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.