Sound and Fury

[Name of the Institute]

Sound and Fury

Introduction

Filmmakers Roger Weisberg and Josh Aronson follow the Artinian family as it comes to terms with the controversial cochlear implant, a device that stimulates the auditory nerve endings and thereby permits some deaf people to hear. Peter and Nita Artinian, a deaf couple, fall squarely in the anti-cochlear camp because they feel strongly that deaf culture is threatened by it, and so are stunned when their deaf five-year-old daughter, Heather, announces she wants the implant. While the Artinians are debating if this is right for her, Peter's hearing brother Chris and his unimpaired wife Mari decide that they are going to go ahead with the implant for their 18-month-old son -- provoking hurt and anger from Mari's deaf parents, who think their decision means they are ashamed of their son's handicap and thus ashamed of them.

Analysis

The documentary Sound and Fury (2000). which was nominated for an Oscar, traces the impact of cochlear implants (ci) on one Long Island Family, the Artinians. Peter and Nita Artinian do not sign merely for themselves. Their attitudes and beliefs are widely shared by others in the Deaf community. And their objection to cochlear implants is not without historical precedent in that community. In fact, it resembles nothing so much as the mid-twentieth-century Deaf reaction to hearing aids. Deaf people's response to such medical technologies has been remarkably consistent in denying that theirs is a medical condition in need of a cure. In other words, they firmly rejected the medical model of deafness (Chute, Nevins, 2002).

But they also objected to the ideological values the technologies embodied. Both hearing aids and cochlear implants privilege speaking and hearing over signing and seeing. Both assume that communication by speech is unquestionably better than communication by sign. The Deaf community has historically responded negatively to that assessment of its language. More deeply, its members have rejected the medical judgment that their bodies are deficient. Regarding their deafness as a wholly natural condition, as norm al as hearing, they have repeatedly indicated their community's preference for the visual over the audio-logical, as well as for sign over speech.

The Artinians' rejection of cochlear implants can best be understood within the Deaf tradition of questioning technologies that seem to show deafness in a negative light. The early twenty-first-century American Deaf community of which they are members has nearly two centuries of cultural experience, development, and history on which to draw as it faces the challenge of cochlear implants. A word about this community and its culture is perhaps warranted. There are roughly 28 million deaf and hard-of-hearing Americans in the United States today, but most of them are people with age-related hearing loss. Most, in other words, are culturally hearing people who can no longer hear. The number of Americans who consider themselves culturally Deaf that is who identified themselves as members of the Deaf community and not just as people with an audio-logical condition, is estimated to be between 400,000 and 600,000. One can be ...