​People who stutter are regularly interrupted. Our sentences our finished for us, we are talked over, and skirted in conversations. This can be terribly frustrating and disempowering, not the least because being regularly interrupted causes dysfluent people to internalize this oppression.  
 
Yet it is also noteworthy that Speech-Language Pathology (SLP) describes the stuttering event itself as an “interruption of speech” (e.g. Guitar 2014). At first glance this use of “interruption” seems straightforward. To interrupt someone else’s speech is (as the OED defines “interrupt”) to break the continuity of something in time, to hinder from proceeding with some action, as well as to hinder, stop, prevent, thwart. Yet there is something odd about this formulation when applied to ourselves. To follow out this line of thought, not only are we interrupted by others, but SLP discourse concludes that when we stutter we interrupt—ourselves?
 
What could this mean? Is it that they think we are interrupting language itself? If so—then whose language? Certainly not our language! I have always spoken with gaps, pauses, prolongations, and repetitions. A stutter is only an interruption of what we think language should sound like: “normally” fluent, able-bodied speech.[i] One might respond that stutterers interrupt the abstract structure of language and morphology—except that linguistics generally holds language to be both flexible and dynamic.[ii] Communication theory likewise suggests that communication is filled with redundancy and thus far more flexible than we fear.[iii] All this to say that the idea that stuttering is itself an “interruption” is actually far from self-evident, and in fact a much more political and complex statement than we’ve been taught to believe.[iv]
 
But what does it mean that we both interrupt and are interrupted? Is there a relation between these events? Do people interrupt us because our speech interrupts the script of fluency? Because we interrupt the linear and ceaseless flow of time and information? There is likely truth to the idea that interruptions are attempts to interrupt the dysfluent interruption—to get back to business as usual. But we can take this conversation in a different yet equally plausible direction: thinking about who gets interrupted leads to the question of who is interruptible.
 
Dysfluent speakers, women, queer and racialized voices don’t just happen to get interrupted; some voices are understood to be interruptible in a way that others are not. That is, the problem is not exactly that some voices are just louder or more authoritative than others and thus get heard, while other voices that break the (apparently fragile!) flow of speech or that have distinct features (such as “uptalk”) don’t demand attention. The issue, rather, is always power dynamics between marginalized and privileged peoples.     
 
For example, in November 1970, the Globe and Mail published a curious piece entitled “Stammer Becomes Fashionable: Essential Mark of the English Gentleman,” an exposé of a wildly counter-intuitive British phenomenon. The cultivation of a distinguished, yet fake, stammer is described as indicating good breeding and fashion. Speech impediments in the British Parliament were reportedly displayed commonly and unashamedly, and the article details stammering as a passport to elite circles, a means of holding a listener’s attention so one’s words are appreciated more. This strategy was developed early in certain private school traditions. “In the more extreme cases,” explains Oxford professor David Jenkins, “it’s a very visible affectation. It’s also a sign of complete self-assurance. You take your time, knowing you are master of the situation.”[v]
 
Stuttering in this case was oddly used to control conversations; the stutter that stretches time and makes others uncomfortable becomes a symbol demonstrating that social elites are masters of the situation—that they are not interruptible.
 
The irony is painful but offers an important lesson: dysfluent voices are not interrupted simply because stuttering “interrupts speech.” The issue, rather, is one’s position within relations of power. For the fashionable stammerer, stuttering became a manifestation and performance of high social status. Today, we are taught to limit our stuttering for the exact same purpose.
 
There are two broad conclusions we can draw from this reflection.
 
1) To understand interruption and dysfluency we must move past the SLP discourse of stuttering “interrupting speech” to think about power and ableism. If stuttering interrupts, it interrupts not speech nor communication but ableist norms of speech that are rooted within our social, cultural, political, and economic worlds. How can this power to interrupt be used critically to cultivate community and resistance? This question is important since the capacity to interrupt is always linked with power and is thus dangerous. For example, the French novelist and stutterer Patrick Modiano appeared on a prominent French television show; displaying his admiration for Modiano, Jacques Derrida later reflected that, “he’s managed to get people to accept that they need to be patient when he can't find his words. . . . There’s someone who has succeeded in transforming the public scene and forcing it to go at his own speed” (479). Derrida’s wording, “forcing [the audience] to go at his own speed,” is quite ambiguous. Is Modiano, like the fashionable stammerer, taking control of the conversation, interrupting fluency as a way to master conversation? Or is his interruption an invitation into a different rhythm and tempo that transforms the public scene? These are very different practices that lead towards very different politics. 
 
2) The example of the fashionable stammerer highlights the possibility that being interrupted—being interruptible—has little to do with the manner in which phonemes exit one’s mouth. It is of course true, as Chris Constantino argues in his Foucauldian work on passing-as-fluent, that fluent privilege can be emulated and used to leverage one’s social position—though as many of us know, truly passing as fluent is always precarious for the stutterer and often more stressful/dangerous than it’s worth. The fashionable stammerer is evidence that in a different social context, stuttering came to mean something else entirely, a sign of privilege rather than pity. It is evidence that fluency and normalcy are always stacked games played against marginalized peoples.
 
To conclude, we are interrupted and seen as interruptible not due to the distinct characteristics of our voices and patterns of our speech but because stuttering has been framed as an interruption. We are interrupted because the power to interrupt belongs to those with social power and is seen as grotesque in our dysfluent bodies. The “fashionable stammerer” may have been a historical oddity, but social expectations around who gets to take up time when communicating remains coupled with privilege.
 
It is difficult to know the best response. Interruption is an incredibly complex event and practise marked by as many pitfalls as possibilities. One perhaps obvious response is to refuse the idea that disabled speech is an interruption of speech and communication. This is our dysfluent mode and rhythm of communicating. We neither aspire nor pretend to be fluent so at this level there is nothing to interrupt and nothing to be interrupted. We should, if we desire, finish our sentences and block visibly while others attempt to carry on the conversation without us. This would be a start.
 
But of course dysfluency is an interruption, just of a very different kind than imagined by SLP. Dysfluency transgresses ableist norms of what language should sound like, how social time should be occupied, and the place of disabled peoples within society (i.e. if not assimilated then cheerfully working towards a cure or rehabilitation). From this perspective we might begin to imagine how to use dysfluent interruption as a critical practise. How can interruption confront and transform communicative privilege and the ableism that structures our lives? How can dysfluency help to critically interrupt political norms and structures by which some people are deemed “interruptible”? If this is a much bigger challenge than refusing the idea that stuttering “interrupts speech” it is because the political reward is likewise far greater.

-Josh
​

[i] Both normalcy and fluency are fictions that quasi-exist in the way that statistical averages exist.

[ii] That stuttering stretches language and expresses variation is obvious; or, in theoretical terms, Deleuze might say that dysfluency composes a “minor grammar.”

[iii] Some communication contexts have little to no redundancy and are thus highly susceptible to interruption and error (for example, an air traffic controller). The point is that the vast majority of communicative relations could be reconfigured to make space for dysfluency if not governed by ableist protocols. Yet admittedly, what people likely mean is more straight-forward: stuttering interrupts the spontaneous or “natural” flow of meanings exchanged between people (as one of our commentators has said, stuttering can feel like being caught in a traffic jam in rush hour). This intuitive idea highlights an additional meaning of “interrupt”: stuttering seems to thwart our intended meanings and purposes within communicative events (as, of course, they unfold in fluent time). I am apparently a self-interrupting speaker. However, not only, as Zach has previously argued, might we find that we can stutter more “spontaneously” (in Chris Constantino’s terms) from a position of dysfluency pride and activism, but we must remember that language always unfolds in time, and communication is never instantaneous. The idea of being "thwarted" is, in this context, always framed by a fiction of fluency that does not exist.

[iv] At the same time, it is important to note that nearly all of these modes of interruption (which I have cast doubt upon) are precisely what SLP, a medical-industrial complex, has in mind when it frames dysfluency as an interruption. The stuttering event interrupts speech when considered linguistically, phonetically, communicatively, socially, temporally, economically, etc. etc. The fear of interruption is ubiquitous, perfectly evidenced in how SLP thinks about speech and its powers as incredibly fragile. Not only blocks and hesitations—the obvious candidates for an interruption—but repetitions, prolongations, and modulated flow of the voice are defined as interruptions. Why? Because they apparently carry no meaning and thus pose as, at best, an irritation and, at worst, a threat. However, as all of us have discovered when we’re among listeners that truly appreciate and make time for our voices, the voice, speech, language, and communication are far more robust and resilient than SLP seems to imagine.

[v] Israel Shenker, “Stammer Becomes Fashionable: Essential Mark of the English Gentleman,” The Globe and Mail, November, 1970, 12:12, Toronto.

In art, and especially in writing, disability is commonly used as a metaphor. As a poet, I have heard countless instances in which fluent people use ‘stutter’ figuratively in their work. It happens at least once in most readings and shows. A poet says “love stutters when it gets nervous” or “the kid with the stutter like a skipping record” or “the insistent stutter of my longing” or “the kid’s hands forgot how history stutters new names.”

These poets are not referencing dysfluent speech in the same way I do. Rather, they use ‘stutter’ to convey information about a character. Metaphors rely on a shared understanding of a concept, and the lines quoted above only make sense within this context. When a fluent poet says stutter they are referencing the collective understanding that stuttering is indicative of anxiety, dishonesty, incapacity, or inferiority. These analogies persist because stereotypes about dysfluency are so widely shared and firmly held. The writer uses stutter as a metaphor because they know it will concisely and illustratively communicate their intended concept.

This is not limited to dysfluency; other disabled voices and bodies are common objects in writing. Almost every abled writer I know has at some point appropriated the language of disability in their work, referring to surprise as paralyzing, fear as crippling, or blindness as ignorant, or comparing capitalism to cancer.  Employing references to disability as metaphor relies on a collective understanding that disabled bodies are broken, inferior, less valuable, and that they appropriate for use as objects of comparison.

It is important to note that the appropriation of disability occurs by abled writers, who are positively sanctioned for objectifying disabled voices. Disabled speakers writing about themselves and their experiences are less-positively sanctioned. A cliché phrase in poetry slam when facing a particularly challenging competition is “do your cancer poem!”, meaning pull out your best work. Almost never is this a poet who has cancer, but instead a poem about someone else who has died of cancer. This type of cancer poem typically scores very well.

Abled writers who use my voice as a metaphor interpret it differently than I do. They aren’t thinking about dysfluency as an identity at all, because they aren’t thinking about dysfluent people. They are looking to describe a nervous character and they settle on ‘stutter’ or they are writing about an abnormal rhythm and are reminded of the way our speech catches in their ears. Using ‘stutter’ as an analogy separates our speech from our bodies, strips it of meaning and nuance, and reduces it to stereotypical repetitions and elongations.

Even when the use of stuttering is not directly pejorative – when it is compared to something other than a nervous child, or used in an original way – the decoupling of dysfluency from speech and from the person is incredibly problematic. Fluent writers do not understand the social components of dysfluency, the way that dysfluent people relate to our speech, or the ways that they are complicit in perpetuating stereotypes. Their intention has nothing to do with my voice, but their word choice is born out of ableism and speech discrimination. In critiquing writers who appropriate disability, I am challenging the power that abled writers hold over disability narratives.  

-Erin

The Did I Stutter project works very hard to show that social discrimination rather than bodily defect is at the heart of the “problem” of stuttering.

The sound of my voice is different, but there is nothing about that difference which makes it inherently bad or unfortunate. It is only because our society has labelled difference as disorder, stuttering as ugly and unwanted, that my voice becomes a medical or pathological problem to treat.

The idea that our society rather than my body lies at the heart of my struggle—that I should spend my time fighting discrimination rather than wrestling my body to be more fluent—has been treated by many as absurd.

It’s simply taken as obvious that stuttering is a bodily defect rather than a social issue.

But back up to the beginning of speech correction in the early twentieth century, and look at the way many of its proponents framed this supposed defect:

• “There is an essential economic need for speech-correction work. Unless these speech defectives can be retrained so that they will be able to fill an appropriate place in the industrial and professional world, society will continue to suffer an economic loss because of them.”1
  
• “Recognizing the social economic value of speech, it is patent that the attainment of fluent unimpaired habits of speaking represents a distinct gain to the community. The value, therefore, of speech correction would be represented by the saving to the community of expenditures now involved as a result of existent or future speech defects.”2
  
• “The Government has recognized this menace by refusing to permit immigrants who stammer to enter the country, because of the great probability of their becoming public charges.”3
  
• “Miss Wells discussed the role of the speech correctionist in the unifying of public sentiment and the promotion of Americanism through the elimination of foreign accent, thus bringing about a more homogeneous American speech.”4
  
• “Each inarticulate citizen is a weak spot in our defense against un-American propaganda and in our development of efficient democratic procedures.”5
  
• “The War Committee of this association found that able young men were handicapped in the discharge of the military obligations of citizenship, were unable to qualify for commissions because of voice and speech defects.”6
  
• “If nothing is done to correct their condition, thereby establishing mental stability, what is the result? Such children help to fill up our vast army of truants, delinquents, vagrants, and gangsters. From a weak, good-natured child is evolved a child on the road to criminality.”7
  
• “It is not by chance that the incidence of speech defects is higher in penitentiaries than anywhere else except in the institutions for the mentally deficient.”8
  
• “‘Living at the tips of one’s nerves’ through an impediment of speech tends to develop vicious circles of nervous instability resulting in an increase of criminals, prostitutes, and general failures.”9
  
• “Plans are under consideration whereby the board of education will provide in the very near future for its thousands of children suffering from defective speech, thus wiping out all handicaps and setting a standard for normal American children.”10
  

The quotes could go on for pages upon pages.

The point is, stuttering was regarded as a medical defect to fix precisely because it was a social problem.

Education, medicine, psychology, and speech pathology all turned their attention to developing treatments for abnormal speech precisely because it posed a problem to society. It cost society money. It damaged national unity and identity. It could lead to moral degeneracy and criminality.

From the very start, the “medical model” grounded itself in the social. The treatments developed to fix dysfluent speech didn’t legitimize themselves on the objective “fact” of our pathological condition; they legitimized themselves by showing they were providing a social service. “Facts” always come second.

So when I say that stuttering is a social problem, I am not saying anything groundbreaking. I am saying the same thing speech correctionists themselves claimed as a basis of their discipline. When I go on to say that the reaction to stuttering should therefore be to change society rather than to change my body, I am not rejecting a somehow obvious “truth” that my body contains a pathological defect. I am rejecting the brief interlude medicine, science, and psychology have offered in reaction to the social problems caused by stuttering. I am suggesting we back up, look at the world that refuses to accept us as we are, and make the cultural changes that should have been happening all along.

My voice was treated as broken precisely because society was structured to exclude it. It’s time to fix that. Not me.

-------------------

1  Charles Van Riper, a pioneering speech correctionist described as having had the most influence of any speech-language pathologist in the field of stuttering, in “Speech Correction: Principles and Methods,” 1939.

2  Dr. Ira S. Wile, Physician and commissioner of Education in New York City, in “The Economic Value of Speech Correction,” 1916.

3  Frederick Martin, of the New York board of Education, in “Stammering,” published in the Quarterly Journal of Speech in 1919.

4  Recorded by Katner in “The Speech Clinic as a Social Agency in National Emergencies,” describing a symposium at the convention of the National Association of Teachers in 1940.

5  M. R. Traube, Dean of the School of Education at Pennsylvania State College, in “Coordinating Professional Responsibilities in Speech Correction and Speech Education,” published in the Journal of Speech Disorders, 1941.

6  Edward Charles Mabie, head of the State University of Iowa Department of Speech, in “Opportunities for Service in Departments of Speech,” 1920.

7  Dennis J. McDonald, Fellow of the Academy of Medicine, New York, in “Speech Improvement,” 1916.

8  Avis. D. Carlson, an American writer, in “Crippled in the Tongue,”1937.

9  James Sonnett Greene, M.D., Director of the New York Institute for Speech Defects, in “The Mission of the Speech Specialist,” 1916.

10  Again, Dennis J. McDonald, Fellow of the Academy of Medicine, New York, in “Speech Improvement,” 1916.

We were looking through the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA)’s explanation of Speech Sound Disorders this afternoon. They spend a few paragraphs defining these (articulation and phonological) disorders—e.g. when a person continues to makes the “wrong” sound for a word past the age that children typically learn the “correct” sound. There are examples: saying “wabbit” for “rabbit,” or “poon” for “spoon.” There is information on treatment.

And in the middle of it all there is this gem:

                   Q:  What if I speak more than one language? Is my accent a speech sound disorder?

                    A:  An accent is the unique way that speech is pronounced by a group of people speaking the same                          language. Accents are a natural part of spoken languages. It is important to realize that no accent is                        better than another. Accents are NOT a speech or language disorder. An SLP can work on                                           accent  modification services if a client wishes to reduce or modify his or her accent.

“An accent is NOT a speech or language disorder,” they say. “It is important to realize no accent is better than another.”

It all gets stranger when you look at the accent modification page:

                     Q:  How do accents affect communication?

                      A:  Accents reflect the unique characteristics and background of a person. Many people take great                           pride in their accents. However, some people may have difficulty communicating because of their                           accent. These difficulties include the following:

                       - People not understanding you

                       - Avoiding social interaction with those who may not understand you

                       - Frustration from having to repeat yourself all the time

                       - People focusing on your accent more than on what you are trying to say

…Well that sounds eerily familiar.

So why is it that a regional accent is “NOT a speech disorder,” but my disability accent, although it causes the exact same “difficulties,” although it is a matter of pride and identity for me, is? Why are regional accents considered “a natural part of spoken languages,” when the disability accents, likewise used by tens of millions of people worldwide aren’t? Why is it so “important to realize that no [regional] accent is better than another,” but my disability accent should be treated and removed?

This isn’t about our voices being wrong. This is about how we treat those who do not develop the way that “typical” children do. This isn’t about communication. This is about fixing and hiding away abnormal voices, abnormal bodies. This is about our culture being attuned to racism but not disability oppression. This is about how speech experts have decided variation is good, unless it is due to disability.

Sorry ASHA. Your ableism’s showing.


- Josh and Charis

One of the purposes of Did I Stutter is to shake up ideas that we take as common sense. To use a different metaphor, over time, ideas and practices that we regularly use become packed like a well-worn path. We intend to dig up and question seemingly obvious facts about stuttering, to make the trail cumbersome so we have to pick our way with more attention and perhaps find a more exciting and inviting trail that does not beeline for pathologization and rehabilitation. To be more precise, we want to show that what seems obvious may not be so obvious after all.

The taken-for-granted idea I want to explore today is that stuttering is something that can and should be measured. How do we know if a person stutters? How do we know what treatment to prescribe? How do we gauge the success of a treatment? Well, first and foremost by measuring and categorizing dysfluent speech. This is run-of-the-mill stuff for SLPs. But when we stop and think about it, measuring stuttering is an odd and fairly recent practice that reveals a lot about our assumptions of what speech, communication, and disability are.

Like many, I have gone to speech therapy and twitched as the SLP tapped out my syllables and dysfluencies on her counter. The tap quickly became background noise and forgotten: a regular part of therapy. Yet if counting stuttering has become natural for stutterers, it is far more so for SLPs. In fact, I will argue that measuring disabled speech is a central foundation of SLP as a discipline and industry.         

What we now understand as SLP only emerged as a discipline at the beginning of the 20th century. While rhetoricians have been teaching proper elocution since Ancient Greece, and medicine—including an attention to speech “defects”—flourished during the Enlightenment, it was not until the 1920s that professional “speech correctionists” from backgrounds of education, medicine, and elocution came together to form various special interests groups such as the American Academy of Speech Correction (AASC), which eventually became the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (Duchan 2012). From a historical perspective this timeline is fairly unsurprising. Many other social sciences, such as psychology and anthropology, were established within this period, a period defined by the rise of what is called “logical positivism.”

Positivism is the belief that for a claim to be meaningful it must be demonstrable (and verifiable) through evidence. If it can’t be measured and demonstrated, it is neither true nor false, but is rather meaningless or gibberish. Needless to say, positivism shaped the entire field of Western science. Einarsdottir and Ingham (2005) point out that “from a scientific point of view, it is necessary that the measurement, and therefore the diagnosis, of a disorder should have consistency if research on that disorder is to have progress” (260). Positivism fits fairly easily with “hard” sciences like chemistry and physics which were already firmly based in experimentation, observation, and evidence. However, how do you measure messy things like the human mind (psychology), culture (anthropology), or speech (linguistics / SLP) in a way that positivists will accept as credible? Social sciences have often responded (especially in the heyday of positivism) by contorting human activities such as emotion, politics, and communication into quantifiable data that does great violence to their complex nature. Despite or perhaps because of this effort, social or “soft” sciences have continually struggled to be recognized as “real” sciences.   

The immediate problem for SLP was thus proving that what they do is scientific—i.e. credible and legitimate. Charles Van Riper hints at the early worry about the field: “Back then we had no texts, no tools. We recorded our clients’ speech on wax phonograph cylinders. Our sound waves were scratched on a smoked kymograph drum. Using tuning forks of different frequencies, we calibrated hearing loss by marks on the office carpet. We had no standardized tests.” (Van Riper, 1989, pp. 72-73; quoted in Duchan 2012). One of the first tasks of the AACS was accordingly to find a scientific grounding for speech correction: a means of quantifying disabled speech such that results can be verified and taken seriously within medical scientific communities.

Wendell Johnson was more or less the first SLP to come up with a standardized and widely recognized system of measuring stuttering—or, as SLPs call it, a “disfluency typology.” In the late 50s, Johnson devised a measurement system that used eight categories of stuttering (interjections, sound and syllable repetitions, word repetitions, phrase repetitions, incomplete phrases, broken words, and prolonged sounds). By measuring any sort of speech he was of course making a statement about what speech is: a phenomenon that can be reduced to its linguistic structure, set of phonemes, and accompanying motor functions. Other less measurable ways of understanding communication were thereby set aside as outcomes of, or incidental to, the demonstrable facts of syllable counts. Since then, the categories have shifted slightly—the more general metric “SLD” or “stuttering like disfluencies” is often used today (Einarsdottir and Ingham 2005, 262)—but the idea and practice of using syllable counters, syllable count sheets, and word count sheets to quantify, standardize, and understand stuttering behaviors has changed very little. Finding the best way to measure stuttering is an intensely debated topic within SLP, yet almost all within the field agree that it must be done (and in fact only argue so intensely about how to do it because they see it as a matter of such great importance). The Lidcombe program is an excellent example of the compulsion to quantify stuttering today, as the program goes so far as to export these practices into the home and the family—Lidcombe explicitly relies on parents measuring and charting the dysfluencies of their child.

My first point is this: the idea that stuttering is something that can be measured and represented on a count sheet is not a simple and obvious fact, but must be understood in its historical context as a way of thinking closely connected to the legitimacy of SLP as a scientific discipline. SLPs are often quick to point out that theirs, in unmistakably positivist terms, is an “evidence based practice.” While many individual SLPs do strain against the positivist roots of their discipline, for better or for worse the discipline itself is still married to the (elusive) goal of measuring stuttering, which presents real limits on the possibility of individual SLPs deviating from this method.

However, while SLPs are of course measuring something in their typological practices (motor functioning or deviations from linguistic structures), I do not think they are actually representing a deep fact about the reality of stuttering and speech production when they count out syllables and measure dysfluencies. We are of course supposed to believe that dysfluency counts are describing something scientific, objective, and therefore deeply true about the reality of my body when they quantify my speech (e.g. that I have “a stutter,” and this is a pathological medical condition). But I reject the positivist project upon which SLP is built (note that rejecting positivism is not the same as rejecting science). I believe that when these sorts of claims are made what is really happening is a circular confirmation of what has already been assumed as true. SLP starts with the assumption that stuttering is a medical and biological pathology that can therefore be measured, and then proceeds to prove this by measuring and quantifying stuttering. This is a strong but certainly not maverick claim to make on my part. Many others have staunchly resisted the positivist conquest of human affairs: the discipline of political science is a fascinating example. Even closer to home groups like Deaf pride, the anti-psychiatry movement and c/s/x, and queer activists remain highly skeptical of modern psychiatry/medicine’s discourse around and definition of their bodies and minds (cf. Price 2011). Note, I am not saying SLP isn’t a science nor an evidence based practice. Rather, the point is that “scientific” does not mean objective nor a description of how things “really are.”

I might accordingly ask: what is SLP as a discipline really accomplishing by grounding itself in measuring and quantifying dysfluent speech? SLP (a) gets to call itself a science with the rest of them and (b) is able to use this credibility (and the ensuing funding) to pathologize and treat our bodies. Again, this has very little to do with the intentions of individual SLPs who for the most part are simply wanting to help stutterers. The issue is that there is always something happening that exceeds individual intentions.

Picking up on (b), my second point is this: measuring stuttering is deeply connected to capitalism. We have argued before--here and here—that whatever else it is, SLP, along with all rehabilitative medicine, is also an industry that makes money by pathologizing and subsequently treating our bodies. Understanding the historical relation between SLP, positivism, and scientific legitimacy, we can be a little more specific about the capitalist aspect of SLP. We must consider (i) that scientific credibility enables the capitalization of rehabilitative fields like SLP. Nikolas Rose (2007) argues that as medicine was intensely capitalized in the latter half of the 20th century, “clinical practice was reshaped by the requirements of medical insurance, and criteria for reimbursement. Basic and applied biological research – in biotech companies and in universities – become bound up with the generation of intellectual property and shareholder value” (4-5). In this way, syllable sheets providing hard data are an economic tool by which SLPs get reimbursed by third-party payers for services rendered. The need to provide quantifiable outcomes to third parties continues to be a source of frustration for some SLPs who wish to provide more holistic therapy. The measurement of stuttering is thus not simply a diagnostic tool for prescribing (and reviewing) appropriate treatment, but is a type of guarantor that legitimizes and sanctions the “exploitation” of disabled speakers—the idea that their bodies must be normalized through (often costly) therapy to have value in society. Scientific credibility greases the wheels of the medical-industrial complex.   

(ii) I believe it is also important to consider that measurement and quantification are central to capitalism itself. Capitalism works by maximizing profit margins: wringing the most value out of its workers and continually expanding its markets. Capitalism increasingly measures work to make production more efficient. Nike, for example, has the time it takes to produce the various parts of a shoe down to the hundredth of a second. On the other end of the process, companies quantify markets to increase profitability. Coca-Cola sets targets according to “Total Liquid Intake”: quantifying and then increasing their share of how much liquid humans ingest in a day worldwide. Insofar as speech and communication are increasingly central to capitalist production, quantifying speech and attempting to maximize communicative efficiency through SLP are every bit a capitalist project regardless of (and even in spite of) the intentions of individual SLPs.        

In conclusion, I would like to suggest that quantifying and measuring speech (or treating it as something that can be quantified at all) should perhaps be rethought. Speech is not a string of sounds. Communication is not the exchange of meanings ferried between two brains by phonemes. Similarly, dysfluencies—no matter how meticulously counted—do not disrupt my ability to be with another through speech in a measurable and reductive way. Spoken communication is a rich, affective, aesthetic, intersubjective, and dynamic process. To contort it into a string of sounds that can be measured, dissected, and then labelled as dysfluent and pathological is a violence not only against my body but against the very nature of speech. My stutter is too wily to be reduced to a syllable count. It refuses to be caged. I refuse to make it an assembly line.    


-Josh

As we’ve critiqued many of the ableist assumptions of Speech-Language Pathology, we've received reminders that “not all SLPs are like that.” We recognize that there are individual SLPs who work hard to resist many parts of the system from within. We are extremely grateful for this work, and recognize just how important it is to those of us who receive it.

However, when you read our critiques of SLP, you’ll notice that the majority of what we’ve discussed has been focused much less on the role of individual pathologists, and much more on the discipline, teachings, and premises of Speech-Language Pathology as a whole.

This is because while it’s true that not all SLPs do all of the things that DIS has critiqued, the much more important point is that every person who stutters still experiences the harmful effects of SLP as a whole. Our society has taken the discipline and industry of SLP as the default way of understanding and responding to stuttering, and the things it says about stuttering affect every single one of us, whether we’ve ever set foot in a SLP’s office or not.

Every day I encounter the assumption that my stutter is a problem to be treated and coped with. This assumption is reinforced by the practices, research, and very existence of the SLP industry. In diagnosing stuttering as a medical condition and looking for ways to treat and rehabilitate stutterers, SLP is creating and reinforcing the backdrop of discrimination (and assimilation) against which I live every day of my life.

Of course the vast majority of us who have been to speech therapy have experience this outright—the assumption that it is my speech (not the biases of my listeners) which causes my difficulty in communicating. The assumption that the underlying social struggles I face (anxiety, fear, shyness, low self-esteem) are best addressed by modifying me or my speech rather than ableism within society.

Moreover, these exact opinions are replicated by society as a whole. For one thing, everyone constantly assumes that if I’m not receiving speech therapy I should be. For another, everyone thinks of my stutter as a struggle to overcome—a deficiency to be disliked and minimized. These biases against my speech are backed up and made credible by SLP.

At Did I Stutter, we are instead claiming that there is quite literally nothing wrong with stuttering. We want to be proud of our stutters. We want completely to undo the assumptions we hear every day that there is something unfortunate or deficient about our speech and that our voices would be better off modified or changed. We want to go to schools and workplaces where those around us don’t wish we were fluent and don’t expect us to wish it too. We want to understand the “impediments” in our speech as having nothing to do with our physical bodies and everything to do with a society that doesn’t accommodate our voices just as they are. For better or worse, these goals stand in opposition to Speech-Language Pathology.

It is for this reason that Did I Stutter has been careful to position itself outside the field and logic of SLP. In doing so we aren’t critiquing the intentions of individual SLPs, who are by and large in the field to help people. Rather, we are resisting the industry’s entire assumption that disability should be responded to in therapeutic ways. Like many other liberation movements, we want to make room for people with speech impediments to define their voices for themselves without needing to defer to “experts.” We also recognize that SLPs face an unfortunate conflict of interest as it does not economically benefit SLPs or the industry as a whole for stutterers to embrace their voices just as they are and stop seeking therapeutic intervention. This is part of why we are grateful for the work of those SLPs who do resist the ableism of the larger industry, yet part of why we know that resistance from inside an ableist system will never be enough.

It may be true that not all speech-language pathologists reinforce the ableism of Speech-Language Pathology.

But yes, all stutterers are damaged by it. 

-Josh and Charis

Put simply, our society is built for able-bodied people and it resists any change at every step of the way. The ADA has been in place for 25 years and our society still does the absolute bare minimum to make our world inclusive and accessible for disabled people. For example, businesses don’t want to spend money to renovate their buildings; they regularly change just enough to squeak past building codes. Or to take another example, we still think of disability as an absolute tragedy, so much so that people regularly report that they would rather die than end up in a wheelchair/become blind/deaf/etc. etc. Behind the thin veil of inclusiveness, we as a society do not like disability and do almost anything to avoid it. “Do we really have to include them?” is an uncomfortably common sentiment I encounter. People fawn over disability when it makes them feel inspired (see picture), but as soon as they realize just how much our claims for justice will require of them, their inspired smiles sour. 

To create social change is thus not simply about educating people, since education in itself means we are dependent upon the kindness and generosity of others. You can ask people nicely not to finish your sentences and explain why it is infantilizing, but that leaves it up to their good will. As every liberation movement of the past century has shown, social change requires something more: a change in power dynamics that transforms the relations between people. In our context, this means transforming how abled people relate to disabled people (in ways that are less oppressive), how abled people relate to each other (in ways that disarm ableism and make space for disabled people), and how disabled people relate to each other (in ways that affirm solidarity). This is especially true for stuttering since, as I have suggested earlier, it is a distinctly interpersonal experience. Speaking on our own terms thus requires educating people as well as shifting the terms—shifting the power dynamics—on which we get to speak.  

This brings me back to the issue of anger and communicating hospitably. Against our sometimes common-sense intuition, I believe that communication is not primarily the act of swapping information between our heads, but is a way of relating to and changing the relationships between one another. Communication connects us to each other, and depending on how we communicate, we can establish very different kinds of relationships between people.

However if communication is a way of relating to one another, it is also about power. It is no secret that we assert power over others through communication. We regularly change how people act and think about themselves and others through the way in which we communicate—not only what we say, but, for example, the underlying tone we use, the context in which we say it, and who is involved in the conversation.

So if communication is more about modifying how we relate to each other than simply exchanging information, and if we understand social change to require transforming the relationships between people rather than simply educating them, the importance of how we speak and write about stuttering with others takes on a new flavor.    

I want to talk about communicating hospitably, and I want to use it in the place of words like “empathy,” “kindness,” “and “compassion.” These words so easily force marginalized people to be “respectable” and “civil” if they want to be taken seriously. In other words, we are forced to speak on the terms of ableism. Communicating hospitably is rather inviting others into our home, into our way of communicating, our speeds, our styles, our rhythms of communication. Communicating hospitably is, moreover, to communicate on our own terms and welcome others to explore this world with us. This means that yes, we need to make space for them and help them find their way within our world. But it does not mean that anger and hospitality are polar opposites, nor that anger not is not at times an appropriate response to how people treat us in our home. In communicating hospitably we are seeking to change the relationships between people, not just invite them in so we can funnel information into their ear.

If someone interrupts my sentence, I hospitably invite them into my communication by finishing my sentence anyway. If they continue to do so, a more direct—“why are you cutting me off?” may be appropriate. Many people will learn how to listen in less ableist ways with polite explanations or reminders. But if I have invited someone into my home, into my rhythms of speech, and they refuse to treat those rhythms respectably, I can’t simply assume it’s because I haven’t asked nicely enough. In this regard, there are times when people will still try and force us to speak on their own terms—make us feel ashamed or embarrassed of our stuttering—and thus recreate an oppressive relationship. It is especially in these times that getting angry is an appropriate way of resisting oppression. When this happens I love to look people straight in the eye as I stutter, my tongue protrudes, and syllables spill out of my mouth, daring them to either listen up or walk way.

Stuttering with hospitality means generously inviting people into my speeds and rhythms of speech. It also means that I refuse to speak on the terms of ableism. I refuse to make that kind of world my home. 

-Josh

I, like many stutterers, have spent a long time feeling embarrassed of how I talk and who I am, and feeling guilty for making people uncomfortable. I lived in constant fear of my tongue which might at any moment derail—producing a tortuously slow trainwreck of gapes and grimaces, dragging behind them embarrassed glances always ending in shame. 

For this fear I spent half an hour every morning rehearsing fluency at 60 SPM: “wheeen the suuunliiight striikes raaindrops iiin the aaAir . . .” I was determined not to let stuttering hold me back – “I CAN ACHIEVE ANYtt-----ttTHING WITH PERSISTANCE!” Yet perhaps it would be better to say that I simply feared my mouth once again swelling shut with shame.

My speech pathologists taught me self-acceptance. Self-love. They told me it didn’t matter what other people thought of me. I should just ignore them. “They’re ignorant,” I was told. Sunday School taught me to forgive those who mocked me. Let it go—they’re not worth your time.

The one thing I was never told that was that I could get angry. Fucking angry.

Fury is a proper response to injustice and oppression, to silencing, stereotyping, and co-option. All emancipatory movements of the twentieth century—civil rights, disability rights, feminism, and queer liberation—have been fueled by anger focused into resistance. As the legendary Audre Lorde writes, “Anger is an appropriate reaction to racist attitudes, as is fury when the actions arising from those attitudes do not change.” [1] For so long, disabled people have been treated as objects of charity and welfare, expected to accept the scraps society doles out with a thankful tear in our eye. In contrast, the disability rights movement teaches us to “piss on pity” and be outraged at our exclusion and marginalization.   

So where the hell is the fury in the stuttering community? We are jesters in music and film. People mock, stop, and dismiss our words. We are inspirational when we overcome our “tragedy” and lazy when we do not. We are regularly not treated as equal citizens, denied time, jobs, and respect. I should be livid when your discomfort makes me hate myself. When you tell me to sit down halfway through my class presentation. When you don’t absorb anything I’ve said because you’re too busy feeling sorry for me. When you medicalize my body and claim to be the expert on my speech. I should be outraged at everyone who helps, in a million little ways, to create and sustain a world that oppresses dysfluent speakers.         

Yet for all of this the stutterer is trained (with stickers and (social) gold stars!) to be mild-mannered and submissive—to accept ourselves. Does no one find this absurd? This is domestication, not liberation! We as a community are far too easily satisfied. Oh, it’s certainly permissible if I occasionally get angry at myself, if it leads me to work harder and persevere. But direct that anger towards the world? Ruffle some feathers? Dare to make our frustration political? All of a sudden we are stuttering out of line. All of a sudden we are unruly, dangerous.

(We will not, by the way, be towed back in line through claims that we’re just playing the victim card or being lazy. In every movement, these have always been cowardly responses used to maintain the status quo.)     

Here’s what anger does. It focuses us. It enlivens us. But most of all, it centers attention where it needs to be: on the injustice of the stuttering experience. My tongue is not the problem. My tongue has never been the problem. Getting angry lets me remember this.

Anger is a rallying cry. In the fight for gender equality, anger remains a driving force behind suffrage, workplace equality, and bodily autonomy. In the civil rights movement, anger fueled leaders from Martin Luther King, Jr., to Malcolm X, to Audre Lorde in rallying the multitude and making sure they will no longer be ignored. Anger continues to be a life-giving force in the face of marginalization, as, for example, recent events in Ferguson have shown.

In the disability rights movement, anger forces those who are “abnormal” and subhumanized to be confronted, at least for an instant, as persons. When those who are institutionalized without their consent, medicated against their wishes, isolated, ignored, diagnosed, stigmatized, rehabilitated, sterilized, denied education, criminalized, and left in poverty with no escape beyond the bureaucratic welfare and intermittent charity of those caregivers and systems disabled people too often find themselves utterly dependant on, anger is a lifeline in demanding that injustice be recognized and that oppressed peoples be heard on their own terms. Anger is a bastion for communities who refuse to simply smile and be grateful. Anger fuels change. 

Anger can be this for stutterers.

It’s time to take back our speech.

-Josh

[1] “The Uses of Anger: Women Responding to Racism”

I am not a conspiracy theorist. I do not own a tin foil hat.

Yet one would hardly need to believe the US government is hiding aliens in Area 51 to notice, mimicking the melodramatic language of politicians, a “war on disability.” Put more soberly, there is an intensive and sustained global effort to irradiate disability from the human population, an effort rooted in the common belief that disability is a tragedy—causing pain, suffering, disadvantage—and the world would be a better place without it.

While society has always discriminated against disabiity to some degree, it is only in the past 150 years that humans have believed themselves capable of removing disability from the human population altogether in the happy march of human progress. The irradiation of disability fits into a larger story, into the history of what is termed “eugenics.” 
     
Eugenics is the attempt to improve the genetic stock of humanity—literally to create better people. Originating in the mid-nineteenth century with Francis Galton, an English scientist responsible for discovering statistical techniques of measuring heritable human abilities and characteristics, eugenics caught on like wildfire across Europe and especially in North America. Galton introduced the idea of statistically “normal” human traits and the idea that the quality of the human race could be improved by promoting the reproduction of “higher” quality people (positive eugenics) while discouraging the reproduction of “lower” quality people (negative eugenics).

Following from Galton’s theory of negative eugenics, institutions were quickly erected to separate those deemed “feeble-minded” from the rest of society. Built upon some very sketchy science, thousands of disabled people (or people diagnosed as disabled) were segregated and sterilized in an attempt to produce a better population, or a better human “stock” throughout Canada and the US. In Alberta, the Canadian province in which I live, 2 800 people were approved by the government between 1928 and 1972 to be sterilized non-consensually and often without their knowledge (I am involved with a major research project called the Living Archives on Eugenics in Western Canada) .  

The logic of eugenics—that the human race should and can be improved—is most infamously associated with the Nazi Final Solution. Yet it is less-well known that the creation of a “pure” Aryan race was first tested on disabled people. By the end of WW2, an estimated 275 000 disabled people had been murdered by the Nazis, many of them severely intellectually disabled or mentally ill.[1] Moreover, it is worth noting that many champions of eugenics in North America praised early Nazi attempts at social hygiene. These events seem chilling from our perspective, yet eliminating "less suitable" kinds of people through eugenics was commonly assumed as necessary to combat poverty, crime, and a host of racist and ableist cultural anxieties.  

After the holocaust, eugenic practices—no surprise—fell out of favor. The racism of the holocaust was denounced, as was the “science” that it relied upon. Yet many institutions for the “feeble-minded” remained open for business, some, like in Alberta, sterilizing disabled people into the 70s. 

How could this happen?

Put in simple terms, the ableism propelling eugenics was never slowed. While no one in the scientific community now suggests that certain racialized groups are inferior and should not exist, the idea that the world would be a better place without disability is rarely questioned. Disabled people are still treated as less-than fully human. Think of the language we commonly use to describe unwanted things: “that’s so lame” “are you blind?” “what a dumb idea” “you’re so insane” (there are many other ableist terms that get thrown around). What is disability in movies but a tragedy, an inspiration, or something to laugh at? How many times have you heard someone exclaim that they would rather die than be blind or in a wheelchair? Disabled lives are still not understood as fully human.   

The ugly eugenics of the 20th century is now being replaced by shiny “newgenic” practices such as pre-natal screening that still attempt to stop disabled people from existing. The methods have changed, but the endgame is the same: a world without disability, weakness, and deviance. In other words, while we decry sterilization and (sometimes) institutionalization as inhumane, eugenic beliefs are only gaining steam. 

It is from this perspective that I worry about the search for a stuttering cure. There was much hubbub about a “stuttering gene” a little while back, a search that would not have been out of place 100 years ago. I have sat across from speech-language pathologists excitedly telling me about the search for a stuttering cure and wondered: what other reason is there to find a cure for stuttering than to eliminate our voices and to remove stuttering from the gene pool and the human condition? 

Being from Alberta and knowing about our shameful eugenic history colours the search for a stuttering cure for me. As well intentioned as it may seem, a “cure” for stuttering cannot be separated from the idea and practise of eugenics that assumes the world would be a better place without disability, without us. We already screen for Down Syndrome since we have decided some lives are more valuable than others. In 20 years might we screen foetuses for stuttering? (I am, by the way, dubious that a stuttering gene will ever be found). What about Speech Easy? Pharmaceuticals? Therapy? While often advertised as helping us “find our voice,” I believe these practices are often eugenic, aimed at normalization. It is just assumed that, given a choice, we would rather talk fluently. We would rather not be disabled.        

I do not believe that the world would be a better place without disability and without stuttering. We have seen shadows of that world and it is foul and dangerous, full of fear and hate. Rather, with disability theorist Rosemarie Garland-Thomson,[2] I believe we need to understand disability as intrinsic to our humanity, something that needs to be “conserved” and encouraged to flourish in the face of eugenic ideas and practises. My desire is for a world where different types of bodies, voices, minds, experiences, and people can exist together, learn from each other, and yes, even love each other. 


-Josh


[1] Braddock, David L. and Susan L Parish, 2001, “An Institutional History of Disability,” in (ed.) Gary L. Albrecht, Katherine D. Seelman, and Michael Bury, Handbook of Disability Studies (Thousand Oaks: Sage), 40.

[2] Garland-Thompson, Rosemarie, 2012, “The Case for Conserving Disability,” Journal of Bioethical Inquiry 9 (3): 339-55.