Resistance

My contribution to The Stammering Collective was a talk reflecting on my work carried out over the last 10 years in relation to public understanding and awareness of stammering.  I questioned how stammering is perceived and defined by the public, spoke about how we might change wider understanding of stammering, and how we might be able to move beyond popular narratives of “overcoming” stammering.

Media engagement has been part of my professional roles with the Irish Stammering Association, the Irish Association of Speech and Language Therapists and the International Communication Project. A consistent theme I have promoted in print media, online publications, and in radio and television interviews is that, essentially, it is ok to stammer. Furthermore, it need not be seen as a negative quality needing to be fixed and it should certainly not limit the possibilities for an individual. These messages need to be repeated.

As the talk was intended as a conversation starter, it did not have a neat conclusion. Public engagement will continue over the coming years. I look forward to seeing where the conversation leads to in 2032 and again in 2042. I would hope that the “overcoming” narrative has changed and that I am able to listen to many more stammering voices on my hologram device. I also hope that these stammering voices are talking about lots of interesting things beyond the topic of stammering.  

• Facilitating cultural competence and awareness
• Understanding the dynamics of stigma, self-stigma and masking and the psychological consequences of living with a concealable stigmatised identity
  
• Exploring the lived experience and feelings associated with stammering in an ableist world that privileges fluency
  
• Understanding minority stress and ableist trauma
  
• Supporting the development of new affirming narratives around stammering
  
• Finding own unique stammering aesthetic
  
• Disclosure and self-advocacy
  
• Community

• Public information and education programmes
• Reducing barriers – creating a stammer-friendly environment and culture
• Campaigning
• Lobbying
• Representation
• Cultural change
• Celebration of stammering and difference

• Disability viewed as a human rights issue.
• Direct challenge to the medical model & institutions within which most SLTs have been trained and work.

Calls into question:

• Principles upon which therapy is based.
• Roles of therapist/client.
• Language.
• Range of therapies offered.
• Types, forms and aims of research into stammering.

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If speech language pathology is the intervention that stuttering activists seek from the government, medicine and private sphere, there is at least a conversation to be had about its medical necessity […] The stutter itself is only a negative bodily development if making people occasionally wait an extra two to ten minutes is a pathological emergency. This is all just to say, the burden should be on speech pathologists to prove their legitimacy on something more than merely auditory aesthetics.

— Richter (2019, p.73-74)

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Call for action

• Ethical responsibility.
• Locating therapy discourse within wider disability/neurodiversity discourse.
• Call for broader focus of therapy to address roles that self-identity, society and social stigma play.
• Drive to enrich and enhance professional accounts.
• Co-authoring therapy knowledge.

We want to affirm, especially for the young people out there, that it is okay to stutter. We believe that not only is it okay to stutter, but people who stutter should be empowered to speak however is most comfortable for them – even if that speaking style contains pauses, repetitions, and blocks.

— NYC Stutters (2020)

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• Educators to integrate the diversity agenda into speech and language therapy training to enable future therapists to consider the philosophical underpinnings of their role and approach.
• Forums for therapists to examine their underlying values, role and scope of practice.
• Meaningful collaboration to rethink the scope, focus and role of future stammering therapy for CYP & adults.
• Open, public debate about social and ethical implications of research in the fields of neuroscience and genetics.
• Research into what matters for people who stammer.
• Balanced investment of funding.
• Accessible research findings & conferences.

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Still it appears to us that the answer will be forthcoming if we as a field are serious about engaging in a partnership between researchers and the population of people who stutter, for people who stutter can provide the most meaningful metric for determining whether a treatment is viable.

— Yaruss & Quesal (2004)

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It is critical for professionals to realise that people with lived experience are best situated to drive the effort for changing how our society thinks about stuttering. Professionals bring resources and credibility to the table which can be very important for public attitude change, and they can play a supportive role to improve social conditions. However, people who stammer themselves are best positioned to promote the agenda of their community in terms of actions and policies that effect their lives.

— Boyle (2019)

[the open secret is] a way of imparting knowledge such that it cannot be claimed and acted on.

— François (1999)

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Homophobia often insists on knowing rather than refusing to know about the sexuality of gay people.

— de Villier (2012)

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Linking the stutter and the unspeakable are logics of subterfuge, to be sure, but I find that Sedgwick’s construction of the “open secret” more closely relates to the kind of secrets that animate stuttering. The open secret is a form of coded disclosure that Sedgwick links to the closet, and it mobilizes language around the secret in order to disclose only to those in the know and hide from those on the outside. Anne-Lise Francois describes it as “a way of imparting knowledge such that it cannot be claimed and acted on.” The open secret is that which everyone knows but cannot discuss. I select this construction for the stutter because, while some stutterers can and do pass as fluent and come out of the closet by a discursive disclosure like “I stutter,” more often, the stuttered voice betrays her before any such disclosure can be made, and knowledge of the stutter is created without being acted upon or acknowledged. The stutter’s unspeakability is subtended by its audibility and uncontrollability. Sedgwick’s example of the open secret actually comes from a text featuring a stutterer, Herman Melville’s short story, Billy Budd. However, it is not the eponymous character’s stutter that reveals the structure of the open secret for Sedgwick but rather the possibility of mutiny onboard the ship on which Billy is impressed.

Like queerness, certain forms of discrimination against stutterers or unwanted social interactions often express themselves through a desire to know, and to know it as a symptom. Nicholas de Villier in The Opacity of the Closet argues that it is important to pay attention to the ways that “homophobia often insists on knowing rather than refusing to know about the sexuality of gay people.” Similarly, stutterers often encounter the diagnostic desires of others, the desire to know why and from whence. An example from my childhood: I was at summer camp and sitting in the camp nurse’s office for something mild. The nurse asked me questions about myself and I answered. Then we changed topics and I talked to her about my brother. She interrupted me and said, “did you know you only stuttered when you were talking about yourself, not your brother?” The nurse created her own interruption in my speech as if to master my stutter with her own impediment, and sought to psychologize the root of it as a symptom. This diagnostic desire is a practice of what Sedgwick calls, in a different work, paranoid reading, a kind of analytic reading that seeks to treat the text as a puzzle or stratagem to be untangled. Stuttering attracts this desire to know, in part, because it is an exemplary object of non-knowing. No one knows why people stutter. The stutter speaks to a great opacity within us, and that opacity might be productive of a different way of understanding the self and its relations to others.

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Society will not tolerate… that I should be… nothing, or, more precisely, that the something I am should be openly expressed as provisional, revocable, insignificant, inessential, in a word, irrelevant.    

— Barthes (1981)

This ‘still-here’ can only mean speaking. Not language as such, but responding and not just verbally – ‘corresponding’ to something.

In other words: language actualized, set free under the sign of a radical individuation which, however, remains as aware of the limits drawn by language as of the possibilities it opens.

This ‘still-here’ of the poem can only be found in the work of poets who do not forget that they speak from an angle of reflection which is their own existence, their own physical nature.

This shows the poem yet more clearly as one person’s language become shape and, essentially, a presence in the present.

The poem is lonely. It is lonely and en route. Its author stays with it.

Does this very fact not place the poem already here, at its inception, in the encounter, in the mystery of encounter?‍

I find something as immaterial as language, yet earthly, terrestrial, in the shape of a circle which, via both poles, rejoins itself and on the way serenely crosses even the tropics: I find a… meridian.

With you and Georg Büchner and the State of Hesse, I believe I have just touched it again.

— Celan (1960)

To stutter is often to feel the edges and the walls of lamguage, in the mouth, in the glottis, on the face, in the chest. It can be to experience those parts of language which do not signify but that force us to encounter the stuff that language is made of and the other buccal functions from which language is inseparable, such as eating, breathing, chocking, kissing, humming, hissing, coughing, drinking, sucking, vomiting, licking, swallowing, wheezing, and blowing. We often avoid paying attention to the stuff of language because it reminds us of the mechanical and involuntary crust upon the transparent flow of social and economic institutions and the rational expectations of social interactions.

I have two examples about what it might mean to experience the matter of language queered. The first I’ll call wood, and it comes from the Italian thinker Giorgio Agamben. Agamben writes in his essay “The Idea of Matter:”

“There where language ends is not where the unsayable begins, but rather the matter of language. He who has never reached, as in a dream, that woodlike substance of language that the ancients called silva remains, even when he is silent, a prisoner to representations.”  

— Agamben.

This is a very loaded assertion, but by “prisoner to representations” Agamben is referring to a use of language that is reduced to transparent meaning, pre signification, supple communication, and pure intelligibility that conceals the medium of that which you use to communicate. You’re a fly in a box who doesn’t see the glass walls. Silva, meaning wildwood, is also a term for a poetic form enjoyed by the ancient Romans, and it trades on its metaphorical meaning as material for construction. If language is woodlike, it has a texture, a grain, colour, rings. It is hard while it can be broken down, built up, pulped, and refigured. It is attached to non-wood things like leaves. Agamben’s reference to the dream gives it a more ethereal resonance. Without going too deeply into the dream theory, Freud noticed that words are often treated in dreams as though they were things. Jean-Francois Lyotard provides an example from a poster of what dreaming does to language. In Frédéric Rossif’s poster Révolution d'Octobre, the words are physically folded as if rippled on a 3D surface by the wind, and the letters become distorted. Conor Foran’s stuttering font is another example of the distortion of words by the pressures of desire upon language. Language can do a great deal outside of representation.

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“One of these days I’m going to have to hang a sign on that door,” Agent Samson used to say. She was probably thinking along the lines of SPEECH THERAPY LAB, though a more appropriate marker would have to be read FUTURE HOMOSEXUALS OF AMERICA. We knocked ourselves out trying to fit in but were ultimately betrayed by our tongues.

— Sedaris (2000)

In the first short story of David Sedaris’s 2000 collection, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Sedaris recounts four months of his 4th grade year, in which he was removed from class once a week at 2:30 on Thursdays to meet with the acerbic school speech therapist he called “Agent Samson” to treat his lisp. Her clients were all lisping boys, he noticed, and none of them conventionally boyish, and he jokes that if there were a sign on her door it should not read “Speech Therapy Lab” but “Future Homosexuals of America.” At this young age Sedaris already has an inkling that speech impediment, in his case lisping, is related to sexuality, a personal affectation continuous with a dislike of sports or a love of making one’s own curtains. Sederis taps into a cultural trend that includes the identification “gay voice,” and that states that one can read sexuality off the voice, particularly the male voice, through how one speaks, what one says, or what one does not say.

With expressions like “stuttering pride” and “coming out of the stuttering closet,” activism by people who stutter explicitly ties its historical struggles and political goals to queer liberation, and queer theory has offered a verdant store of language and concepts for re-imagining dysfluent speaking as a kind of queer form of being in the world. Moreover, these intersections point towards the critical potential of the dysfluency itself as a kind of queer object, an object that presents a problem for sexual and gender norms, as well as conventional forms of reading, expression, and time. I am interested in how the experiences of being queer and a stutterer interpenetrate, and how each informs the other. In the few first-person accounts I read from queer people who stutter I often saw the authors comparing their social encounters as queers and as stutterers. One person notes that homosexuality was removed from the DSM in 1973, but that stuttering or “child-onset dysfluency disorder” remains. Another said that they were encouraged to embrace their queerness but to cure their stutter, and that speech therapy for them amounted to a form of conversion therapy. What I saw were not necessarily similarities but cases in which people embody two marginal positions, where one could have been treated like the other, and was not. How do queerness and stuttering misconnect with each other? Returning to Sedaris: of interest to us in Sedaris’s story is the detail that there was no sign on Agent Samson’s door, and that “Future Homosexuals of America” does not substitute for other language but for an absence of language. Agent Sampson’s is a door with no writing that suggests that as much as her door clearly opens for a certain kind of boy, it offers no clear language for that child, and the name of the certain type of boy who goes through it for a certain type of speech remains in some sense unspeakable. Sedaris is not cured of his lisp, but rather like many young stutterers develops an enormous vocabulary in order to avoid the sibilant s. The s is occulted in Sedaris’s speech, and this haunting, unspeakable s produces not a reduction in language but an excess of language in the form of the enormous vocabulary. How might we think of writers as people who work by suppressing language? This connection between the unspeakable and the excess of language conceptually ties dysfluency to the emergence of male homosexuality as a pathological category in the 19th century.

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I've had therapy to help deal with the way my parents reacted when I came out, but the therapist never insinuated that things would be easier if I was less gay. On the other hand, the speech therapy I've had as an adult focused very strongly on how things would be easier for me if I was more fluent.

— Elias K (2015)

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Sexuality between men had, throughout the Judaeo-Christian tradition, been famous among those who knew about it at all precisely for having no name – ‘unspeakable,’ ‘unmentionable,’ or ‘not to be named among Christian men’.

— Sedgwick (1985)

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The unspeakable transformed in the 20th century to what she calls a “byword” likely most familiar in Lord Alfred Douglas’s phrase, “the love that dare not speak its name.”

Like Sedaris forming his vocabulary around the absent s, the unspeakability of male homosexuality did not correspond to a dearth of language about it, but what Michel Foucault famously refers to in The History of Sexuality as “a steady proliferation of discourses concerned with sex… a discursive ferment that gathered momentum from the eighteenth century onward.” For the Victorians male homosexuality may have been occulted in the language, but:

Silence itself – the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between different speakers – is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within over-all strategies… There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.

— Foucault (1976)

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The Victorians implicitly made the connection between homosexuality and stuttering. James Malcom Rymer’s fictional autobiography The Unspeakable: or, the Life and Adventures of a Stammerer, explores this link. Riley McGuire’s research on this novel argues that attaining mature heterosexual masculinity is predicated on attaining a fluent voice.

Freud’s famous diagnosis of stuttering as anal-sadistic is comprised of a few brief remarks made in passing. His more substantive thoughts on stuttering actually come earlier in a case study about woman with adult-onset stuttering and various neuroses. But the psychoanalytic understanding of stuttering as the unresolved frustrations of the narcissistic tendencies of the anal stage has captured more minds. Stuttering, after all, is the most uncomfortable type of shit-talk. But the threat of stuttering to masculinity also appears to be explained by the impediment’s root in anality, with its association with sexual submission, women, and the end of gender. There is a productive queer reading to be made about the threat of stuttering and the moral panic around sexual submission in gay male culture. At the end of his famous essay Is the Rectum A Grave? Leo Bersani finds in fantasies about the rectum “the place where the masculine ideal of proud subjectivity is buried”. Bersani offers a mythological location in which to reimagine the value of sexual submission. Besides being the “death” of male dominance, the anus is also the death of sexual difference, for we all have one.

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.

What is the fluent gaze? Can we see it in cinema? Is the gaze the right conception due to the auditory nature of stammering? Is there an oppositional gaze: a stammered/dysfluent gaze?

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‘The scene for the portrait is designed by a stammerer; photographed and painted by a stammerer; of a stammerer stammering. The stammered gaze.’ — Patrick Campbell

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Close-up of Dysfluent mono typeface, in use in Dysfluent magazine issue 1.

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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.

• A hypothetical scenario involving a child, Conor and his parents who go to see SLT, Róisín.
• While hypothetical, it is based on a range of real-life experiences of the author.
• It highlights the parents’ desire that part of SLT professional identity be “able to cure”.
• SLT resistance of that identity and choice to be an ally to Conor.
• The process of considering available evidence and seeking support from those with more experience in order to negotiate an identity regarding the type of alliance she will offer.
• Resistance of normalising discourse regarding fluency.

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Brian and Sandra – parents of Conor aged 3.4

• Conor – advanced language development, no concerns re speech errors.
• One day, out of the blue, Conor begins to repeat words and part-words.
• Sandra is surprised, then worried and… she reacts.
• Brian remembers his mother saying that one of his brothers had difficulty with speech but grew out of it.
• Conor continues to repeat, begins to prolong sounds and sometimes no sound comes out when he tries to say a word. 
• Sandra and Brian decide it's time to go to a speech and language therapist and they meet Róisín.
• Their story about Conor – about their role - about Róisín and her role – their expectations.

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Róisín

• Róisín is 25 – has been working in same job since 21 – first class honours – manager affirms her excellence  - more complex cases – wider range. 
• Anne, specialist in stuttering/fluency disorders is on maternity leave so case is assigned to Róisín.
• Róisín consults the evidence – Fluency shaping approach with lots of evidence. 
• Has notes from in-service Anne gave – decides to go with indirect approach and start with education – but assessment first including taking case history.
• And the plot thickens – Sandra ..(and Brian) want stuttering gone asap  - yes parent sessions are fine – but when is she going to see Conor and fix his speech?

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Conor

• Conor loves fun – he likes lots of things, running, painting, lego, and he has lots to say.
• He has noticed that some words seem to have a mind of their own recently and it’s like they get stuck.
• Mom and Dad have said nothing -  he has noticed they go very quiet and just look at him.
• One day last week, Granny Annie was minding him in the car and he was talking to her when a word was getting him stuck.
• She told him to “slow down, take a deep breath and start again”. 
• He could not see her face, but she sounded a bit something different.
• Note to self – try to not let words get stuck! 
  

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Assessment day for Conor

• Went   lovely place with loads of toys and met Róisín who played with me and talked to Mom and Dad.
• She made a video of me.
• Mom does that sometimes too.
• I wonder why? 
• Róisín seems to get stuck on some words too – not sure why I am here but Róisín has the best Lego and I am making an amazing bridge.
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Roisin's dilemma

• Wants to help – who? Conor? But parents want fluency.
• Her CPD, while limited, has her thinking that focusing on fluency might not be best choice. 
• She takes her dilemma to supervision.
• She Googles and finds StutterTalk. 
• She contacts the SIG/CEN.
• She decides that she needs to talk with parents about some of the difficulties she sees with focusing on fluency. 
  

• How the meaning/cultural currency of feelings/emotions change over time.
• Emotions as shaped by cultural/political forces‍
• Representation of emotions in literature/film as revealing of the power structures at work.
• ‘Affect’ is used in different ways in different fields (neuroscience, psychology and literary/cultural studies).
• Sara Ahmed, Lauren Berlant and Sianne Ngai – critics for whom affects are crucially connected to structures of power (social/cultural/political); also interested in how affective states stretch our capacity to name them but haven’t cut loose from language and cognition.
• Sianne Ngai (Ugly Feelings), she’s interested in those feelings that are seen as unproductive/marginalised.

• One of the hall-marks of affect is ‘In-between-ness’.

… the most fundamental insight of affect theory: that no embodied being is independent but rather is affected by and affects others bodies, profoundly and perpetually as a condition of being in the world.

— Ahern, A Feel for the Text. (2018)

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The challenge for researchers is that affect is not something, but rather is “in many ways synonymous with force or forces of encounter”; rather than housed in or controlled by the individual, it “arises in the midst of in-between-ness: in the capacities to act and be acted upon.

— Ahern, The Affect Reader. (2010)

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• ‘Affect’ as dynamic – emotions not static but in process – changing as they move between bodies.
• Robert Solomon recommended ‘thinking of emotions as acts’, as ‘something we do, not just have’.
• 'Affect’ captures maybe better than emotion that embodied aspect of experience (something felt before it’s understood).

We do not, as scholars from different disciplines, bring together our objects and practices to one another through a kind of free-trade agreement; rather we re-enter a long history of binding, tangling and cutting [across disciplines/practice] within which the current moves towards integration are much more weighted than they might first seem.

– Fitzgerald and Callard (2016)

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A ‘dynamic of entanglement’ rather than a push towards integration.

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We have tried to conjure a different palette of affective dispositions through which we might […] live in interdisciplinary spaces. Those dispositions (eddying around ambivalence, awkwardness, frustration, failure and so on) depart from the most common affective registers (critique, adulation, disinterested rigour) through which [many] have tended to approach the terrain of the medical, clinical or biomedical. We want resolutely to claim the stance of interestedness. But we also see interest as a stance that can be (indeed usually is) taken up without someone quite knowing the place at which they stand, or the entwinements through which they are always-already bound with/in others […]. So it is, to be entangled.

– Fitzgerald and Callard (2016)

Hercule Poirot: I pity you, Norton… how very sad to find that this great and beautiful world is so foul and disappointing. And your mother, I pity even more.

‍Stephen Norton: M-my m-m-mother? You pity my mother?

Hercule Poirot: To endure the agony of bringing you forth only to discover that she had nurtured in her loins such wickedness – is that not worthy of pity?

Stephen Norton: It is you who is n-not worthy! She m-m-meant the world to m-me!

Hercule Poirot: And you to her?

Stephen Norton: She l-loved me… l-loved me m-m-more than… m-more than…

Hercule Poirot: Did she ever hold you, Norton, as mothers do? Stroke your hair… kiss your cheek?

Stephen Norton: She… she… she…

Hercule Poirot: Scared you, did she not? She pushed you away!

— Christie (1975) ITV adaption (2013)

To invent the sailing ship or steamer is to invent the shipwreck.
To invent the train is to invent the rail accident of derailment.
To invent the family automobile is to produce the pile-up on the highway.

— Virilio (2007)

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Transmission and Social Acceleration

The most obvious, and most measurable form of acceleration is the speeding up of intentional, goal-directed processes of transport, communication, and production (2003, 6).

— Rosa (2003, p. 6)

The center of this idea of communication is the transmission of signals or messages for the purpose of control. It is a view of communication from one of the most ancient of human dreams: the desire to increase the speed and effect of messages as they travel in space.

— Carey (2009, p. 12)

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Functional Accidents and Distributed Agency

[an accident is] a failure in a subsystem, or the system as a whole, that damages more than one unit and in doing so disrupts the ongoing or future output of the system.

— Perrow (1999, p. 66)

[O]n June 16, 1887, a Philadelphia wool dealer named Frank Primrose telegraphed his agent in Kansas to say that he had bought—abbreviated in their agreed code as BAY—500,000 pounds of wool. When the message arrived, the key word had become BUY. The agent began buying wool, and before long the error cost Primrose $20,000, according to the lawsuit he filed against the Western Union Telegraph Company.

— Gleik (2012, p. 166)

Who or what is responsible?

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Untidy Systems

Philosophers have always aimed at cleaning up the litter with which the world apparently is filled.

— James, (1996, p. 45)

[James takes seriously] a place for something like an element of chanciness or volatility within [the world’s] loose regularities and historical flows.

— Connolly (2005, p. 73)

In an untidy world, the actant is “a being or entity that makes a difference in the world without quite knowing what it is doing [emphasis added]” (Connolly, 2005, p. 72).

Communication as Ritual

• Communication, commonness, communion.
• James Carey: the model directs our attention “not toward the extension of messages in space but toward the maintenance of society in time; not the act of imparting information but the representation of shared beliefs".
• Akin to religious mass.
• Akin to reading a paper “[n]ews reading, and writing, is a ritual act and moreover a dramatic one. What is arrayed before the reader is not pure information but a portrayal of the contending forces in the world [emphasis added]” (p. 16).

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Dysfluent Accidents as Ritual

• Carol Padden: Ritual emphasizes “performance, activity, and the materiality of communication itself. In this framework, meaning is not so much the definition of a word or sentence but instead is constructed in situ, in social and cultural activity” (p. 44).
• Unlike sending a message, meaning gets enacted in the very midst of unruly bodies that excrete “all levels of expression, from the minute details of discourse—from pitch, emphasis, gesture, head tilts, and eye gaze” (p. 44).
• Moreover, since communication happens “on site,” time cannot be transcended or otherwise avoided with speed but must be lived through.

• Crossed Wires: perhaps it's not that my grumpy co-worker “misheard” my stuttered speech, but that he didn’t want to listen and did not want to belong in time to a common world with this disabled person.
• The Stall: “Part of it feels like my body goes into a kind of supplication or prayer almost. I have a friend who once referred to it as ‘watching me ask for the word’” (Ellis, 2020, n.p.).
• The misfire: “The unexpectedness of stuttering forces both listener and speaker into a space of trust and vulnerability. They must both give up control of the situation. The person speaking does not know when and for how long they will stutter. Likewise, the person listening does not know when to expect a stutter. In order for both people to communicate, they must trust one another. (Constantino 2016, para. 5)
• Ritual? Anti-ritual?

• ‍The blurt. Stutterers pepper their language with so-called “fillers” that ostensibly sit outside of, and even detract from, the message. We sometimes grimace and groan in the act of speech. In addition, we sometimes find ourselves in the midst of speaking sounds, words, or phrases we didn’t fully intend.‍
• The misfire. The phenomenon of stuttering includes both prolongation and repetition. Stuttering can extend the opening sounds of a message (e.g. ---aaaaaaaagree or bo-bo-bo-book), which an ableist grammar recodes as misfires that communicative parties can tacitly agree to ignore.‍
• The stall. A repetition can be a redundant redundancy (one that serves no discernable purpose), like repeating most of a sentence multiple times to get a “running start” on the difficult finish that was long ago anticipated by our impatient interlocutor. Or, in a hard block, the voice suddenly and unexpectedly runs dry. A word stops in your throat, and you must wait for infra-bodily traffic to clear while the absence of meaning gapes wide and dangerous in the social world.‍
• Crossed wires. A regular experience for stutterers, crossed wires describes the state of “talking past each other” that might begin when one party “mishears” the other and then feedbacks error into the conversation.‍
• The swerve. Clinicians prefer the term “avoidance” to describe the strategy stutterers employ when we sense an oncoming phoneme over which we expect to trip. I might, for example, begin to say “I agree” but change course, swerving around a potential misfire to substitute on the fly: “I don’t know.”‍
• The cut-off. This accident is one of attempted repair, caused when interlocutors or bystanders rush to the scene of an accident, interrupt, and reimpose order by attempting to predict and finish the stalled (or otherwise damaged) message according to a dominant grammar.‍
• The gridlock. Stuttering ferociously at the front of a queue, for example, halts the flow of information, people, and capital; it stalls a lane of traffic and tempts impatient honks in the form of tapped toes and glances, as everyone waits for an undetermined time until information and thus bodies will once again flow free.

The Questions we need to ask

Who needs to change? What do they/we need to change?

Acknowledging the natural variation, the unique skills, experiences and traits of neurodivergent children.

— Constantino (2018)

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Client who stutters

What do they understand about stuttering? And their stuttering in particular?

Cons for the Client

• Exposure: "I stutter".
• Risk of failure.
• Lack of acceptance by self and others .

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The Speech and Language Therapist

What do we understand about stuttering? Turn the tables on the process of normalising judgement As therapists we need to enquire into what a person thinks of the judgement they have been assigned. What if stuttering was the norm? If stuttering was cool…

Cons for the Therapist

• Exposing beliefs contrary to the medical model.
• Perceived risk of ‘failure’.
• Lack of acceptance by peers, clients and client's families.

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Who needs to change?

How do we do this? Is this our responsibility alone?

• Ourselves as SLTs
• Families.
• Parents.
• Teachers.
• Employers.
• School systems.
• Health services.
• Shop keepers.

Mind your Ps and Qs is an English language expression meaning "mind your manners", "mind your language", "be on your best behaviour", "watch what you're doing".

• To our self.
• To others.
• How we talk about children who stutter.
• How children who stutter hear us talk about stuttering generally.

Action: helpful self talk to counter stereotypes.

• Gather evidence in real-life situations will lead to generating more balanced thoughts on the basis of their findings.
• People can identify helpful self-talk that will positively influence their emotional reaction and behaviour in a situation.
• Helpful self-talk can also be generated by reflecting on previous experiences that have gone well and what the person was saying to himself or herself at the time.

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For the Speech and Language Therapist

• Be aware of own thoughts, feelings and expectations around stuttering and our role as an SLT.
• Communication trumps fluency.

Action: helpful self talk.

• Handouts for teachers.
• Powerpoint for school presentation.
• Advice leaflet for parents (Generate discussion about what works in therapy  and helpful versus unhelpful advice).

Committee for the Big Stutter Party

Self disclosure/stereotype threat:

• Children can develop a “growth mindset” through learning that success takes effort.
• mistakes are opportunities to learn and grow from.
• This mindset encourages children to seek out new challenges and fulfil their potential.

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Therapeutic practices must adapt to shifts in the conditions of people’s lives.

— Winslade (2013)

It is no longer enough to give people a relationship in which they are free from being judged. What they need is an opportunity to actively deconstruct the normalising judgements operating on them and to push back against the effects of these judgements.

— Winslade, p.8 (2013)

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Publication

The action of making 
something generally known.

— Oxford Dictionary

The format that the text / typeface is packaged in is as important as the textual content or typeface itself. Kind of like how in JJJJJerome’s work, there’s an interesting relationship to song or score sheets, through his use of a publication that is linked to his music. The format of this requires a unique level of engagement from the reader and listener.

Since I created the first issue of Dysfluent, I have been thinking about how the format of a publication defines the intent behind the work. It made me think about while there is a certain power to publication, there is also a quietness and consideration to it. At least from a design or artistic perspective, it requires a great deal of engagement from the viewer.

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Protest

A statement or action expressing disapproval of 
or objection to something.

— Oxford Dictionary

Recently I have been thinking of this concept of display, or posters, or for lack of a better term, protest.

Protest to me is really interesting from a creative or design stand point. For a person to display a poster, it is a deliberate act of reflecting an inner voice or identity, for the world to see.

I think of teenagers pinning up posters in their bedrooms, and of people marching on the streets voicing concerns. There is a certain passion or aggression (maybe not the right word?) to the idea of posters.

How does the idea of protest or display speak to earlier discussions on stigma?

I was interested to see what Fiona showed earlier in our talks, that banner where children visualised their stammer. There is something really nice there in terms of displaying their dysfluency.

It gets me thinking then. What is the content of the posters? What do they say? Do they need to say anything? or can they just be visualisations of dysfluency?

Rethinking covert stuttering (Constantino, Manning, Nordstrom, 2017)

• How do people who pass as fluent constitute themselves?
• Expected a straightforward study of ableism and repression.
• Got stories of resistance and agency.
• Participants did not see why stuttering was any more authentic than fluency.
• Passing is not repressed stuttering but a unique form of stuttering constituted by specific practices of self.
• Passing resists both how biology suggests a stutterer must talk and what privileges society says stutterers should have access to.

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.

• Fluent ↔︎ Stuttered
• Medical models ↔︎ Social models
• Speech restructuring therapies ↔︎ Neurodiversity

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Authentic self as fluent

Authentic self is repressed by bodily power (pathology). We can liberate the self by restoring normal functioning.

• Behavioral therapy.
• Medication.
• Surgery.

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Authentic self as stuttered

Authentic self is repressed by social power (ableism). We can liberate the self by rejecting fluency.

• Stuttering pride.
• Activism.
• Creative expression.
• Identity is always relative.

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Identity is always relative

There is no true self to be emancipated, there is only different selves constituted through power relations.

I am constantly being encouraged to pluck out some one aspect of myself and present this as the meaningful whole, eclipsing or denying the other parts of self.

— Lorde (1984)

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A rejection of authenticity does not necessarily lead to determinism.

We are free in so far as we continuously rebelling against the ways in which we are already defined, categorized, and classified.