Jennifer Rayman

Jennifer Rayman is an Associate Professor of American Sign Language and Deaf Studies at California State University, Sacramento.  Her connection to the DEAF-WORLD and fascination with American Sign Language began at a young age.  Early in her career worked as an ASL/English Interpreter in university settings.   Within the Deaf community, she left behind the life of an interpreter to focus on being a committed friend and ally to the Deaf people in her life.  She began her academic career by studying with Carol Padden and Tom Humphries at UC San Diego and moved on to teach at the University of Central Lancashire in Preston, England before settling in Sacramento.

Hollywood Speaks in the 21st Century: Talking Culture in “Switched at Birth”

Drawing on the groundbreaking work of Tom Humphries (2008) “Talking Culture/Culture Talking”, I analyze episodes from the television series “Switched at Birth.” Building on my previous work “The Politics and Practice of Voice: Representing American Sign Language on the Screen in Two Recent Television Crime Dramas” (2010), I take a two-fold approach, examining both the cultural capital circulated in mainstream television shows as well as production practices of framing sign language on the screen. Over twenty years after the original publication of John Schuchman’s “Hollywood Speaks: Deafness and the Film Entertainment Industry,” the time has come to pose the question: has mainstream Hollywood finally begun to ‘talk’ Deaf Culture?