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MEDIA LITERACY AND INTERCULTURAL DIALOGUE<br />
Strategies, Debates and Good Practices<br />
<br />
What constitutes an audiovisual image is a disjunction, a dissociation from the<br />
visual and the sonant, both autonomous, but at the same time an immeasurable<br />
relationship of an “irrational” that connects one to the other without becoming a<br />
whole, without turning into the minimum whole.<br />
Ouedraogo (2011), in an investigation of cinema, sound and education,<br />
highlights the relationship between sound and image that implies the<br />
consolidated coupling of eye-ear. The authors consider the audiovisual<br />
perspective of the senses of sight and hearing taking into account that<br />
spectators have both. However, we are proposing an analysis about other<br />
perceptive paths, tread by subjects that lack the auditory reception of sound.<br />
The hearing-impaired develop sight as their main information input source.<br />
Without hearing, they cannot perceive audiovisual as those without this<br />
handicap. How do the hearing-impaired assign meaning to image and sound? If<br />
they follow a different perceptive path, will their reception of audiovisual works<br />
do so as well?<br />
The question of how deaf people perceive audiovisual stimulus has stirred<br />
sound researcher Michael Chion. The author asks if, when they are watching<br />
television, “(...) the deaf mobilize the same regions at the center of the brain as<br />
hearing people for sound (...)”? (1994, p. 12).The author does not give an<br />
answer, but his questions moves us to conduct our research more specifically<br />
with the deaf.<br />
Those who were born with bilateral deep neuro-sensorial deafness have never<br />
experience hearing sound. They do not have auditory memory, have not<br />
developed oral language, which characterizes pre-language deafness. The<br />
profoundly deaf are not capable of hearing the human voice. Even though they<br />
cannot hear those sounds, according to Freeman, Carbin and Boese (1999),<br />
sound can reach them through bone or skin, permitting the deaf the perception<br />
of the mechanical wave of vibration. In that sense, even though the deaf cannot<br />
hear, they have all the conditions necessary to interact with sound, something<br />
that is not exclusive of hearing people.<br />
2. Sound, deafness and stereotypes<br />
Cinema has dealt with the relationship between sound and deafness in some<br />
films, which will help us illustrate how that confluence has helped build<br />
stereotypes. On Children of a Lesser God, by Randa Haines, the deafnesssound<br />
dichotomy points out the differences between two worlds. Actor William<br />
Hurt plays a speech teacher who falls in love with his former student Sarah, a<br />
deaf character played by Marlee Matlin. They are protagonists of a sensible<br />
narrative in which the importance of sounds lies in its representation of the<br />
difference between the deaf and the hearing. While Hurt, playing professor<br />
Leeds, finds self-realization by teaching his deaf students to speak and sing,<br />
Sarah defends deaf culture and sign language, which does not include speech<br />
or sound as an element of constitution of its identity. On this movie narrative, we<br />
highlight the scene in which deaf students sing and dance for their parents on<br />
their graduation. On Thoma’s conception (2002), this scene, which brings up<br />
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