​​A change is clearly underway. Three years ago one would be hard pressed to find any critical literature on disability and stuttering. Today, however, more and more discussions can be found exploring stuttering as an oppressed form of communication and questioning the impulse to normalize it through rehabilitative medicine. As such articles continue to come out, we thought it could be helpful to write short and accessible reviews both to let people know what is happening and to lend a critical lens to the discussion. 

Today, I would like to talk about a recent article published by the International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology titled “To be or not to be: Stuttering and the human costs of being ‘un-disabled’.” The essay is written by Brian Paul Watermeyer (PhD), a clinical psychologist at the Department of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences at Cape Town University, and Harsha Kathard (D.Ed), an SLP professor at Cape Town University. 

The central argument of this paper is that there is a psychological cost in striving for normalcy, and that SLPs are often complicit in creating the desire to be normal within stutterers. As Watermeyer and Kathard write, “[W]e hope that these reflections may contribute to deepening reflection among rehabilitation professionals of how our work may harmonize unhelpfully with cultural imperatives towards normalcy” (p. 8). This is a bold and important question, and I hope that it continues to be asked. 

Watermeyer and Kathard explicitly offer few answers. Rather, their hope in this piece is to open up space for future research. One of the questions they return to often is why, given that many other disabilities have been claimed as a positive part of one’s identity, is it seemingly so hard to think of stuttering as a “legitimate way of being and communicating” (p. 6)? Why is it that “the idea of making space for stuttering as a legitimate human difference—like some other impairments—feels incongruous?” (p. 6) Again, this is an excellent question meant to break down obstacles to (what we would refer to as) stuttering pride.  

However, one of the peculiar things about this paper is that while explicitly written from the perspective of disability studies, it doesn’t draw very deeply upon the resources offered by the field. Besides a couple one-off references to Garland-Thomson (1997, 2009) and Davis (1996), Watermeyer and Kathard draw almost exclusively upon Watermeyer’s previous publications. This of course wouldn’t be a problem if there was a lack of relevant literature to work with and if Watermeyer offered the best theory with which to think critically about stuttering. Yet I am not convinced that this is the case. I suggest the result is that Watermeyer and Kathard 1) have difficulty drawing generative conclusions and 2) are at times forced to create problems and distinctions that don’t actually exist. 

For example, Watermeyer and Kathard argue that most disabilities can be incorporated as a positive aspect of identity because “all ‘selves’ are both normal and not, both frail and robust and subject to both hope and despair” (p. 6). Yet Watermeyer and Kathard continue by setting stuttering in a separate category: “In contrast, data on stuttering suggest a picture of discrete, competing selves jostling for prominence. Here, to stutter is to fail in the quest to embody the ‘normal’ part of the inner split” (p. 6). This is a rather arbitrary and unhelpful distinction for a host of reasons. The first one that comes to mind is that Watermeyer and Kathard tend to treat identity as a free-floating thing in the social sphere. Rather than drawing conclusions about stuttering from generalized notions of identity, we need to investigate the (historical) process of how specific arrangements of identity and subjectivity are formed around the experience of stuttering. Of course the experience of stuttering is both similar and different from other forms of disability. Yet this in itself means very little. 

The larger problem, however, is that these are not primarily academic issues. If true that it is more difficult for society in general to think of stuttering as a “legitimate way of being and communicating” (p. 6) than using a wheelchair, for example, this is only because activists in the disability rights movement have been working tirelessly for 40 years to change ableist perceptions and institutions/structures around what it means to use/require a wheelchair. Stuttering, on the other hand, does not have this history. This is an activist and social issue, not an inherent problem with “stuttering identity.”    

In conclusion, and on a related note, it is telling the way in which this article ends. Following their excellent call for greater reflection on how SLP practices may be complicit with cultural imperatives towards normalcy, Watermeyer and Kathard write: “Integrating this awareness into new theoretical approaches may create a more humanitarian balance between the drive to correct and the path towards societies more able to manage difference” (p. 8). I find it very telling that the outcome of reflecting on our culture’s drive toward normalcy is summed up in words like “balance” and “manage difference.” Understanding disability/stuttering justice as a “balance” or middle ground  between assimilating difference and making space for it will always be the problem of working within the system, of trying to produce change from within the medical-industrial complex. Similarly, difference is not described as something to embrace, celebrate, or radically include, but as something (a challenge or problem) for a bureaucracy to “manage.” Managing difference is not how a more just world is created. In this context, it is hard to take seriously their concluding belief that “social change in disability is not the sole responsibility of health professions, but our influence in shaping disability culture is beyond question” (p. 8). 

Excuse us, but we are not done with the questions.

-Josh

In the course of the advocacy work done on this website, the authors, this writer included, have brushed over how dysfluency means different things in different social contexts to distinct forms of dysfluency. There are differences between blocking on words, between finding enormous difficulty with merely saying anything at all, and between a collection of speech abnormalities that merely delay conversations (such as tics).

The truly irrelevant questions in this mix are those always asked by the non-dysfluent: how often? How long? What causes it?

Dysfluency is not made up of any singular force but a combination of emotion, experience, language, and the situation of the conversation.

The forms it takes and the social respectability those forms are accorded, however, do differ along a hierarchy. Most stigmatized in the stutterer world are the blockers. People who block are those who are the mythic embodiers of a lifetime of ableist trauma over mis-pronounciation. They inherit the memories of being looked at funny every time they mispronounce. In response to this build up, so the story goes, instead of accepting dysfluency or speech glitch, they simply stop, preferring the gap to nothing at all.

I tell that tale in a kind of self-doubting voice with the explicit goal of considering how even with the conversations among stutterers and dysfluent people, there is a kind of pity pointed toward those whose dysfluency causes them to block.

Yes, the hierarchy of dysfluency is real and near the top of this pyramid, yours truly sits, who had received the passing-privilege benefit of early speech therapy that allowed me to learn to pretend to give eye contact as well as time in the debate world which also conditioned me to (sometimes) give eye contact.

The writers for Did I Stutter often sit in this position of not being blockers and not being visibly pitied within their (own stuttering) sub-community.

And the natural benefit to our level of smoothness and respectability might be that the extra confidence gained allows us to write and reflect on the vicissitudes of stuttering oppression.

Perhaps below the blockers are those that do not speak at all and/or those who must use technologies (of various sorts) to do any communication.

Amidst this hierarchy between those that get a word in and those who are delayed in even syllabic locution, is a l relation that is more situational.

Perhaps, if a friend who is a stutterer and I both speak to a speech therapy professional, one can expect the professional to note that the one who fidgets less is the better speaker. Some of us dysfluent folks who may not block on words, may be extremely fidgety and depending on the speaker, this could be read as a “worse” sign of dysfluency and as posing more harm to the conversation.

We know from the accounts of stutterers that some of us have more tics simultaneously with our dysfluency. Others of us may have tics in reaction to other phenomenon about a conversation. While the relevancy of these types of expression to communication at all and whether they present a hindrance may also vary, the dysfluent community is cut across diagonally by tics, which may happen as often with those who otherwise present as fluent as with those who can barely utter a word.

The wider point here is that practices like informed consent and communication access help people at all levels of the hierarchy of dysfluency. But the people at the lowest level may not have the language or the guts to tell others off for judging them over a mispronounciation and may be ever further compounded into a negative position.

Alternatively, those at the bottom of the hierarchy of dysfluency may not be there because of the compounding effects of trauma but may be there because of other changes in voicedness.

It is our job as dysfluent activists to interrogate our own biases and to ask questions of  what and who are present when we speak.

-Zach

Much of the time, my speech is not noticeably dysfluent. The number of blocks and repetitions I encounter in a given sentence vary by the day, topic, and speaking situation; some days there are a lot, and some days almost none. I do not purposefully augment my speech to mask dysfluency, but it is very common for others to incorrectly perceive my speech as fluent, at least initially. In these instances I am fluent-passing, regardless of my intentions.

Passing is a complex component of disabled identity. It comes with a great deal of privilege, which I am careful to remember. My history with stuttering and speech discrimination is my own, and it is greatly influenced by the ease with which I can pass as fluent—the ease with which I can closet my voice. My speech is stigmatized in a similar manner to other stutterers, but often to a much lesser degree. While in a particularly dysfluent period I am reminded of the contrast, how it feels to anticipate ridicule every time I open my mouth.

Being fluent-passing means that my dysfluent identity is less visible to the people around me. Stuttering is a thing that I do, and I don’t feel the need to talk about it all that often. Because of this, my friends and co-workers are frequently surprised or confused when they first hear my opinions about dysfluency. They are surprised to learn that I care greatly about the way my speech is perceived, or that the ways they talk about my voice are a type of speech discrimination.

I receive a lot of praise from others (especially from poets) for the way that I parse my words. They call me articulate, or compliment my diction. This makes me uncomfortable—in the way that fluent people discussing a dysfluent person’s speech is usually uncomfortable—but also because my praise-worthy diction is the result of two decades of pressure to assimilate. I enunciate the way I do because speech discrimination has taught me that it is the safest way to speak.

The variability of my dysfluency increases the pressure I feel to pass in some aspects of my life. I am always disabled, even when others do not hear a stutter. I always have the right to request and receive accommodations related to my speech, but the justification for those accommodations is less apparent. People assume that since I sound fluent one day and dysfluent the next, I am capable of presenting as fluent all of the time. And if I am capable of presenting as fluent, that they have no obligation to respect my dysfluent identity.

Everyone communicates in a unique manner; fluent and dysfluent alike, no two people have identical speech patterns. The category of stutterers encompasses a massive range of voices that can really sound quite different from one another. As such, every stutterer experiences stuttering and speech discrimination differently. These experiences are influenced and augmented by intersections of privilege and marginalization in regards to race, gender, class, and sexuality.

My voice is my own and it reflects my individual history. I do not claim to speak on the specific oppression of anyone else; rather, I am committed to fighting the speech discrimination that prohibits dysfluent people from being heard.

-Erin