#speech discrimination

[brickoneil]

I lost $5601 and my Bank Account

I lost $5601 and my Bank Account

Thought I’d give and update about my life these days. If you follow me on Twitter, you know. On 9/3, I discovered my account balance, $4412, had been stolen due to a Debit DDA charge. I couldn’t do anything until Tuesday 9/6 after labor Day. I also noticed my SSDI check hadn’t been deposited so on 9/6 I messaged chase and the check appeared. On 9/7, my SSDI payment was stolen with another Debit…

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[lilacfarm]

things to say instead of “did i stutter?” because that is a disrespectful and ableist phrase (explanations here: x x x x )

i said what i said

should i explain myself further?

you know what i said

i don’t want to repeat myself

am i making myself clear?

i know what i meant

do i have to say it again?

i meant what i said

please reblog and feel free to add! :)

[didistutterproject]

Stuttering as Transgender: Disability, Gender Ambivalence and Resistance

The stutterer is located within the patriarchy precisely in a place of ambivalence due to the patriarchal structure’s function of distributing appropriate emotion according to gender role. Built into such a structure is the suppression of masculine feeling in favor of technical demands. Opposed to the role of neutral masculine is the passionate but mandatorily cheerful feminine whose slightest upset risks becoming coded into a stigmatized category of hysterical. Such gender roles are even tightened when applied to people oppressed by other categories such as ethnicity, race, disability, transgender, sexual minority and class. The above set of patriarchal emotion roles are described in order to critique how the stutter, as well as other expressions of impairment, challenge the assignment and location of gender and sexual placement within the normative matrix and hierarchy. The stutter is a transgender act because it is simultaneously monotone and overly masculine while also associated with weakness and cowardice that are attributed to the feminine within the Western patriarchal ideology. The stutter represents a misuse of affect to a society based on a hetero-patriarchal hierarchy. Feeling is expected to be expressed only in terms of the gender plot one is assigned. In the patriarchal family, the stutter ruptures this system of placement. The stutterer becomes unattractive within a heterosexual world of compulsory hyper-masculinity and becomes to unfinished or monotone or devoid of meaning to properly be coded as the passionate feminine.

The placement of the stutter outside of the patriarchal division of gender expression is important. Stutterers are stereotyped in film as carrying traits associated with childishness; the stutter is located beyond gender as it refracts into masculine and feminine forms of cowardice and brusqueness simultaneously. The stutterer has the unique opportunity to recognize dysphoria as their socially produced expectation for their speech is brought into conflict with the reality of misunderstanding and extra social labor having to be done by the stutterer. Body dysphoria and speech dysphoria are similar in that both have to do with an oppressive limited assignment. As “girl” or “boy” are handed to a body that has no implicit categories, syllables are labeled “fluent” and “dysfluent” spuriously. The stutterer is assigned the social expectation of fluency and must discard the taxonomies that restrict their view of themselves.

A further point that I hope to make is that stuttering and other communicative expressions of impairment negate the assignment of gender and make possible polysexual and transsexual communication. When I stutter, I feel neither masculinized nor feminized; I am allowed to be a brusque passive-object simultaneously; I walk a neutral space in patriarchy and this neutrality is why others disconnect from me. Neutrality in both male and female gender assignment communities is fearful, as identification is one of few reliable rules of the social worlds of gender. The stutterer walks between gender segregations and expresses polysexuality and polygender through an irruption of invisibility in conversation.

-Zach Richter, “Stuttering as Transgender: Disability, Gender Ambivalence and Resistance”, didistutter.org

[dysfluentsuggestion]

wanting to get rid of your speech impediment is not bad or wrong, claiming that everyone must do so, is.

[lilacfarm]

just because someone else 'overcame' their speech impediment does not mean that you have to, or are 'dumb' if you don't.

[dysfluentsuggestion]

your speech therapist isn't supposed to make you feel bad about yourself.

[dysfluentsuggestion]

it's not your fault if you are interrupted.

[dysfluentsuggestion]

you are not less of a person if you have your speech impediment into your adulthood.