In this blog post, I will argue that within the ableist viewpoint that predominates the concept of being a stutterer, it is impossible to identify the self or the “I” as the stutterer, because a stutter is always limited to the voice or to the psyche, both of which are separated from the self.

A problem with the pervasive wellness or self-improvement culture is that it views the body as a set of disconnected properties that need to be constantly improved upon. The self, in such a scenario, is kind of a ghost that inhabits the body (and the psyche) but is separate from it. For the goodness of the self to be elaborated, the various properties of the body must be in a constant state of upgrade.

Thus, within an American and broader Western voice, the “I,” or the self, is beyond material problems and is bigger than the histories attached to those material realities.

To say that I am a stutterer is to revel in the contradiction of individualism combined with self-conscious vulnerability.

We are really something more than our bodies. Our society builds a hyper-narcissistic views of the self and then forces a constant effort to maintain certain standards for appearance.

But people have long pursued alternative sets of standards and have rewritten the present ones for all sorts of reasons.

When we say I am a stutterer, the common response, possibly from those who love us might be: come now, you are so much more than a stutterer, you are a writer, a board gamer, a brother, a son, etc., etc

In that response, “the stutter” is relegated to a practical issue or technical difficulty.

But the stutter’s other capacity as an experience that is shared by many people is lost.

People have long been permitted to identify with facial features of familial legacy, with bodily attributes such as strength as a mark of positive morals and with  body art or tattoos as a sign of independent spirit. However, when the peculiar presence of one’s speech or body is made into a zone of professional or hygienic consideration and not as a mark of solidarity, the beauty of human variety is lost.

The popularity of wellness culture has led disabled people to cultivate appearances of ableness, to refuse identification with past negative experiences and to measure things like “fluency” or “passing.”  Yet choosing to track these elements is not really about wellness, but is about the appearance of self-ownership.

To identify with an element of the body that cannot be controlled, as one does when we claim membership in our dysfluency is to identify with a naturally occurring force of public refusal. As the stutter bucks the trends of language, takes up too much time and makes strange and incomplete sounds, to identify with the stutter is to stop commending mastery and order over our own flesh.

When we refuse to participate in criticisms about how our own bodies should be, we remove the distractions that cause us to be angry at the pace and limitations of our bodies and learn to stop casting constant negative judgment about our embodiment and can thus merely “be” our bodies.

However, being a body might be better understood as a kind of material authenticity. When we lose the illusion of an individuality that is so special and unique as to transcend bodily boundaries, we become more familiar with the ways in which histories have been built on top of amorphous and unclear elements of the flesh.

I want to end this blog altering a question I hear too often. “How is my fluency?” is brought up to check our power to pass in the stuttering community. But a more important question for those concerned with disability pride to be asking is, “how is my dysfluency?” and instead question the ways in which their flesh has become contorted, by way of habit, into bizarre ugly incomplete attempts to mimic a gentrified body, at the cost  of truer self-knowledge and self love. I encourage my friends in the stuttering community to ask me “how is my dysfluency?” to check not my performance of normalcy, but my attempts to hide linguistically my disabled self.


-Zach

“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”

After years of fluency-shaping speech therapy, I finally found a different approach when I learned about desensitization and stuttering acceptance. It was a huge relief to learn that there was another option for people who stutter: one that didn't necessarily involve fluency. The idea that I could be content with the way I talked while still stuttering was never an option to me before, and it honestly changed my life. Since then, I've managed to overcome a lot of the frustration that I used to feel every time my speech wouldn't cooperate.

There's so much I value about desensitization, but lately I've been thinking about the inevitable risks we face in self-help and speech therapy, even when the goal is self-acceptance. For me, the notion that people who stutter can be good communicators was incredibly exciting. I continue to feel empowered when I list all the options I have while speaking: even if I'm not fluent, I can make "good" eye contact, listen well, express excitement about whatever I'm talking about, and communicate openness about my stutter. But the idea of a "good communicator" seems risky, and it's become important for me to remind myself not to overvalue "good communication." I worry that this phrase promotes a normalized idea of speech: one that makes room for stuttering, but only if it's surrounded by other qualities of good communication, some of which may be out of reach for many speakers.

So how can we push back that inevitable narrative of speech therapy--and disability-- that values overcoming? How can people who stutter keep from aspiring toward some model of speaking, without looking at the forces that shape the idea of "good communication?" I love many things about the idea that good communication doesn't mean fluency, but it's easy for this notion to go from being empowering to being another way that we tell ourselves that our speech is inadequate. Instead of failing at being fluent, I was failing at communicating well, failing at adequately owning my stutter, or failing at maintaining eye contact.

That's why it's so important for all people who stutter to become educated about disability theory: to consider the forces that normalize speech, and that require us to appropriately handle our stutter-- whether that means concealing it, regulating it with fluency-shaping techniques, or treating it with the proper amount of levity and openness. Without this dimension added to speech therapy or to self-help, the techniques we learn for "good communication" are just another form of easy onset. Both work toward standard speech without considering the forces that reject and stigmatize "bad communication"-- or disabled communication.

I'm still in speech therapy, and I still want to do all the things I wrote about above: stutter more easily, maintain eye contact, communicate openness. A lot of speech therapy, for me, is about fighting back against the techniques-- and shame-- I learned during fluency-shaping speech therapy. But, at the same time, I want to love my speech at all times: when I'm stuttering, when I'm blocking, when I'm using filler words, when I'm avoiding certain sounds. These habits may have come from a history of anti-stuttering therapy, but they're still a part of my voice, and a part of me. I went from hating myself when I stuttered to hating myself when I wasn't being a "good communicator": different scenarios, but the feelings that come afterward are eerily similar.

In both cases, I was failing the expectations of my listener: being awkward, vulnerable, visibly embarrassed, and, above all, unable to make them comfortable-- whether by achieving fluency, maintaining eye contact, or "communicating well." Is there a way to let go of the idea that people who stutter have an obligation to make their listener comfortable? To make these techniques an option, without making them an obligation? Along with openness, and easy stuttering, and eye contact, I want to look closer at "bad communication" and how it works-- because, even though it's "messy" (as Zach puts it in his blog post from September), it still communicates.

-Emma

Perhaps you know someone who stutters or encounter stuttering in your workplace, neighborhood, or daily commute. Perhaps you haven’t noticed stuttering among the people around you simply because they are working so hard to hide it. Stuttering is experienced by 1% of the world’s population, by people of every gender, race, class, and language. Today, on International Stuttering Awareness Day, we are asking you to pay attention.

The Did I Stutter team are writers, artists, students, and activists. We stutter and we are proud of it. We reject the idea that stuttering is a pathology and we are committed to fighting speech discrimination. This is what we want you to hear:

Stereotypes hurt us

First, it is important to understand that while stuttering is commonly interpreted as nervousness, anxiety, or a lack of confidence, it in fact gives no indication of a speaker’s confidence, intellect, or knowledge of the topic on which they are speaking. Dysfluency may be more apparent when a speaker is under stress only because they’re anticipating others reacting negatively to their speech and are more acutely aware of their stutter.

When stuttering is represented in movies or television, it is almost exclusively used to indicate that a character is shy or unsure in their speech. A stuttering character who becomes fluent by improving their self-esteem further perpetuates the belief that stuttering is a temporary condition and that stutterers are psychologically fragile. These stereotypes harm us in our daily lives, where we want to be recognized as strong in our convictions, confident in our speech, and knowledgeable in our fields of work and study.

Stuttering is not naturally shameful

Following in the disability rights movement, we understand stuttered speech as simply a form of human variation and “fluency” as an arbitrary calculation deciding how fast and smooth a person must speak to be heard and taken seriously. There is no reason why everyone has to talk the same way. In fact, most of our conventions about how quickly and smoothly people “should” talk are completely arbitrary. Yet these conventions, taboos, and expectations force stutterers to be ashamed of their voices. Stutterers face pressure from peers, family, speech therapists, teachers, bosses and friends to normalize our speech. Pressure to fix, cure, or reduce our stutters too often just cause psychological harm, teaching us to loathe our voices and avoid speaking altogether.  

Stuttering in and of itself isn’t bad, broken, or unfortunate. It’s only the social judgements and discriminations against non-normative speech that force stutterers to be excluded or ashamed.

Speech therapy is a choice, not a duty

There are lots of reasons stutters may choose to go to speech therapy. But making able-bodied people comfortable shouldn’t be one of them. Speech therapy may be helpful in relieving physical tension or accessing educational or professional opportunities that would otherwise be denied us. However, stutterers should not have to spend years of costly speech therapy or an hour of fluency exercises a day changing our bodies so you don’t have to wait an extra 10 seconds for our Starbucks order.

Stuttering back

The only cure for stuttering is silence, and we refuse to be cured. Stuttering more within communities that affirm dysfluent speech will offer young stutterers the option of celebrating their difference instead of trying to fix it. Building a community based in opposition to speech assimilation will help allies and non-stutterers understand how to communicate better with us.

We hope to create and share an alternative way of hearing our stutters so that instead of shame, dysfluency can be acknowledged for the many things it communicates. We hear our stutters as sexy, as comedic, as happy, and as graceful. We want to encourage stutterers to stutter proudly in hopes that more people might begin to hear the beauty in repeated syllables. 

Ask people who stutter if they are disabled and you will get a wide range of answers: everything from indifference to political solidarity to indignation at being associated with them. The relation between stuttering and disability is not a peripheral issue. Rather, it shapes the nature of the stuttering community as we resist normalization.

In the most obvious sense, stuttering is undeniably a form of disability. Stuttering is a “speech-language pathology” studied by scientific and medical experts. It is even listed in the DSM-5 (the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) for goodness sake. Our bodies are medicalized and treated as disabled.

More importantly, though, stuttering is an obvious disability candidate from the perspective of critical disability studies. In critical disability studies, what makes something a disability is the challenges faced when moving through an ableist world, and it is clear that stutterers are regularly discriminated against because of how we process spoken language.

Yet stuttering is nevertheless positioned in a curious gap between disability and abled-bodiedness. The stutterer is often understood as not quite fully abled or disabled. As I have  argued elsewhere:

Stuttering is seen as something that is ultimately under our control, something that we could “fix” if we just worked hard enough. Put simply, stuttering blurs the line between disabled and able-bodied.

I think there are a few reasons stutterers often avoid identifying as disabled. The first is out of respect for people with “real” disabilities. Because stuttering is sometimes on the limit of what qualifies as disabled, and because we think of disability as a very bad thing, stutterers may not want to compare themselves to those who “have it worse.” Another reason is to avoid the stigma associated with disability. Disabled people are routinely cast as objects of pity and charity, and many stutterers do not want in on that party. And finally, unlike many other forms of disability, stutterers are able to “pass,” or hide their disability. When stutterers successfully pass, they dodge much of the ableism leveled at stuttering, making whether they are disabled a complex question.

I’d like to suggest, though, that distancing ourselves from disability and disabled people has two significant and dangerous effects:

1)      First, as the above quote indicates, no matter how proficient one gets at passing and/or using fluency techniques, playing on the terms of the able-bodied is a treacherous game. We will always be expected to speak by the rules of “normalcy” until normalcy is dismantled. No stutterer can be fluent all the time, and when one fails while passing-as-normal they fail hard. Claiming a disabled identity frees us up to speak on our own terms and by our own rules. I believe this is a far healthier way to live.   

2)      Second, and related, distancing ourselves from disability—saying “I am not like them”—reinforces the ideal of normalcy that affects us all. Put in different terms, all of us—blind, deaf, quadriplegic, epileptic, stuttering, bipolar, intellectually disabled—are oppressed by a shared logic of ableism. We are in this boat together and it is a hazardous mistake to think the oppression of those who are “really disabled” is not related to our own. The flip side to this point is that we need each other. Claiming a disabled identity and joining in solidarity with a larger disability community means that we can draw upon the resources of those who have been fighting discrimination for a very long time. Claiming a disabled identity means we can be part of a resistance against normalcy that is far bigger than stuttering.  

Let me end with a story. Last year I was sitting on the bus when a person who was intellectually disabled (ID) mistook my stutter for me being ID. In the past—in fact, for much of my life—I would have been horrified that others around me would think I was ID and would have quickly distanced myself from being like her. But it is the same ableist attitude that says it’s shameful to be ID that says it is shameful to stutter. So this time, instead of distancing myself, I happily took the ensuing conversation as a moment of kinship and as an opportunity to disrupt the ableism that structures both of our experiences.

-Josh

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

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

“Marginalized people are not revolution objects.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

-Josh

Let me start off by recognizing that speech therapy is an incredibly complicated issue. We want to make space here for those who desire speech therapy while at the same time being able to stand back and question some taken-for-granted assumptions. So I have a couple of disclaimers up front. First, these are simply some thoughts on speech-language pathology, not final nor sedimented beliefs. I am very much still working through this issue. Second, as the amazing disability writer and activist Eli Clare pointed out to Zach and I a couple months ago, speech therapy enables people with “severe” communicative disabilities to access education and (thus) other social opportunities that would be denied them otherwise. Because of these complexities, it is not our intention to dismiss speech therapy outright. However, we are nevertheless concerned with the way in which speech-language pathologists, even at their best, exert subtle yet very real power over people who stutter.

As the name suggests, speech-language pathology or speech therapy “pathologizes” our voices. In other words, these practices begin with the assumption that our voices are abnormal or deviant, and then medically intervene, either to increase our fluency or to offer therapeutic and emotional supports. With this in mind, I would suggest that speech therapy has three effects:

(1) Entering into a client/therapist relationship produces a specific kind of identity for the stutterer (in academic terms, it is a form of “subjection”). I enter into a relationship where I become someone who is pathologized. This is a relationship where a therapist has the authority to speak the “truth” about my body and my disability, which includes the seemingly obvious fact of my physiological/medical condition. At the same time, entering into this relationship limits the kinds of responses and control I can have over my body. Individual speech-language pathologists seek to use this authority in positive ways, and I want to stress that the vast majority of speech pathologists I have encountered in my life have been incredibly wonderful and well-intentioned people. However, this is not about individual intentions. As I have mentioned in another blog post, I just don’t think the medical, physiological difficulty of producing sounds is the best way to understand what stuttering is and what makes it a so-called “impediment.” Because pathologization is built into the client/therapist relationship—because my stutter is defined upfront as a medical issue that the therapist is given authority to help with—the option of deciding for myself that there is nothing wrong with my voice is severely limited.

(2) The client/therapist relationship is “depoliticizing.” That is, speech pathology assumes, and convinces stutterers, that what stuttering is (when we get right down to it) is an individual and biological thing. This process of medicalization covers over the ways that the very idea of normal and abnormal speech is produced by cultural values and expectations—and of course, by speech pathology itself. Because of this depoliticization, the stutterer is left with the belief that ultimately (a) stuttering is something that only I can manage (whether it be through fluency reduction or reducing avoidance, fear, etc.), (b) being able to communicate is primarily my responsibility, and (c) these are not political and social, but individual psychological and physiological issues. Speech pathology can thus distract us from getting at the root causes of our oppression.

(3) Speech pathology is a massive industry that makes money off of our bodies. Or, more specifically, it makes money off of pathologizing our bodies and reinforcing the idea that we, rather than society, are the ones who ultimately need to change. On an individual level this isn’t such a big deal. We pay people to provide us with services all of the time. However, stepping back a little and looking at the big picture, the speech pathology industry rests entirely on the assumption that our bodies require intervention. Besides traditional speech pathology, this industry includes pharmaceuticals, technology such as Speech Easy, psychology, neuroscience, and genetics. Contemporary speech-language pathology cannot therefore be separated from capitalism—or what has been termed “late capitalism.” There is big money being made by exploiting our bodies.

In my own life, I have found speech therapy both helpful and unhelpful. Even while it treated my voice as broken and needing to be fixed, it encouraged me to speak up in ways I had previously avoided, and I am grateful for that. Whether or not to participate in speech therapy is a personal decision, and if you choose to engage in it you are very welcome here. Our hope is simply that as a community of stutterers we can begin a critical conversation about the pathologization of our voices. 

-Josh

In her fantastic blog, "How to Stutter More," Emma Alpern, a person who stutters, writes: 

I would like to join Emma in asking the very counter-intuitive question: why would I want to stutter more? It is true, as she writes, that intentionally stuttering desensitizes the moment of dysfluency and can make speaking easier. This is, however, the least important reason to stutter more. Emma continues: "stuttering more has helped me find a new way to talk: a way that was in me all this time, but that I had been struggling against for as long as I could remember."   

What does reclaiming stuttering look like?  

It means choosing what our stuttering voice means. It means denying others the power to define our voices as something shameful, embarrassing, broken, or deviant. It means, like Emma, finding new ways of talking that take our stutter as a central aspect of our voice.

I stutter more because I do not want to live in (nor help create) a world that normalizes bodies and discriminates against those who do not fit in. I take pride in my stutter as a way of resisting communicative expectations that are supposed to make me feel ashamed and are supposed to silence me. Stuttering more and stuttering proudly turns the tables on all those people who assume that, given a choice, I would rather talk just like them. 

I wouldn't. 

These are our voices. 

Deal with it.  

-Josh