It’s time to take back our speech: Did I stutter? By Joshua St. Pierre

Joshua St. Pierre, Zach Richter and Erin Schick created the Did I Stutter Project, a disability activist project for stutterers by stutterers. Below are excerpts of a blog post by Joshua St. Pierre first published November, 6, 2014.

Put most simply, we are a group of stutterers who want to be heard on our own terms, with two main goals: 1) resisting speech assimilation and 2) advocating for dysfluency pride. We are not a self-help group per se. Rather, we consider ourselves as part of the disability rights movement.

Gaining their momentum in the 70s, disability rights activists and theorists have insisted that what we understand as “disability” is not primarily a medical but a political issue of inclusion and exclusion. Human traits are tremendously varied – eye and hair color, bone structure, height, physical and mental capabilities. So why, disability politics asks, are only particular forms of variation marked as “abnormal”?

The short answer to this question is that the very process of categorizing bodies and human traits in terms of normal/abnormal or abled/disabled is deeply informed by cultural, economic, social, and political values. For example, despite progressive legislation we still erect inaccessible buildings and transportation systems that “disable” wheelchair users and deaf or blind people. Architecture that excludes certain types of people is a reflection of what and who we value as a society. Disability activists and theorists thus argue that (to varying degrees depending on who you ask) disability is not an individual and biological condition, but is a complex interaction between bodies, cultural values, and social/economic structures. “Abnormal/normal” and “disabled/abled” are, therefore, first and foremost political categories used to construct our world in oppressive ways. Because of this, disability rights movements refuse to believe that disability is fundamentally a medical issue, and instead see it as a matter of civil rights and justice. We demand to be included in society as equal participants just as we are.

For the entire post: http://intandem.co.uk/blog/its-time-to-take-back-our-speech-did-i-stutter/

Joshua St. Pierre is a PhD student in philosophy at the University of Alberta and has published on stuttering and communication both academically and non-academically. Using his experience of stuttering, his work explores the normalization and exclusion of particular communicative bodies, practices, and subjects within political economies.

Did I Stutter?

Twitter: @i_stutter

Website: http://www.didistutter.org

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/614806875282366/

Tumblr: http://didistutterproject.tumblr.com