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Stuttering and disability: Is one of these things not like the Other?

9/9/2014

5 Comments

 
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:
Unlike the experience of being blind or deaf, stutterers are clearly expected to perform on the same terms as the able-bodied. No one would likely tell a quadriplegic to “walk already” or a deaf person to “listen up,” since it is understood that these actions are beyond their control. However, since a stutterer’s disability is not understood as absolute, since the stutterer is [seemingly] not really disabled, stuttering can evoke irritation out of listeners who wish that she could just “spit it out!” 
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
5 Comments
Kaz
9/9/2014 04:54:43 am

Hmm...

<blockquote>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.</blockquote>

I'm not sure I completely agree with this, because I feel as though a lot of disabilities get the "expected to perform on the same terms as the able-bodied" treatment. I'm autistic and I have definitely had that experience (in fact, I can draw several parallels between life experience as an autistic person and as a person who stutters, but that's a different story...); I also have a number of friends with e.g. chronic illnesses and the like who could probably identify with this. In fact, I'm a little leery of this line of thinking:

<em>No one would likely tell a quadriplegic to “walk already” or a deaf person to “listen up,” since it is understood that these actions are beyond their control.</em>

since although it's probably literally true, I've definitely heard stories of e.g. part-time wheelchair users who get treated as though they're faking or hard-of-hearing people who are not accommodated. (I'm also a little leery of "no one would do this to a member of group X!" coming from people who are not members of group X in general.)

I guess what I'm trying to aim at here is that to me, the experience of being disabled but expected to perform on the same terms as the able-bodied isn't in any way unique to stuttering but instead something that I've experienced with a different disability as well and heard a lot of other disabled people complain about, something that affects a lot of disabilities that don't look like what the average nondisabled person imagines as "disability".

To get back to the main thrust of the post...

I'm a person who stutters who will proudly call that a disability. For me, calling myself disabled is a political statement, a statement of solidarity, a statement that I am done with thinking that there is something wrong with me and that I need to change myself so the world will treat me better. It took a long time and a lot of pain and grief to get to that point, though. When I was younger, I'd probably have said something like "oh calling myself disabled would be letting the stutter control my life" or the like, and that's definitely something I've seen other people who stutter say.

I don't want to tell anyone they have to identify as something they're not comfortable with, or that they have to imbue "disabled" with the exact meaning I do. However, lines of argument like that one are honest-to-god insulting to those groups of people who are generally considered disabled by everyone (e.g. deaf people, blind people, full-time wheelchair users). Like your story about the person with ID you'd have wanted to distance yourself from not so long ago - I feel as if a lot of us have internalised ableism around the concept of disability that doesn't just hurt us but also hurts other disabled people who we'd be much better off acting as allies to, including PWS who have another disability. It's one of the things that I regularly get frustrated by in the stuttering community.

Reply
Josh
9/10/2014 02:30:14 pm

Kaz,

Thank you for your thoughtful comment. I agree, and should have made it much more clear, that stuttering isn’t in its own special category regarding the expectation to perform on the terms of the able-bodied. I was wrong to speak for people with disabilities that I don’t have. Since I wrote the article (where the quote comes from) like you I have heard the absurd things people have told many of my variously disabled friends.

I think it is also true that not all disabilities are medicalized in the same way. While stuttering may not be in its own separate class, it is medicalized differently than, for example, muscular dystrophy or Down’s syndrome. Stuttering is normalized through therapy in a different way than muscular dystrophy is normalized through therapy. Like chronic illnesses, medicalization attempts to erase stuttering from social life in a way that it cannot for other forms of disability (which it accordingly normalizes in other ways). I think this often, though not always, creates different kinds of expectations—not necessarily “better” or “worse”—for people with disabilities such as stuttering to perform able-bodiedness. I need to get better at attending to how specific experiences of ableism are similar in some regards but different in others.

I also agree with you that forcing disabled identities on people is never a good idea. I have tried to suggest that there are good reasons for taking up a disabled identity as a political act of solidarity, but it likewise took me a long time to come to this conclusion. I know there are reasons others may not find it helpful/possible at their specific time/place in life.

Reply
Jo
9/16/2014 06:54:39 am

I am a stammerer and most definitely identify myself as having a disability. There are many situations where I find myself dis - abled because of my stammer. It is also a political statement for myself as I believe we have a right to communicate and sometimes that is not possible. I'm in the yes camp!

Reply
sachin
11/6/2014 12:49:03 am

Another thing which holds pws back from joining the disability group is the hope that someday they will be "cured" or they will experience a permanent remission. Yet, it should be possible to accept stuttering as a temporary disability while it is there, in the same way as an epileptic / asthmatic will accept his issue and take reasonable precautions..
In India, many pws think of disability as an area overshadowed by job reservations and other state interventions, leading to further stigma and discrimination..

Reply
Meg
11/15/2016 07:14:05 am

I too stammer and I strongly believe stammering is a form of disability. Let's face it, severally in our private and work lives, we are denied certain things that have to do with speaking, no matter how short the conversation is meant to be. Moreover, some ignorant people sometimes laugh at me when I begin to stammer during a conversation while others lack the patience to wait and hear me out, they cut me short mid conversation. Other times, people feel pity for me which kind of irritates me because I do not need pity but understanding. Also, there have been cases during presentations in school where we stammerers are allocated the same minutes to make our presentation like able bodies persons but we end up failing because we couldn't give justice to the presentation while adhering to the allotted time. So, I feel sad when I hear people debating if or not stammering is a disability.

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