Is there a fluent gaze?

Male gaze (Laura Mulvey)

Dr. Carol Marcus a Leading scientist, has doctorate in applied physics, specializing in advanced weaponry, who happens to take her clothes off halfway through a movie made in 2013 (Star Trek: Into Darkness).

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Medical/clinical gaze (Michel Foucault)

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White gaze (Toni Morrison)

The white gaze is the assumption that the default reader or observer is coming from a perspective of someone who identifies as white, or that people of color sometimes feel need to take into account the white reader or observer's reaction. Various authors of color describe it as a voice in their heads that reminds them that their writing, characters, and plot choices are going to be judged by white readers, and that the reader or viewer, by default, is white.

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Ideas of oppositional gazes have developed: the female gaze

Female gaze has been used to refer to the perspective a female filmmaker (screenwriter/director/producer) brings to a film that would be different from a male view of the subject. Having a female cinematographer allows women to be viewed as they really are and not the voyeuristic spectacle that the male gaze makes them out to be.

You have to see yourself in society to be a part of that society

Visual activism to confront and challenge societal preconceptions:

Look → Think → Act

Simi Linton (1998) in Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity quoted by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson:
 "We wield that white cane, or ride that wheelchair or limp that limp” … luxuriate in that stammer?

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The portrait invites us to stare, engrossed perhaps less with the “strangeness” of this woman’s disability and more with the strangeness of witnessing such dignity in a face that marks a life we have learned to imagine as unliveable and unworthy, as the kind of person we routinely detect in advance through medical technology and eliminate from our human community.

— Garland-Thomson (2009)

Flaunt the visible marks of disability. The relish with which disabled people can live their identity and present themselves to the starees.

In our zeal to resist medical conceptions of stuttering do we just substitute one normalizing litmus test for another?

By rejecting fluency in and of itself or by asking whether forms of knowledge are consistent with our favorite model of disability, what ways of being do we disqualify?

I’m not comfortable telling another stutterer how to think/feel about their stuttering.

Stutterers are always already resisting how they are constituted.

How are they currently resisting societal demands for fluency?

How are they currently resisting their body’s demands for effortful speech?

Rather than see therapy as a means to liberate the self (be it fluent or stuttered) I suggest we see it as an exploration of the stutterer’s resistance and agency.

We explore how the stutterer has been constituted not to determine who they must be but to determine who they do not have to be.

We explore how they got here but leave where they’re going up to them.

In my clinical experience, most stutterers value both an increase in their ability to resist societal pressures to speak fluently and an increase in fluency, or at least easier stuttering.

I would say in a few words that if either of these methods is able to be adopted with success on occasions in an easy and agreeable manner, a real step has been gained towards overcoming the affection; but if the sufferer is told to persist in uttering er, or to sing or roar out his words on all occasions, and trust to these as his infallible remedies, he will probably fail, for the remedies are so much worse than the disease that all sensitive minds would instinctively shun them with horror, and despond the more in consequence.

— Monro (1850)

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Other Examples of Stuttering Humour in Victorian Culture

• Humorous songs such as “The Stuttering Lass”.
• Minor characters in Victorian popular fiction.
• The celebrated theatrical character of Lord Dundreary performed by Edward Sothern. First appearance in the play Our American Cousin (1858). “Dundrearyism” in the periodical press.

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• Anthologized throughout the nineteenth century in numerous anthologies of wit and humor, as well as  recitation manuals.
• In many of its incarnations, the “two stammerers” joke concludes with two people who stammer coming to blows because they each misperceive the other’s stammer as mockery.  

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