Photoshopping Out a Model's Cochlear Implant

During my junior year summer, I voluteered at a homeless shelter, passing out clothes and toiletries to the clients who visited us. One of the clients was a deaf man, and, despite his regular visits, we were always strikingly unprepared for him. None of the staff could sign, nor did we even have blank pieces of paper for him to write on. Instead, he was relegated to writing in the corner of the sign in sheet to relay his needs to us. The tug of war between the teaching of ASL versus English to deaf students seems to assume that the core issue is maximizing deaf people's ability to communicate and interact with the hearing world. Watching Deaf Jam, however, I wondered why the onus must necessarily be on the deaf. Why are hearing people not expected to know ASL? At the very least, why is it assumed that any communication between a deaf and hearing person relies soley on the deaf person? I guiltily admit that this question never even occured to me until I saw how Tahani had been the one to reach out to Aneta. This act of communication was not perfect; often, Tahani would err, such as when she told Aneta that Aneta had previously heard one of Tahani's poems. However, the communication was still there, with both parties attempting to create a relationship with each other, a process I found myself admiring and hoping to see more of in the future, perhaps with myself as the active agent.