​​A change is clearly underway. Three years ago one would be hard pressed to find any critical literature on disability and stuttering. Today, however, more and more discussions can be found exploring stuttering as an oppressed form of communication and questioning the impulse to normalize it through rehabilitative medicine. As such articles continue to come out, we thought it could be helpful to write short and accessible reviews both to let people know what is happening and to lend a critical lens to the discussion. 

Today, I would like to talk about a recent article published by the International Journal of Speech-Language Pathology titled “To be or not to be: Stuttering and the human costs of being ‘un-disabled’.” The essay is written by Brian Paul Watermeyer (PhD), a clinical psychologist at the Department of Health and Rehabilitation Sciences at Cape Town University, and Harsha Kathard (D.Ed), an SLP professor at Cape Town University. 

The central argument of this paper is that there is a psychological cost in striving for normalcy, and that SLPs are often complicit in creating the desire to be normal within stutterers. As Watermeyer and Kathard write, “[W]e hope that these reflections may contribute to deepening reflection among rehabilitation professionals of how our work may harmonize unhelpfully with cultural imperatives towards normalcy” (p. 8). This is a bold and important question, and I hope that it continues to be asked. 

Watermeyer and Kathard explicitly offer few answers. Rather, their hope in this piece is to open up space for future research. One of the questions they return to often is why, given that many other disabilities have been claimed as a positive part of one’s identity, is it seemingly so hard to think of stuttering as a “legitimate way of being and communicating” (p. 6)? Why is it that “the idea of making space for stuttering as a legitimate human difference—like some other impairments—feels incongruous?” (p. 6) Again, this is an excellent question meant to break down obstacles to (what we would refer to as) stuttering pride.  

However, one of the peculiar things about this paper is that while explicitly written from the perspective of disability studies, it doesn’t draw very deeply upon the resources offered by the field. Besides a couple one-off references to Garland-Thomson (1997, 2009) and Davis (1996), Watermeyer and Kathard draw almost exclusively upon Watermeyer’s previous publications. This of course wouldn’t be a problem if there was a lack of relevant literature to work with and if Watermeyer offered the best theory with which to think critically about stuttering. Yet I am not convinced that this is the case. I suggest the result is that Watermeyer and Kathard 1) have difficulty drawing generative conclusions and 2) are at times forced to create problems and distinctions that don’t actually exist. 

For example, Watermeyer and Kathard argue that most disabilities can be incorporated as a positive aspect of identity because “all ‘selves’ are both normal and not, both frail and robust and subject to both hope and despair” (p. 6). Yet Watermeyer and Kathard continue by setting stuttering in a separate category: “In contrast, data on stuttering suggest a picture of discrete, competing selves jostling for prominence. Here, to stutter is to fail in the quest to embody the ‘normal’ part of the inner split” (p. 6). This is a rather arbitrary and unhelpful distinction for a host of reasons. The first one that comes to mind is that Watermeyer and Kathard tend to treat identity as a free-floating thing in the social sphere. Rather than drawing conclusions about stuttering from generalized notions of identity, we need to investigate the (historical) process of how specific arrangements of identity and subjectivity are formed around the experience of stuttering. Of course the experience of stuttering is both similar and different from other forms of disability. Yet this in itself means very little. 

The larger problem, however, is that these are not primarily academic issues. If true that it is more difficult for society in general to think of stuttering as a “legitimate way of being and communicating” (p. 6) than using a wheelchair, for example, this is only because activists in the disability rights movement have been working tirelessly for 40 years to change ableist perceptions and institutions/structures around what it means to use/require a wheelchair. Stuttering, on the other hand, does not have this history. This is an activist and social issue, not an inherent problem with “stuttering identity.”    

In conclusion, and on a related note, it is telling the way in which this article ends. Following their excellent call for greater reflection on how SLP practices may be complicit with cultural imperatives towards normalcy, Watermeyer and Kathard write: “Integrating this awareness into new theoretical approaches may create a more humanitarian balance between the drive to correct and the path towards societies more able to manage difference” (p. 8). I find it very telling that the outcome of reflecting on our culture’s drive toward normalcy is summed up in words like “balance” and “manage difference.” Understanding disability/stuttering justice as a “balance” or middle ground  between assimilating difference and making space for it will always be the problem of working within the system, of trying to produce change from within the medical-industrial complex. Similarly, difference is not described as something to embrace, celebrate, or radically include, but as something (a challenge or problem) for a bureaucracy to “manage.” Managing difference is not how a more just world is created. In this context, it is hard to take seriously their concluding belief that “social change in disability is not the sole responsibility of health professions, but our influence in shaping disability culture is beyond question” (p. 8). 

Excuse us, but we are not done with the questions.

-Josh

Much of the time, my speech is not noticeably dysfluent. The number of blocks and repetitions I encounter in a given sentence vary by the day, topic, and speaking situation; some days there are a lot, and some days almost none. I do not purposefully augment my speech to mask dysfluency, but it is very common for others to incorrectly perceive my speech as fluent, at least initially. In these instances I am fluent-passing, regardless of my intentions.

Passing is a complex component of disabled identity. It comes with a great deal of privilege, which I am careful to remember. My history with stuttering and speech discrimination is my own, and it is greatly influenced by the ease with which I can pass as fluent—the ease with which I can closet my voice. My speech is stigmatized in a similar manner to other stutterers, but often to a much lesser degree. While in a particularly dysfluent period I am reminded of the contrast, how it feels to anticipate ridicule every time I open my mouth.

Being fluent-passing means that my dysfluent identity is less visible to the people around me. Stuttering is a thing that I do, and I don’t feel the need to talk about it all that often. Because of this, my friends and co-workers are frequently surprised or confused when they first hear my opinions about dysfluency. They are surprised to learn that I care greatly about the way my speech is perceived, or that the ways they talk about my voice are a type of speech discrimination.

I receive a lot of praise from others (especially from poets) for the way that I parse my words. They call me articulate, or compliment my diction. This makes me uncomfortable—in the way that fluent people discussing a dysfluent person’s speech is usually uncomfortable—but also because my praise-worthy diction is the result of two decades of pressure to assimilate. I enunciate the way I do because speech discrimination has taught me that it is the safest way to speak.

The variability of my dysfluency increases the pressure I feel to pass in some aspects of my life. I am always disabled, even when others do not hear a stutter. I always have the right to request and receive accommodations related to my speech, but the justification for those accommodations is less apparent. People assume that since I sound fluent one day and dysfluent the next, I am capable of presenting as fluent all of the time. And if I am capable of presenting as fluent, that they have no obligation to respect my dysfluent identity.

Everyone communicates in a unique manner; fluent and dysfluent alike, no two people have identical speech patterns. The category of stutterers encompasses a massive range of voices that can really sound quite different from one another. As such, every stutterer experiences stuttering and speech discrimination differently. These experiences are influenced and augmented by intersections of privilege and marginalization in regards to race, gender, class, and sexuality.

My voice is my own and it reflects my individual history. I do not claim to speak on the specific oppression of anyone else; rather, I am committed to fighting the speech discrimination that prohibits dysfluent people from being heard.

-Erin

This is not a post about stuttering. It is a post about how we are all of us bound together in complex and complicit ways.

Due to a long and very interesting history, SLP has become the dominant way to think about and engage with communicating bodies that are different from what society now takes to be “normal.” Medical and scientific practitioners have become the experts over our bodies. The American Speech-Language-Hearing Association (ASHA) capture the overall goal of SLP well in their vision statement: “Making effective communication, a human right, accessible and achievable for all.”

I wholly support this vision statement, taken at face-value. So many people have historically and continue to be marginalized because of how they communicate. Or more accurately, they are oppressed because they communicate in ways that society has decided are deficient. People are oppressed for typing rather than speaking their thoughts. For requiring assistance to type. For stimming. For stuttering. For talking with tics. We are oppressed because we don’t speak loud enough, or quick enough, or enunciate our words according to dominant linguistic norms. We are oppressed, in short, for having disability accents.

This, of course, needs to change.

My belief, however, is that ASHA has not thought carefully enough about what this phrase actually means. The disability rights movement has a long history, but this history has often times not included speech and communication disabilities and ASHA might accordingly be missing some really central things that the disability rights/studies movement has been critiquing for a long time. Since ASHA is central within the realm of SLP and is also an example of the assumptions of the wider medical community/society as a whole, it could thus be helpful to break the sentence down into chunks and think about each piece individually to criticize and ultimately reimagine some basic assumptions about disability and communicative bodies.


Making effective communication, a human right, accessible and achievable for all.

Let’s start with the big one: communication. Before we can unpack “effective communication,” we need to understand the seemingly basic idea behind communication. Unfortunately, there is nothing simple about communication; people mean a great many things by the single word. The most frequent meaning of “communication” today—and I would venture to guess, what ASHA means—involves transmitting our thoughts to another person. The purpose of speaking or writing in this sense is to get the ideas “locked in our heads” into the heads of our interlocutor or audience. Miscommunication occurs unless what we mean by our words is properly and precisely understood.

This belief that meaning is individual and interior is in large part tied to the political theory “classic liberalism” which itself is linked to capitalism. Communication is described by John Locke in the seventeenth century as transporting ideas (using words) much like one transports wheat across the ocean: words and wheat alike must not suffer corruption as they venture into the public sphere.

What is the disabled speaker/writer here but a risk, a danger: breakdown and blockage of the flow of ideas? I am increasingly convinced that our very conception and arrangement of communication is central to our oppression. We think of communication, as ASHA indicates, as the transaction of a paper-thin meaning: I own a singular meaning wrapped in a word that I must somehow get into your head. Breakdown is of course inevitable in this impossible situation. Yet rather than admitting the impossibility of liberal-capitalist communication, we pathologize and exclude more and more communicating bodies so we can pretend the system of communication is working fine. The system is not okay. It was broken from the start.

When we construct our communication practices around “transmitting ideas,” disabled people are always the ones who carry the burden of inevitable breakdown. If someone stutters they are to blame for faltering communication; it is never the listener’s fault for not understanding. Yet if a person is somewhat d/Deaf, it is never the speaker’s fault for the misunderstanding. In every breakdown, the responsibility falls uncritically on the disabled person. The system is incapable of dealing with communicative difference. It is pitiful, ableist to its core.  

We need to rethink communication radically. Communication is, in my estimation, nothing like transmitting ideas, but is rather the act of making common (note the root word here), the activity of opening up a shared space within which meaning is created together. Meaning is public, not private. It is an activity that requires collective work, not a sterile and flimsy transaction. Communication is a thick, though often difficult, means of existing with and through others. Stuttered words are brought into common spaces and contribute to the difficult work of meaning-making just like fluent words. There is no difference save that dysfluency is more honest about the process.

If we believe that communication is a shared practice of creating meaning together, we wouldn’t have to pathologize non-normative bodies so that we could reintegrate them on ableist terms. This, of course, would make it difficult to profit off of our dysfluent yet possibly-fluent-in-the-future bodies.


Making effective communication, a human right, accessible and achievable for all.

From this perspective, “effective” communication already looks a little suspect. Effective on whose terms? Effective for what purpose? It is important to note that we are not oppressed because we don’t communicate. I’ll say it again: we are not oppressed because we don’t communicate. We are oppressed because we do not communicate on ableist terms—by their standards of fluidity, time, and transparency of meaning. We are oppressed because our forms of communication are not efficient cogs in the machinery of capitalism, where time is money and money is a fluid transaction. We are oppressed and rehabilitated, in other words, because we do not communicate “effectively.” Yet effective communication is at the same time nothing but respectability politics. How we communicate makes people uncomfortable. Our awkward pauses open up gaps in the “normal” flow of conversation. Our faces contort, so people look away. We are uncomfortable. ASHA’s mandate is thus in part meant to make our communicating bodies respectable and proper so that we can assimilate into mainstream society and their ableist ways of relating to each other.


Making effective communication, a human right, accessible and achievable for all.

There is something interesting going on here. By using the language of ‘accessible’, ASHA is speaking the language of the disability rights movement. Yet by putting ‘accessible’ together with ‘achieve’ they are using this language to change our bodies rather than make space for them. We have written about the power that ableist narratives of “overcoming disability” have within our society. The narrative of “overcoming” adversity and struggle despite the challenges of disability is one that resonates loudly. Actually making communication accessible for all would mean fighting against ableism, teaching those who can’t be bothered to listen to us to care, creating communicative space for us, and operating massive social campaigns to speak against speech discrimination. What ASHA means is quite different: extending a medicalized “apparatus” into every nook of society to fix our bodies such that we can overcome our disabilities (and our fears associated with disability) and thus be integrated into an ableist society. There is nothing resembling accessibility here, at least as meant by disability rights movement.


Making effective communication, a human right, accessible and achievable for all.

This, again, is a curious phrase nestled into ASHA’s vision statement that is more than a little misleading. Upfront, and I will return to this, it must be noted that nowhere is effective communication proclaimed to be a human right. This is a clever rhetorical move that naturalizes and legitimizes ableist practices used to normalize communicative practices. The idea that communication itself is a human right is a little more solid. Article 19 of the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights proclaims the right to “freedom of opinion and expression,” a right that has been somewhat haphazardly adopted in 2003 and 2005 by the UN-convened World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) as a right to communicate. This “right” does not directly apply to conversational communication, however, but is rather focused on global telecommunications. Yet debating whether or not communication is enshrined as a human right is likely missing ASHA’s point. Proclaiming that communication is a human right is a political statement, a statement of what AHSA believes is and should be true.

However, as I noted above, by slipping ‘effective’ into the equation, ASHA is making a vastly different claim. ASHA is asking people to take the uncritical notion of ‘effective,’ with all the ableist standards it implies, as a fundamental necessity. They are in force arguing that SLP is necessary because of a human right—or, even more strongly—that access to SLP is itself a basic human right. There is nothing benign about this statement.

Yet even if we would accept, for the sake of argument, that effective communication is or should be a human right, we need to ask why the language of “human rights” is being invoked in the first place. In other words, what is the rhetorical function of “human rights” in this vision statement? There is a large body of literature that critiques the discourse of human rights as serving those who have the most power and continuing to disenfranchise the most marginalized. At the same time, the discourse of human rights sounds good and is widely used to justify international foreign policy and capitalist interests. In a similar way, I suggest that ASHA’s use of “human rights” sets communication disability up as something to be philanthropically and humanistically pitied and tolerated as it doesn’t demand any real change in how we organize our society while propping the gate open for a medicalized industry to profit off of disabled bodies.


Making effective communication, a human right, accessible and achievable for all.

Lastly, this process requires experts and is in fact something only experts can do. Normalizing disabled bodies is a technocratic process, a techne, a “making.” It is something that requires vast amounts of statistics, training, tools, and of course, money. Notice the implied subject of this sentence. The vision statement is about us, without us. It is something we, the dysfluent, cannot hope to achieve on our own. The vision statement thus not only naturalizes SLP but secures its future.


Conclusion

Given this lengthy critique, what is the response? How might we imagine “making communication accessible and achievable for all” differently? First off, we must understand that assessable communication is never simply a matter of getting better techniques but of changing power dynamics. Paraphrasing disability theorist Rod Michalko’s words to me this summer, perhaps disabled people are not listened to not because society can’t “hear us” but simply because people don’t want to. No amount of speech tools, self-talk, and assisted technology will help people communicate with an ableist world that doesn’t give a shit about our voices. Reclaiming our voices, “making communication accessible and achievable for all,” requires that we stop pretending that disabled communicators will be included if we can just be a little more normal. It requires recognizing our oppression as oppression. It requires recognizing communication not as individual and innate capacities, but as a set of relations between people that can never be solved with technological or therapeutic intervention. The ableist and oppressive relations between speaker and listener, parents, medicalized “experts,” allies, the non-vocal, and teachers are the problem. For dysfluent liberation to be possible, for communication be “accessible for all,” social relations need to be transformed. It is here that ASHA has not only missed the point but has reintrenched our oppression.

-Josh

People have pointed out that that we at Did I Stutter regularly use the term ‘dysfluent’ rather than the conventional ‘disfluent’. This was and continues to be a very deliberate choice for us. While this difference is in some ways nitpicky, humour the language nerd in me for just a moment. For us, the use of these two spellings, these two prefixes, shows the diverging political understanding of stuttering between the disability studies/rights movement and the medicalized disciplines and industries.

So what’s the difference: dis- vs. dys- ?   

Dis- is originally a Latin prefix that means “lack of” or “not.” It is used as a fairly simple negation (as in the instances of “dislike” and “disavow”), removal (as in “dismember”), or reversal (as in “disassociate”) (OED).

The term “disfluency” is similarly used to indicate a type of speech that is merely not fluent. It is a sterile and clinical term that turns our wild forms of speech variation into a simple lack or failure judged against the presumed normalcy and desirability of smooth speech. ‘Disfluent’ hides its values behind an apparent objectivity.       

Dys- is originally a Greek prefix indicating “bad, difficult” or “destroying the good sense of a word, or increasing its bad sense” (OED). Unlike dis-, dys- is not a simple negation, but marks a transgression: something has gone wrong, particularly in a moral sense.

We accordingly take ‘dysfluency’ to be a far more honest term than ‘disfluency.’ While ‘disfluent’ feigns at being objective and sterile, ‘dysfluent’ recognizes that when we stutter we are not simply performing a lack, but we are transgressing the entire moral code of how society expects us to speak. To stutter is to disobey, to overstep the narrow boundaries of able-bodied speech.

Chris Constantino recently claimed that stuttering is a form of civil disobedience. Using the term ‘dysfluent’ helps us at DIS be aware of the subversive possibilities of our unpredictable and unruly speech. If stuttering is transgressive, let’s own that and make it ours.  

Obviously how people use words is far more important than how they are spelled, which puts definite limits on the value of word analysis. People who use ‘disfluent’ aren’t necessarily bound to medicalized notions of speech and can still use it to mean something more transgressive. However, the fact that ‘disfluent’ is the accepted standard within medicalized communities compells me in itself to describe my speech differently. There is nothing clinical about how I talk. Our voices are anything but a lack. 

-Josh

There is nothing wrong with your stutter.

Order the meal you actually want.

Stick up your hand and ask your question.

Phone and make an appointment.

Take the drive through.

Ask a stranger instead of google.

Volunteer to give the presentation.

Speak.

Be bold. Be inconvenient. Be proud.

And when they look away, stutter louder. When they giggle or stare or ignore, stutter louder still.

Your voice is beautiful, it is irreplaceable, and it deserves as much space and attention as any other voice on the planet.

There is nothing wrong with your voice. Your stutter deserves to be heard.

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

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

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

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

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

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

The quotes could go on for pages upon pages.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yours in solidarity,

-Chris

Here’s a bold claim:

Communication and clarity have nothing in common.

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

There is no such thing as clear communication.

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

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

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

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

But what if

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

What if

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

that we cobble together each moment limping and crippled along.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

If only we could understand each other!

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

while never realizing that

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

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

Effective for who, I want to know.

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

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

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

 
                                                                                bbb
 

       b------


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

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


as
we wel liimp and Cccci---pple along

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


-Josh