​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.

Communication Accessibility is a concept that has been mentioned in several instances recently in regard to the trial of Anna Stubblefield for the alleged sexual assault of the sibling of one of her students who was identified as developmentally disabled both by the courts and by their own parents.
 
Here at Did I Stutter, we have been using and working on the concept of Communication Accessibility for quite some time and while we do not disagree with its application to the instance of alternative communication being discounted by political/legal authority figures, we also wish not to add any more discussion to the already dicey topic of the Stubblefield case.
 
To expand the discussion, this blog will offer a series of other situations in which the concept is useful:
 
• Communication Accessibility is practiced when the authorities governing a classroom/court room/debate round (or other formal conversation space) take material or discursive actions to include alternative ways of communicating in the space.
 
•Communication Accessibility does not only apply to heard/spoken speech but also applies to other media---offering American Sign Language translation services in multiple venues is an action which makes communication accessible.

•Communication Accessibility also applies to communicative interference. While human produced sounds or nonverbal communications are never considered to be interference in this alternative embodiment affirming position, interference may be made by all manner of mechanical noisemaking machines or by other voices not involved in the conversation---a part of Communication Accessibility is reducing other sensory phenomenal presence. Sometimes, this means turning off a television in the background or lowering its sound---other times, this means altering the venue and finding a quieter or less visually overwhelming area for communication to begin.

•Communication Accessibility is temporal; longer times for speech, assistance with managing communicative data (such as note-taking or conversation repair or alterations to the situation to allow for lip-reading) are to be considered a part of communicative accessibility.
 
Scholars such as Jim Charlton have codified how the hierarchy of disability means that accessibility happens first for the visibly disabled and last for those who are invisibly disabled.
 
Communication Accessibility has been informally and silently left to the last of the goals of what was the disability rights movement---today we see it starting to be addressed in often surface ways, such as “trigger warnings” and “content warnings” as well as in difficult battles over captioning, skyping, quiet rooms and speech times in college debate events.
 
To make Communication Accessible, we as a society or as multiple societies, will have to engage in a series of processes of rethinking what communication is. 

-Zach

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Zach

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

In confronting fluency as an ideology, the Did I Stutter project aims to consider how language and conversation become directed by a demand of austerity of speech and vocal performance. In analyzing fluency as an ideological demand of hygiene in oral communication, a goal might be to think of how fluency develops its own imaginary, in other words, the diverse set of presuppositions, fears and hopes associated with an ideology oriented toward suppressing vocal difference.

I use the word austerity in this piece, evoking its meaning of “extreme simplicity of appearance or style” to describe how ableist practices intend to curtail and reduce the vast variety of body expressions and voices. The austere is that which has been streamlined; is simple, not complicated; that which is controlled; that which is predictable.

The ideology of fluency comes from a perspective of viewing communication economically. Word economy, a series of values placed onto speech, is a necessary labor for speech to perform in integrating the subject within a diverse set of social forces. If fluency has a set of attitudes it is an emotional attachment to a certain specific arrangement and practical use of speech. This attachment is perpetually destabilized by the supposed-unpredictability of different speech.

Speech Language Pathology, as a knowledge system, came into existence to secure conversation from interruptions, to maintain clarity, and to ensure that conversations go on with a singular voice, instead many different echoes and syllable islands.

The teachings of linguistic regulation push subjects to be worried about interruptions and to pursue an ideal of conversational clarity.  Some conversation partners may gesture or wince or sometimes ask a stutterer to repeat themselves. These demands are holdovers from the use of language within modernity for labor purposes. In the early Victorian era and in Europe, theater and official declarations centered on producing a hegemonic singular clarity. In the United States in the post-war era, lecturers were a primary form of entertainment; in all of the spoken arts, including in debate, norms oriented toward clear speech served an economic function: to make speech efficient and therefore valuable.

We speakers now walk around with hundreds of years of history of the glorification of clear speech and have to grapple with a fluency-oriented position toward speech constantly. In every confrontation with a person who feels the need to correct a stutterers’ speech, a new anxiety is made; mistakes are pointed out; impaled within our psych; prevented from floating into forgotten like so many other specific words. The series of performances done to point out distortions in speech, from the demand of clarification to the interruption to the finishing of words; all of these foment an incompleteness complex in the stuttering voice: the stutter from a place of emotional and bodily expression into an injury to the austerity of modern communication architecture.

In building the stuttering subject into a deviant persona, the stutterer is possessed by a ghost of the fluencentric imaginary. We are haunted by the disruption of our voices; we hear the routines of speech devaluation played out in an endless drama on the background of our speech. This is why one of the calls to fix stuttering—the “relaxation” cure—is so ironic; on top of a background of mandatory fluency, where slight mistakes are socially flagged as reasons for humiliation, the stutterer is told that if they would just be less anxious, there would be no problem. But this is false since the anxiety of the social group is projected upon the stutterer. In being told to calm down, in being told to relax and even when the stutterer has to suffer for a view of stuttering as lack of confidence, in all of these situations, a hologram of mass societal anxiety over inaustere speech is seen in the face of the stutterer. The able co-conversationalist must understand that the anxiety of the stutterer is an anxiety of a personal and collective history of targeting and othering unsmooth speech.

When anxiety is discussed as an element of disabled representation, when a disabled person is seen apologizing too much, often there is a criticism of that person’s character: it is seen as a representation of the individual as spoiled by the impairment. But roles are conditioned: anxiety as an affect is too often blamed on individuals when it has only arrived in the individual after being transferred and imposed upon them by wider social structures. 


-Zach

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