​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
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[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.

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

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”

If you’ve been following some of the recent discussions about speech therapy on this site and some of our other platforms, you may have noticed that we’ve been very firm in questioning speech-language pathologists about the validity of speech therapy, and at the same time we have said repeatedly that we are not opposed to stutterers seeking out speech therapy and want to leave room for that in our community.

I understand that this stance might seem contradictory, so I’d like to address our reasons for it. They could perhaps be best summed up in a phrase by blogger realsocialskills which we recently posted on our tumblr:

“Marginalized people are not revolution objects.”

The phrase is used to resist something that can happen within activist communities: Groups of marginalized people decide that they should not have to change their bodies or practices in order to accommodate ableist (or sexist, racist, etc.) social pressures. However, for many reasons, some marginalized people choose to continue to change themselves, and when they do so they can be judged by others in the community for “giving in” to ableist (sexist, racist) pressures rather than embracing their bodies as a form of activist resistance. 

In our context, this might look like attacking someone who seeks out speech therapy for not embracing their stutter.

Activist communities are capable of being just as exclusionary as the social pressures they are resisting, and this is not the sort of community we want to develop. Marginalized people are not revolution objects.

So I want to recognize upfront that there are many reasons people seek out speech-language pathology. I also want to recognize that my choice to reject speech-language pathology personally comes from a place of privilege. For one thing, while my stutter has led to a good amount of social shames and exclusions over the years, the tension in my jaw and tongue caused by my stutter has never caused me physical pain. For another, I am white and male, which can allow my stuttered voice to be taken seriously in ways that other stuttering voices may not be. I am otherwise able-bodied and do not have a parent or caregiver that opposes my stutter, or will speak for me if I can’t speak fast enough. The list could go on and on, because stutters are diverse and part of recognizing the ableism of our society is recognizing that not everyone will be affected in the same ways or to the same extents.

Others who do not have the privileges I do may still choose to reject speech therapy. And others who share my privileges might have their own reasons for engaging in speech therapy. That is okay, because dysfluent speakers are not revolution objects who needs to proudly stutter in every time and place—to be sacrificed for “the cause.”

This is what we mean when we say that people who choose to engage in speech therapy are welcome here. We are not here to police your body or tell you how you should speak. That is, after all, the entire point.

Yet even though some of us may choose to go to speech therapists to increase our fluency, or to learn to accept our stutters, we shouldn’t have to. As a community, we need to be able to decide for ourselves what role speech therapy gets to have in our lives, and that just will not happen when the entire discussion is dominated by the language and terminology of speech-language pathology and when able-bodied professionals continue to define our voices for us. We want to open up space to imagine a world that is different, a world where stuttering and non-normative voices can be heard and appreciated on their own terms. 

So I will continue to be firm in questioning speech-language pathology, because this is not their space. There are very important conversations to be had with speech-language pathologists in the future (as the thread on the forum has indicated) and we do want to keep these communication channels open, while retaining the right to discuss our speech on our own terms.

At the same time, we desire Did I Stutter to be a space where we are generous with each other and our specific needs, circumstances, and bodies. If we are moving forward together it is in stuttered and halting steps.

-Josh