Deaf group rights - how to sign RIGHT

I went to hear Steve Emery's public lecture on The Minority Group Rights of Deaf People on Monday 22nd November.  By the end of it I realised I don't really know what rights are and I am not entirely sure what a Deaf group is, either.  There was plenty of food for thought.

And I started thinking about the sign RIGHT - as in "A power or privilege granted by an agreement or law".  When I first learned BSL, the sign meaning this sort of right was the same signs as the sign meaning "correct" and only the context distinguished it (as it still does in English, of course.) But over the last few years, a new sign for the 'power and privilege' meaning has come in - with the upturned flat open 'B' hand contacting the contralateral chest.

Now it is shifting.  Steve articulated it at that lecture in a way I have now seen it quite often, at the sternum.  That central area is used in signs for concepts that are central to the self such as "I", "Identity" and "character" so this new location feels as though the rights are accorded to the whole person and the core of the 'self'.

Then, in the Q&A afterwards, Iain articulated the same sign at waist level and almost ipsilaterally (certainly the ipsilateral side of central). The lower signs are more metaphorically to do with the core of your being.  Paddy Ladd's concept DEAFHOOD (referring to the process of being Deaf that extends way beyond what the ears might or might not be doing) is articulated at diaphragm level, and the same sign RIGHT when Iain signed it had more of a feeling of the visceral needs but it also felt much more practical and less abstracted than a sign higher up the body.  A sign BUSINESS has the same handshape and inward movement and is at the same height but contacts the side of the body at the waist, not the front.  Putting RIGHT down where BUSINESS is suggests more of the active process of having rights - taking them and doing something with them.

Afterwards, I saw another sign, in which the articulating hand doesn't contact the body at all.  Instead, it is directed to and contacts the index finger of the non-dominant hand.  Far less personal, far more "grammatical" (involving a classifier sign for a single, probably human, entity) and more detached, it feels more abstract and theoretical. It also is more individualistic, and it suggests the rights accorded to an individual rather than to a group. It feels very odd to sign RIGHT towards a classifier sign for a collective group

It will be interesting to see where this ends because I suspect it's not over yet. So far we have only seen where the rights end up; we have yet to see where they come from