We’re waving hands! Creating a graphic novel in Quebec Sign Language

Véro Leduc has spent many years involved in different social causes such as queer, sex worker and feminist movements, promoting their voices on public places. When she arrived in the Deaf community, she wanted to produce a graphic novel so that Deaf folks could wave hands to hearing people, to get their attention and consideration. Realizing Quebec Sign Language is an embodied language for which there is no systematic writing, she spent a couple insomniac nights trying to figure out how to write this language. If writing—an act through which language is inscribed on a medium—is capable of communicating, reflecting upon, debating, citing, remembering, and translating knowledge, what kind of writing is needed for signed knowledge to exist? This chapter relates her journey of creating a graphic novel in Quebec Sign Language and her reflections on the agency digital media are offering for Deaf and signed epistemologies.