​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.

I love finding dysfluency in the world—stumbling across words and people who move with a delightful rhythm. Being the one discovered can, however, be awkward: feeling somewhat like a freak show. Last week I had two back-to-back yet very different encounters with dysfluency.
 
Encounter #1: I have an awkward hour to pass before a medical appointment, so I stop to work at a Starbucks attached to a Chapters that I have only been to once or twice. I order my eggnog latte, stuttering as one does, and as the barista listens with a poised sharpie she asks: “It’s Josh right?” I smile and play it cool while I’m actually thinking “How the hell do you remember my name?!” Oh right, I’m the stutterer.     
 
Encounter #2: Two hours later I meet my parents at another coffee shop across the city. As we leave I stop to ask about an electric grinder for sale behind the counter. The barista, not the same one who earlier took our orders, opens his mouth and answers my stutter with one of his own. A dysfluent dance opens between us as we discuss the pros and cons of this mid-range grinder. I leave without the coffee grinder yet with a smile—fortunate to have stumbled upon dysfluency in a fluent world. 
 
Let’s get the obvious out of the way: I apparently spend too much time at coffee shops. Beyond this fact, there seems to be something really different about these two encounters. In the first experience I was identified as that guy who stutterers through my dysfluency. The first thing that popped into my head were the opening lines of “Honest Speech,” where Erin remarks: “The barn owl communicates with its mates and offspring using a complex system of hissing, screeching, squawking, and facial muscle manipulation / Survival is dependent upon creating a voice so unique it can be recognized by loved ones in an instant.” Was I an owl perched in a Starbucks line?
 
The first intuition is yes, however the issue is complicated. My unique hissings and squawks reveal me to be a singular being that others can recognize. Yet there is an important difference between being recognized as a singular being as opposed to identified a type of person—that is, “a stutterer.” The second is an identity, a subject of a usually medicalized discourse. A “stutterer” is an identity that our culture understands because it is an identity that they have created and thus control. There is nothing unique nor singular about being a “stutterer.” I have been identified as a “stutterer” through my speech many times, and this is almost always an act of erasing dysfluency, of reducing it and myself to an identity that can be understood and managed.
 
In the capitalist context of a Starbucks line, calling me “Josh” seems to be recognizing my singularity rather than my identity as a “stutterer.” What caused the barista to remember me? My unique voice or the fact that I was a stutterer? These options are of course not mutually exclusive, but it may be helpful to consider the context. Baristas write names on coffee cups to give the feeling of connection. This feeling is part of the experience you pay for. In more fancy coffee shops, I have been told, the person behind the till writes down a distinguishing characteristic on the order—e.g. black coat, red hair—so that the other baristas can look directly at you when calling your name. As if that latte was made with care just for you. Calling anyone by name in this context is a calculated play at recognizing our singularity. Whether or not the barista last week identified me in my dysfluent singularity, rather than “that stutterer,” is ultimately beside the point.
 
Compare this to the second encounter. The wonderful thing about encountering dysfluency as dysfluency is the lack of need to make sense of it by labelling it. We were not two stutterers engaged in a halting act of communication, but an unexpected eruption of dysfluency in the world. There is far more dysfluency in the world than most people would like to admit. In fact, the idea of a “fluent world” is a fiction that can only be maintained through a sustained effort of covering up and smoothing over dysfluency. Encountering dysfluency enlivens me because of its honesty. As Erin says, “The sstuttering is the most honest part of me.” This is true not because stuttering represents some deep and authentic truth about who I am—a stutterer—but because the dysfluency of my voice “is how I know I still have a voice, I am still -being heard.” I participate in the world dysfluently and help to create a dysfluent world through my unique squawks and screeches. It is in these specific actions that I can be recognized; these squawks do not point to a general truth about my (medical and social) identity as a “stutterer.” They rather point to me here in this specific and fleeting moment.  
 
Desiring and expecting dysfluency in the world is perhaps a far better model than the way stuttering is used to label us. We don’t need to find and join with other “stutterers,” we need collectively to create a more dysfluent world.  

-Josh

Speech is a funny thing. Our voices are dynamic. We can yell, whisper, scream, sing, grunt, and cry. There is great joy in the range of frequencies and intensities our voices can take.  There is also joy to be found in the disfluency and fluency that our speech exhibits. Sometimes when we stutter the sounds bounce, sometimes they stretch, other times they splutter and twirl. Sometimes no sounds come out at all. Sometimes many sounds come out all at once. The diversity in our voices is truly beautiful and cause for celebration. I would like to introduce the concept of technologies of communication to account for this diversity. Each of these different speech patterns utilizes different technologies of communication, which can be thought of as practices used to construct specific speech patterns. These practices are myriad and serve many purposes, some more volitional and obvious than others. Semantic practices, including the use of certain words, may indicate inclusion within a group, such as use of certain slang or colloquialisms. Syntactic practices may indicate which generation you belong to, for example the use of “like” as an adverb. Phonological practices may indicate your geographic place of origin, such as how you pronounce the word “coffee”. Paralinguistic practices such as vocal fry and intonation patterns all carry information about the speaker. There is nothing that can be called a natural or preexistent speech pattern that these practices can be said modify. That is, there is no speech pattern that exists outside of these technologies of communication.

Just as there are semantic, syntactic, phonological, and paralinguistic practices there are also stuttering practices. There are many ways can stutter which all use different technologies of communication. The practices we use when we stutter can and do serve a purpose. They can be used to disguise our stutters, such as when we use interjections as a distraction. They can be used to hide our discomfort, such as when we break eye contact. Or they can be used to showcase our pride, such as when we let the first sounds of our name repeat wonderfully.  They can showcase our refusal to accept society’s speaking norms when we choose to use our stuttered voices when a gesture may have been quicker. They can show our determination when we proceed with a word even though we don’t know how it will come out. Every moment of the stutter from the apprehension that precedes it, to the repeated syllables during it, to the way we react to it when it ends is constituted by our technologies of communication. Do we respond to that apprehension by changing words or by saying what we want? During the stutter do we push hard or do we relax? After the stutter do we pretend that nothing happened or do we comment on it? All of these examples demonstrate that there is no authentic way to stutter, only different ways to stutter that use varied technologies of communication. The danger of insisting on the authentic is that authenticity is an empty concept. Insistence on authenticity is inherently conservative; it is insistence on the status quo. What we desire is freedom to speak how we want regardless of how authentic it is.

To be clear, this to not to make a relativist claim that stuttering does not exist or an attempt to deny its physiological and neurological underpinnings. Of course stuttering exists. If it wasn’t real we wouldn’t be wasting all this time and energy thinking and writing about it. What we are arguing is not that stuttering is an illusion of socio-historical discourses but that it is never separate from these discourses. It is made of very specific things, both material and discursive, that occur at very specific times and places. Neural substrates are one of the material things that produce stuttering but it would be simplistic to think that the analysis ends there. Yes, stuttering’s neural markers are real, but the effects those markers have on the subjectivities and lived experiences of the individuals possessing them are in no way necessitated by biology. They exist within certain contexts and power relations. It is not our neuroanatomy that is the problem but the ways our neuroanatomy is acted upon by power that is the problem. That is, it is not intuitive that the neural markers that may underlie stuttering should constitute a particular type of individual, the stutterer. There are many neural markers that are not pathologized.

The ableist discourses circulating within the fields of medicine and speech-language pathology act as forces for normalization and standardization. According to these discourses the multiplicities in our voices do not hold value. They demand that we utilize technologies of communication that make us sound like “typically fluent speakers”. It is right that we resist these discourses which attempt to standardize and control our speech. However, in our excitement to promote a disability pride position it is important that we avoid creating a binary between natural and unnatural speech: between authentic stuttered speech and modified fluent speech. This is an essentialist view that denies the nuances of stuttering that make it so delightful. This binary would place disability studies on one side, which privileges one’s natural and stuttered way of speaking, and speech-language pathology on the other side, which privileges one’s modified and fluent way of speaking. If this were the actual situation we should, of course, be firmly on the side of the former; however, this is a false dichotomy, a potential strawman. The difference lies not in one manner of speaking being more natural or authentic than the other but in the use of different technologies of communication. This distinction is important because if our counter-narratives of stuttering pride are to gain purchase within society at large they must be theoretically sound. Other liberation movements have gotten bogged down in trying to define what it means to be a member of their community. Not only was this unproductive but such exercises in essentialism were ultimately abandoned by modern poststructural theory. We stutterers are a diverse group. Some of us will have had therapy experiences, others will not, some will pass as fluent; others will struggle to string two fluent words together. Only one thing is certain of us all: the technologies of communication we use will be abundant and varied. If we are to build a tent large enough to house us all we need to avoid any definition of what true authentic stuttering looks and sounds like. This will exclude people whose stuttering does not fit that mold. In this way we can avoid arguments over who does and does not belong in our community.

Technologies such as stuttering modification are often portrayed as the result of speech-language pathologists taking a stutterer’s “natural” stuttered speech pattern and “modifying” it to be more fluent. This line of thinking assumes a natural way that we all speak and stutter. However, upon closer inspection this notion of authenticity quickly falls away. We have a speech pattern that is dynamic and constantly changing. It has been developing since we were young children and is never complete, never finished, always in a process of becoming. In much the same way that our semantics, syntax, phonology, and paralinguistics depend on our social histories the way we stutter is dependent on many external factors. This is because speech is learned. All speech, not just stuttered speech, is influenced by every past communicative act that we have produced or witnessed in our historically situated society. Not only is it affected by our society’s ableism but it is also affected by where we grew up, the languages we speak, our genders, our sexes, our social classes, our races, and the past experiences we have had. Each of these experiences contributes to our current way of speaking. We cannot peel back the layers to find the natural pattern hidden underneath because we have no natural speech pattern to return to.

As stutterers, we are especially aware of our speech patterns’ histories. We remember the words we have stuttered on in the past. We know which sounds lead to blocks. We remember times we have been mocked and ridiculed. We remember situations in which we have passed as fluent speakers. We remember the reactions different stutters have elicited from our listeners. We recall the looks on our speaking partners’ faces when we do not respond in the amount of time that society deems appropriate. We know how it feels to speak in a society that has developed conversational norms for an idealized-citizen who is assumed to be fluent. And we know how it feels to have no choice but to violate these norms if we wish for our voices to be heard. The words we have stuttered on in the past, the reactions of our listeners, the feeling of the never-ending block, the bullying, shame, and embarrassment, all of these shape our speech and constitute different technologies of communication.

 The sound of our voices and the sound of our stuttering are never separate from these social and historical contexts or these past experiences. Our present speech patterns, the ones we are using in this moment, are unique to this moment. They are different speech patterns than those which we used a moment ago and the ones we will use a moment from now will be different as well. Our speech patterns are always formed by these social and historical contexts. They depend on the technologies of communication that we employ. Therefore there is no natural way that we speak separate from our past experiences. We are always already situated within a social and historical context that is perpetually constructing our speech patterns through our technologies of communication.

If we bracket this notion of a natural speech pattern what are we left with? Our speech pattern, whether yelled or whispered, stuttered or fluent, is always already influenced by society’s discrimination and oppression. Our accents, dialects, semantics, syntax, grammars, morphologies, and, yes, our stutters are constantly worked on by our environments. Even if we have not been to speech therapy out stutters are not natural. There is no natural, no authentic. Our speech patterns our produced by our technologies of communication. To block may be to hold in a stutter, to self-censor due to society’s prejudice, to react to that internal feeling of losing control with a need to control it. The insertion of interjections (uh, um, like), the restarting of a sentence, these are all different technologies of communication. Practices we use to talk. When it comes down to it, everything we do when we speak and when we stutter is constituted by ableist social discourses as well as reactions to that internal feeling of stuttering. The part-word repetition is not the stutter. The block is not the stutter. Rather these are technologies of communication, conditioned reactions to the stutter, fashioned within a context of ableism. For example, if we feel that familiar feeling of stuttering and instead of saying the word “s-s-s-subway” we say “metro”, we have still stuttered (we still had that feeling), but our reaction was different, we’ve utilized a different technology. All of the things we do when we speak, all of the technologies, are reactions to our listeners, to our society, and to ourselves.

Rather than taking about more natural ways of speaking it would be more useful to discuss the technologies of communication we use when we speak. How is our current speech pattern constructed? Do our technologies of communication limit us or do they allow us to express ourselves? In this way we can begin to dissect the ways in which society has influenced us and predisposed our use of certain technologies of communication. Why do we stutter the way that we do? Importantly, why do we feel the way we do when we stutter? By avoiding the binary between natural and modified speech we remain more theoretically consistent as we attempt to challenge the discourses that imprison us. Together we can develop technologies of liberation rather than subjection. Instead of employing technologies that make us sound more fluent, such as fluency shaping techniques, we could employ technologies that allow us to speak more freely. This cannot be prescriptive, technologies of liberation will be different for each person; however, they will have their end goal in common: to stutter freely. When we feel that familiar apprehension before a moment of stuttering we could move towards rather than away from it. We could allow our syllables to bounce and dance rather than tensing up and silencing their song. After a stutter occurs we could treat it as an artistic expression rather than an embarrassment.

When technologies of communication serve to standardize us, to make us fluent, to make us speak as everyone else, we must reject them. We must instead substitute these normalizing technologies with technologies of freedom and beautiful multiplicity. Technologies that allow us to develop unique voices and subjectivities. To quote E. E. Cummings, “To be nobody-but-yourself - in a world which is doing its best, night and day, to make you everybody else - means to fight the hardest battle which any human being can fight; and never stop fighting.” Our battle is not to stutter naturally but to stutter freely.

Yours in solidarity,

-Chris

Here’s a bold claim:

Communication and clarity have nothing in common.

We are compelled to correct our speech and refine our syntax and arguments in the name of communication and understanding,
                                         and this is a joke played at our expense. 

There is no such thing as clear communication.

[C.ccaaa.ccc. you hear me? 
Hhh---hhhave you ever heard me?]

We have lashed ‘communication’ to ‘understanding’ to the notion of exchanging ideas that are locked in our heads. We frantically heave lines to each others’ minds like San Fransican street-car wires—a society teetered as/at/on the crisscross of nerves.

(what we call)
“Communication” is born of nervous fears of skull-shaped-soundproof-rooms.
Of wires sliced and lost messages. Of no wires at all.   

We fret, hanging much on communication but giving it so little.  

But what if

Communication is a public, a compost of voices to make meanings, plural, together.
Meanings that swell between, that pool (and thrash) within shared time. 

What if

Communication is a string of overlapped misunderstandings,
a sagged body of splintered meanings and voices

that we cobble together each moment limping and crippled along.

It is both invitation and threat
and we so often choose the latter.

Stand up straight!  
Get me the brace!
We’re late—where the fuck is the body double?

We play dress-up, pretending communication is a normal body: a non-disabled body that stands straight and walks on its own, thank you very much; a male and virile body; a straight body never veering from its course; a respectable white body that can be trusted to deliver messages. When we’re feeling our best, communication sheds its body and becomes a direct link between minds, a psychic postal man, a Vulcan mind-meld, telepathy.

Telepathy is a dream invented circa 1880
by white bourgeois men
isolated and afraid
of the sin
of voices playing in the dirt.

I think we should be concerned that communication has become a technique.

[Ddd.do. yyy.yyoou. hear me?]

We now think communication is a problem to be solved
through clarity, and if need be, sing-song therapy

If only we could understand each other!

If only stutterers could speak clearly and take their part in the world!

while never realizing that

Clarity is a technique of productivity.  
Fluency is a technology of bureaucracy.
Understanding is a wink and a nudge and every back-room deal.

Those in the know call “effective communication” a “basic human right”
to be made available and accessible to all.

Effective for who, I want to know.

“Clear communication” and “understanding” will never mend our problems nor will it help us live together. It will never lead to jjj..Uustice nor break apart ableism, racism, sexism, transphobia, nor poverty. The master’s tools, Audre Lordre reminds us, will never never dis—never dismantle the ma-ma-aster’s house. Clear and “effective” communication may make dysfluent speakers better adjusted, more normal, productive, and efficient cogs in the ffFFFff---   FfffffFFF…      in FffflFLuent machine of (late) liberal-capitalism, but will never create justice. 

dd.Ddo you have e—ars to h--hear      ? to Fffffffffffffffeel and touch? To   ?

Communication is the is the pract- is the practice of is the ppract. ------ splintered –m-m-m-m-m-mean –is the practise oof- ings and vvvoices cob-b-b-b

 
                                                                                bbb
 

       b------


                                            led to-
tgether
as we
we-w-w-we

as we limp
limp and limp limp ---
and cr--


as
we wel liimp and Cccci---pple along

together. It is a p..pppractice—a shared, p.pppar---- ----  aartial, and imPUre effort—an art, an ethic, a way of llliivving ccccrip
living ww-ww-ww--ith others.  


-Josh

They tell me time is precious.

We have 1 life (not to botch), roughly 3 decades to reproduce (the family structure), 40 hours a week to make money, 24 hours in a day, 16 waking hours.

There’s no time to waste.

In those 16 hours we have to shower, eat, shave, shit, laugh, dress, buy, love, drive, drink, clean, mourn, write, and stress. We have to brownnose our bosses, save for the future, impress our colleagues, grow up, stay youthful, buy a house while interest is low, stay fit, keep in touch, pay off debts, invest, floss our teeth, and watch loved ones die.

So I’m told, life is short.

My response: to stutter whenever and wherever I can.

I like to be inconvenient.

See, the thing about time is that some people are allowed to take up more of it than others. Some people’s time (read: fancy businessmen and other good, privileged capitalists) is worth more than mine. Some people are rewarded for yammering on and lounging in time since their time is what makes the world spin. Disabled people, on the other hand, are taught from an early age to cram ourselves inside time, to take up as little space as possible, to not be a burden.

Part of our oppression as dysfluent speakers comes from being caught in this contradiction: our time is not valuable and yet we continue to www w.-ww-aaaaa—wwwww….  …           to Wwwwwaa.   WWW---waaaaaaste it, spending an extravagant amount of time sputtering consonants and screeching out vowels: far more than we have been allotted. We don’t just stutter away our lives, but (more tragically) the lives of colleagues, families, corporations, and governments.

I take a mischievous delight in being inconvenient.
I steal time that shouldn’t belong to me
from right underneath the businessman’s nose.                          

This doesn’t always work of course. Our ableist world is well-practised at depriving disabled people of time, dignity, and life.       

Yet wherever and whenever possible—precisely when most inconvenient—we must stammer ourselves into the world, in protest and hope that we can reclaim what has always been ours.   

Time was never a commodity--
       It cannot be owned.

It must be squandered
together.


-Josh

Did I Stutter is a disability and stuttering pride community. We want to reclaim our bodies and voices, taking pride in them just as they are. But this statement contains an important question that we have never clearly addressed: exactly what (or who) are we reclaiming our bodies from?

There are probably many ways of answering this question but one in particular seems especially helpful. Taking back our speech means learning to tell liberating stories (or narratives) about stuttering—stories about what stuttering is, how we should “treat” it, and relate to it. The problem is that society is already saturated with competing and ableist narratives about stuttering. Reclaiming our voices thus requires that we learn to tell “counter-narratives” that (1) reject dominant narratives about stuttering that pitch it as disorder and a source of shame, while (2) replacing these with narratives of our own. 

I believe the central narrative supporting our ableist, cultural understanding of stuttering is that when we get right down to it, stuttering is a medical and scientific condition that should be treated as such. This narrative has become so engrained in our thinking that is nearly impossible to question.

What, for example, is stuttering?

According to the dominant medical and scientific story we have all come to accept as (capital-T) Truth, stuttering is simply a communication or neurological developmental disorder or pathology. Researchers and clinicians may not agree on the specifics, but everyone believes that stuttering is at core a medical and scientific condition.   

How does one treat a medical disorder? Through medical means such as rehabilitation; psychiatric treatment; pharmaceuticals; or, in the future, gene therapy.     

I, for one, am absolutely sick of hearing my speech glibly described by medical and scientific experts as a “disorder.” Medical-scientific experts may claim to possess the truth of stuttering, but I don’t recognize their authority over my body and I call on others to reject it as well.

This is all to say that one of our goals at Did I Stutter is to offer a counter-narrative to the medical and scientific story (or what we have in the past referred to as the “medical model”). Our counter-narrative is in many ways extremely simple: the medical model seeks medical solutions for social problems. 

The medical-scientific world loves to “solve” social problems (in fact, many have argued that this is exactly what the modern institution of medicine was developed to do). Nineteenth- and twentieth-century history is rife with examples of medical and scientific institutions and practitioners diagnosing social problems as medical with often terrible consequences. Allow me to outline just a few:

• An estimated 25% of women in the mid-nineteenth-century with symptoms of nervousness, hallucinations, and “abnormal” sexual appetite were diagnosed with “female hysteria” and subsequently treated in interesting ways. Turns out hysteria was just the medicalization of sexist beliefs about women. 

• The presumed rise of poverty, criminality, and “moral degeneracy” in the early twentieth century was addressed by diagnosing, institutionalizing, and often sterilizing portions of the population deemed unfit to bear children. Between 1907 to the 1970s,  in the US alone an estimated 60 000 people were sterilized. This blight on our (near global) history is called eugenics and its legacy remains with us today. 

• Up until 1980 (with the introduction of the DSM-II), homosexuality, or “sexual orientation disturbance” was considered a psychiatric disorder. Turns out society was just homophobic. Against those who would argue that this medicalization was an unfortunate artifact of the past—just “bad science”—it is worth remembering how far we have (not) come. Transgender people are today diagnosed with Gender Identity Disorder (and require this diagnosis for treatment and in many cases legal recognition), and intersex conditions are likewise heavily medicalized with disastrous effects. Finding medical solutions to our social discomfort with gender non-conforming bodies is still big business. 
  

All of these medicalizations shift attention off the social forces that produce the so-called problem in the first place. Often, the only problem is simply that people believe there is a problem. Medicine and science rush in to ease society’s anxiety with difference not by challenging us to embrace differences that we may not understand, but by labelling ‘different’ as a disorder and thus seeking to eliminate it from our bodies. 

Stuttering is not a medical disorder. Like the other things on this list, and like other forms of disability reclaimed by disability rights movements, what we call stuttering is simply a form of human variation—in this case, a different way of speaking. It is the medical and scientific narrative that has labelled this different way of speaking “abnormal” in order to (1) claim authority over our bodies and (2) calm our anxieties about people who are different.

The social problem of stuttering is the fact that we live in an ableist world uncomfortable with disability/difference. The social problem is that stutterers have been taught to hate and be ashamed of how we speak. The social problem is that people take time to listen to long-winded speakers but not to stutterers. The social problem is that stutterers are denied access to parts of society and are not treated as full citizens simply because our speech is dysfluent.

Seeking a medical solution for these social problems is not just an epic adventure in missing the point. Rather, scientists and SLPs who try to fix the social problem with medical tools are reinforcing the harmful narrative that our bodies have a disorder and thereby make it harder for us to take ownership of our speech.

Better evidence-based research, larger sample sizes, or advancements in neurophysiology and genetics will never liberate us from our oppression as stutterers. The problem is not that the science or clinical practices aren’t yet good enough. The problem is that stuttering has never been a medical and scientific problem.

It’s like trying to put out a fire with gasoline.

Medical-scientific practitioners need to realize that for better or worse, they become complicit in our oppression through the narratives they perpetuate.

“Disorder.”

“Treatment.”

“Risk.”

However, we all need to stop parroting stories that treat stuttering as something medical and scientific. And most importantly, we as a community need to learn to tell new stories that can imagine stuttering differently. My stutter has never been a disorder—it cannot be diagnosed or fixed. My stutter is how I talk. My stutter is the particular rhythms of my voice: unpredictable, dramatic, emphatic, unique. Stuttering our own stories about our voices is how they will be reclaimed. 

-Josh

“If my stutter was the most truthful and sincere part of me then what did it mean to try and change that voice?”

Stutterer and author Katherine Preston asks this intriguing question in her Huffington Post article citing Honest Speech. How do we discuss the concept of authentic voice in respect to the myriad reasons individuals choose to change the way they speak?

It is necessary to first differentiate between alterations related to identity and those related to assimilation, although the two are often intertwined.  

When we talk about stutterers in speech therapy, we are primarily talking about assimilation. This type of therapy is founded in speech pathology, which labels disabled speech as inferior, ineffective, and impeded. Individuals who pursue therapy are influenced by the socially constructed standard of fluency, and they seek to reconcile the difference in their speech. Commonly, the decision to enter therapy is made not by the individual but by parents and educators who mark dysfluent speech as different and attempt to realign it.   

Individuals who enter therapy for reasons related to identity are commonly not stutterers. Preston gives many examples of identity-affirming therapy, including trans* and non-binary individuals. In this case, aspects of a person’s speech are misaligned with their identity and they make the choice to pursue change. They seek therapy not to sound like everyone else, but to sound more like themselves.

Assimilation and identity can be conflated in many cases. The litigator who entered therapy to deepen her voice did so because a high-pitched voice was viewed as incongruent with her identity as a litigator. However, the perception of femininity as ineffective in the courtroom stems from the social construction of maleness as an unmarked trait. And the choice to align a person’s voice with their gender identity is influenced by the social construction of male and female speech traits.

Did I Stutter is not inherently opposed to speech therapy. Our intention is not to shame or judge individuals who pursue therapy for any reason but instead to illustrate the implicit and explicit forces that drive stutterers into speech therapy. The point is to empower dysfluent voices, and to advocate for stutterers to be treated with respect regardless of their choices about therapy. The point is to allow stuttering youth access to proud dysfluent role models and to affirm consent and bodily autonomy at all ages.

-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”