• In the [UK] Times, TV reviewer Andrew Billen says the judges prompted controversy by tossing out a deaf contestant because she didn’t look “disabled enough.” In the end, he said, “one-legged Rebecca was eliminated instead, on the old fashioned grounds that she took a terrible picture.”
• In the UK] Guardian, Helienne Lindvall applauds the effort to expand the public concept of beauty, but doesn’t like all the sensationalism.
  

  Last night’s episode of the BBC3 show featured the girls modeling lingerie in a shop window, and another episode will have them on the catwalk. Though I haven’t seen all of them, I fear that this competition seems to be highlighting what the girls can’t do, rather than all the things they can. Couldn’t they have picked a different profession for them to aspire to than one that has such an aversion to the slightest imperfection?… Sadly, though, if it wasn’t sensationalist, would half as many people tune in?

From the New York Times, a feature about Mormon missionaries in the South Bronx. Jacob Frost, who is hearing impaired, at right in photo, and Jeffrey Westra, who isn’t, use American Sign Language as they visit current church members, recruit potential members and reach out to those who have strayed.

The church’s efforts to minister to the deaf in New York began in 1991. By 1998, the church had formed a deaf congregation, which today has some 250 members, about 100 of whom live in the Bronx …

(New York Times photo)

By William Lee Adams, Time Magazine:

The series premiere on July 1 drew half a million viewers in the U.K., driving BBC Three ratings up by 25 per cent for the 9 p.m. time slot. That popularity will doubtless spur more debate over the show and its impact.

Liz Carr, a comic who uses a wheelchair and hosts a BBC radio show on disability called Ouch!, applauds the series for presenting disabled women as beautiful and sexual, as opposed to broken and damaged. Still, she questions if reality TV is the proper platform to confront stereotypes. “I’m not sure that seeing disabled women prance around in lingerie and having their bodies objectified is the best way to change representation,” she says.

True to reality TV form, the eight women live together in a crowded London penthouse, and, as the competition heats up, their claws come out. But their conflicts and insecurities, which often revolve around their disabilities, often reflect issues within the disabled community. (more…)

From the Corpus Christi [Texas] Caller-Times:

Katherine (Katie) Murch, with her mother, left, has made education her mission. The reigning Miss Deaf Texas can’t accept the fact that the average deaf high school graduate only reads at a fourth-grade level. She says more education is needed for parents of children with hearing impairments “so they won’t be frightened or indifferent.”

Murch, who was born profoundly deaf, maintains a 3.6 grade-point average at Texas A&M University-Corpus Christi. She is among the 22 women who will vie for the Miss Deaf America title on Thursday.

Murch’s history as an education advocate for the deaf began with her own desire to be mainstreamed into Flour Bluff schools. It sparked a four-year court battle that ended with a Texas Supreme Court decision requiring the district to provide special programming for the incoming fourth-grader.

With video of Murch signing. “I want to send a message around the world that deaf people can. Deaf people will,” she says. (Caller-Times photo)

… has been posted on Youtube.

Among the high points: The show grapples with standard concepts of beauty; contestants discuss how they feel about their own disabilities and who is “worse off”; fashion industry people confess their discomfort and wonder whether disability “sells”; a photographer asks the model prospects if he can shoot their impairments; contestants cope with access problems; contestants pose in lingerie; and judges debate which prospect might make the best “role model.”

Quotes from the introduction:

Beauty sells. Beauty is perfection.

Competition to make it as a top model in the cut-throat world of fashion is second to none.

So what are the chances of a disabled woman making it in a world obsessed with perfection?

“God, New York would rather burn their city down than put a disabled model on the catwalk, I reckon.”

“Disability has a natural place in life, so why shouldn’t it be part of fashion?”

(BBC photo)

Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, AP/Chicago Tribune:

Disagreements over the relative benefits of sign language, speech education, cochlear implants and hearing aids were on display at a recent convention of advocates for people with hearing impairments.

A gathering of about 1,500 members of the Alexander Graham Bell Association for the Deaf and Hard of Hearing in Milwaukee last weekend was disrupted by about 600 protesters from the Deaf Bilingual Coalition.

Coalition members, who advocate the teaching of sign language to babies and their parents, complained that they had been shut out of the convention.

From the Washington Post:

Washington’s Gallaudet University was torn apart by an angry wave of student protest over its selection of a president two years ago, threatening its accreditation. It’s just been notified that its accreditation will be reaffirmed.

The stamp of approval from the Middle States Commission on Higher Education caps months of work and transformation: new leadership, a new curriculum, a new emphasis on sign language, a new push to prove results with solid data and a new tranquility …

… [The school] never lost accreditation, which higher education officials say is effectively a death knell for a university, but the past months of probation and then a warning from the commission have hobbled its ability to recruit students and keep up enrollment.