I glanced around the small cafe, at all the hearing people sitting at their tables. Indeed, some had craned their necks to look at our movements, but this was behavior I’d long ago ceased to notice. “Yeah,” I signed back, bluntly. “That often happens.”

My friend smiled. A moment later, we started conversing again, and I think then she understood: This is what it can be like to occupy a signing body.

To use sign language, to embrace it in non-signing public spaces, one must sometimes push against ideas of having committed a gross indiscretion. These notions, I confess, haunted my relationship with my body for years after my childhood friend told me not to point. How obvious signing was, how indiscreet in the “conventional” sense: what I was pointing at, my lively facial expressions, my sense of physical restraint! I was already shy as a child, reluctant to put myself on display. So for a while I felt embarrassed, but then learned not to be. This happened out of necessity, out of self-acceptance and, frankly, joy in my own signing body, but for other nonnative signers it happens out of choice. As several other hearing friends have told me since, when they sign with me in public they feel rather conspicuous. “Should I do this?” they ask me. “Is it too much?”

Too much: To me these words succinctly articulate the taboos that can linger about bodily expressiveness. Hearing culture presents us with ideals of speaking with good elocution, restraint and self-control. Now, I admit, I see these ideals as visually impoverished, inaccessible and uninteresting: They produce spaces full of immobile talking heads, disembodied sound and visual inattentiveness. Those qualities become the optical equivalent of speaking in a monotone. As much as I also enjoy spoken words, allowing my body to speak for itself feels, simply, more real. Even if that means signing is sometimes read as a visual spectacle.

My hearing friends, who have often never had to cope with being looked at, can struggle the most with this sense of spectacle. When they learn to sign with me — and there are still too few who really learn — they must overcome these cultural taboos about excessive movement, pointing and gesture. Over the years, I have kept a mental list of the comments they make at the beginning stages.

“I don’t know what to do with my hands. It’s like I’ve just discovered I have them.”

“Are you sure it’s O.K. to point? At him?”