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Stuttering Pride

7/28/2014

3 Comments

 
In her fantastic blog, "How to Stutter More," Emma Alpern, a person who stutters, writes: 
Stuttering more is about reclaiming stuttering. It’s about bringing stuttering into my speech rather than pushing it out. It’s about ending the cycle of interjections and the mentality that to stutter was bad— worse than anything else, worse than the restrictions and the interjections and the avoidance.
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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 

3 Comments
Pamela Mertz link
7/28/2014 04:08:14 am

Great stuff. I have a tee-shirt that reads, I Stutter. Deal With It.
Reclaiming our stuttering is akin to reclaiming our space, when we are afraid to take up too much space in the world.
Pam

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Joshua St. Pierre
7/28/2014 05:13:10 am

Thanks Pam! I totally agree that reclaiming stuttering is like reclaiming space. In that way it is also like reclaiming time--we are afraid of taking up too much time in the world.

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Beem
8/4/2014 04:15:03 am

Hi, I came across this site on the internet. I don't stutter, and I don't think that lisps are nearly as stigmatized, but I have a slushy lisp that was "corrected through years of speech therapy that started when I was in kindergarten and went through fourth grade. For years after this, I had not mastered the S sound and spent much of my time trying ti figure it out. The lisp sound comes naturally but I am now conditioned to form the shape that creates the "sleek" s-sound. But this really disturbs me... so I have been thinking about doing my natural lisp sound on purpose, for the reasons you think are good to stutter more. When I accidentally lisp people often comment or poke fun at it without realizing it is natural for me. So yeah, as a way to not help create a world that normalizes bodies, and take pride in my lisp, I want to lisp more. I appreciated your post.

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