study of socio-political aesthetics: contemplate the significance of white-out and its potential uses as a creative motif in depicting the myriad approaches of how society deals with deaf people and other deviants. How much does society try to cover up? And how blatant are they about it?

I swear, every time I look at this poster, I snicker. What the heck was the publisher thinking? Is speech therapy really that scary? I don’t remember it being that uncomfortable—I actually enjoyed speech hour. In fact, I won the elementary school award one year, for being “best speech student,” back when I was a gormless second grader, strutting around making clucking sounds in the back of my throat in deep study of the vocal velar plosive, “g.” I’m told it was cute, but they’re lying, aren’t they? It must have been extremely annoying. Anyway, if any of you teachers, designers, scientists, and stuffy bureaucrats in state educational departments out there want to promote speech as a worthwhile and comfortable pursuit to be embraced by the deaf, signing and non-signing alike, Super Duper’s approach is the perfect way to fail. Apparently Super Duper has wised up and discontinued the poster series.

Sara Stallard loves art, books, cats, and urban landscapes. When she’s not reading, writing or challenging her friends to Scrabble, she can be found prowling around DC’s Eastern Market in search of the perfect cup of coffee. She also enjoys dancing and gardening.

By Sara Stallard

Joseph Grigely exploits his deafness and makes art out of handwritten conversations–scraps of paper used when communicating with hearing people. He turns them into tableaux for display in various installments. Grigely has done shows where gallery visitors get to write out their own notes on a desk. He has been featured in major exhibitions where there are hundreds of notes all over the walls, preserved bits and snatches of babble, be they intelligent or insipid, all up for close scrutiny by those who come and gawk at the marvel of how the typical use of speech has been circumvented. High-quality prints of select conversational notes have been sold in limited editions. His work has been published in art magazines, exhibition catalogs, and in books, and his exhibits have been shown all over the world, in Japan, Ireland, the Czech Republic, France, the United Kingdom, as well as throughout the cosmopolitan cities of America.

One vital aspect of Grigely’s work which astonishes hearing people is witnessing how conversations look, sans sound. On a visual level, Grigely employs a careful yet attractive aesthetic, demonstrating a tendency to arrange his collected notes according to their color. Once, in Prague, he put together a group of notes of which all the colors were variants of blue, while the comments themselves created contrast via the ideas expressed. Indeed, the truly precious qualities of his work are the ideas found in these tableaux, which range from the mundane to the esoteric, from the prim to the bawdy, from the precise to the unintelligible. Some contain drawings, cartoonish or intricately illustrative. Some have arrow connectors, for linking key terms or indicating continuation elsewhere when space runs out (oh yes, we all know how that goes). Most ensue in hilarity or bewilderment, depending on who you are and whatever strokes the quiver of your wit.

Two of my favorite bons mots from one of Grigely’s books, Conversation Pieces (1998), read as follows:

He’s being very rude

about me
I, unfortunately am too
small to fit a wonderbra
He
It’s not something I would
have told you about even
if you could hear—
I would still have written
it don down!

and

This reminded me of one night when I was living in a big warehouse in St. Paul. Some pals & I went into the basement (where bands rented practice rooms) to check out the scene. There were a few people partying & really wasted. A woman showed us how she played “Butt Darts” – by sticking a quarter between her (clothed) butt cheeks & dropping it into a cup. She seemed to think it was the coolest…

Notice how the first example above mentioned the artist’s deafness as a consideration in how the writer chose to communicate. I wonder at the assumption the writer made about herself: would she really have written that down if Grigely was not deaf? Might she not have whispered in his ear, instead? Also, there’s the self-identified cultural stance of being “Deaf,” a position which Grigely largely eschews—I cannot help but wonder about how Grigely perceives such treatment as he received from the writer of that blushing missive, and whether or not participants in last year’s Unity for Gallaudet protests would have reacted differently. With its inclusion in Conversation Pieces, we still cannot tell if Grigely ever views such blasé comments as offensive or if he is simply indifferent to the significance of that ever-so-generic postulation which so many of us hate: “…if you could hear…” Grigely never makes statements judging such perspectives. This is the hallmark of his work: we, the audience (etymological pun intended), decide these things for ourselves.

The second example above is interesting in an altogether different way. Consider how the writer organizes his thoughts using parentheses and quotation marks, despite the slightly imperfect grammar. Even the two uses of parentheses differ from each other; the first use of parentheses is a proper aside, while the second conveys additional emphasis. Also remarkable is how the writer does not utilize common utterances as one might have imagined he would have, if using speech: “…went into the basement, like where bands come and practice, y’know, and so, we checked out the scene, yo, and there were a few people…” The writer of this particular narrative is obviously constrained by the formalism of academic writing. Compare this to the rush of the first writer above as she makes mistakes and crosses them out in her written iteration of the surrounding small talk. Again, Grigely makes no such analysis for anybody’s benefit; these observations are mine, probably because I was an English major in college and I revel in the minutiae of linguistic cadence.

As I write, recite, and dissect at this moment, there is a Grigely show in Baltimore, Maryland, just 35 minutes north of us here in Washington, DC. It runs through August 22nd. So let’s get to that!

Grigely’s exhibition, St. Cecilia, which is housed in five rooms at the Contemporary Museum (see below for address and URL) features a segment entitled “We’re Drunken Bantering About What’s Important In Life,” in which there are two rectangular groups of notes spreading out perpendicularly from the corner along the walls at eye height. On the left-hand side, the notes are all variants of white, while on the right-hand side; the colors resemble those of an irregular kaleidoscope. It’s interesting to look at, from the other side of the room, but the real enjoyment is found in going up close to those two walls and taking the time to read each and every piece tacked up on those walls. Refer to above for reasons why this is fun. Just heed the signs and don’t touch. The oil from our hands is highly corrosive (make note to self: one of the many scary things about our hands—no wonder museum guards always follow me and my friends—they’re suspicious of our flying hands).

The rest of the exhibit is comprised of aural and visual explorations, with the use of speakers and videos. Grigely has lately been developing and presenting unorthodox ways of appreciating how sound and sight all interact. Apparently, hearing people find this very interesting, and indeed, Grigely’s innovative elucidations of how pronunciation can be confusing, along with the implicit dangers of lip reading, are relevant in light of a continuously audist world. But, you, my fellow literati, are likely to be deaf, Deaf, or hard-of-hearing, and irrespective of your preference for either ASL or English, you’ll probably enjoy “We’re Drunken Bantering About What’s Important In Life” the most. It’s sure to stroke that textual beast inside you.

Grigely’s exhibition St. Cecilia is named after the patron saint of music, and while four-fifths of the exhibition appears to be largely for the benefit of hearing people, it is still evident that English and any other written language is subject to the experiential reality of one’s being deaf, as Grigely so plainly demonstrates. I think we’ve all got this in common, whether or not we realize it or care.

——————–
Joseph Grigely
St. Cecilia.
May 6—August 22, 2007
Contemporary Museum.
100 W. Centre Street, Baltimore, MD, 21201
(Admission varies. Donations encouraged.)
http://www.contemporary.org/

You can also run a Google search on Grigely. What a unique last name! Anyway, there’s plenty of information out there. Including how he started his collegiate studies with NTID (takes a bit of digging, that one) and earned a doctorate from Oxford University. Und so weiter.

Sara Stallard loves art, books, cats, and urban landscapes. When she’s not reading, writing or challenging her friends to Scrabble, she can be found prowling around DC’s Eastern Market in search of the perfect cup of coffee. She also enjoys dancing and gardening.