The Construction of the Disabled Speaker: Locating Stuttering in Disability Studies
St. Pierre argues that the disability of stuttering is not simply biological or natural but is made meaningful by society, and locates stuttering, as an exemplar of communicative disabilities, in disability studies, where it had received attention only as a pertinent example or useful anecdote. Writing on stuttering, from speech pathology to autobiography, the essay observes, consistently frames it as an individual, biological defect to be coped with, managed or cured, and its management prompts stutterers to objectify their own speech production system and treat it as shameful.
The first argument is dialogical. Hearing, St. Pierre holds, is active, not passive, yet the assumed normalcy of hearing hides the hearer's possible contributions to a breakdown, such as losing patience, being unable to follow or finishing sentences, and shifts the responsibility entirely onto the speaker. The essay does not claim stuttering is merely the hearer's construction: broken speech is constructed by both. Second, the pace of conversation required at work disqualifies stutterers from full participation: they often cannot enter a conversation quickly enough, feel pressure not to waste anyone's time and so fearfully remain silent, and are interrupted, ignored or not taken seriously when a sentence takes longer. Beneath efficiency St. Pierre places a more primary ideal, bodily mastery, under which a body that obtrudes at all is marked as deviant. Third, stutterers are liminal, neither clearly abled nor disabled, which the essay suggests can help explain why, unlike many other disabled people, they are often expected to perform on the same terms as the able-bodied; insofar as stuttering seems fixable through self-discipline, disfluency can be read as a moral failure.
It is a conceptual essay with no data of its own, drawing on disability theory and two stutterers' autobiographies. St. Pierre largely brackets speech therapy for want of space and says calling stuttering uniquely a moral failure would overstate the case. The bridge to psychological safety is ours. We read the dialogical argument as the listening half of voice: if broken speech is co-produced, how a team hears belongs to its climate for speaking up, and silence kept so as not to waste others' time is a cost the pace of the room lays unevenly.
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