I struggle to speak, so I’m told. Apparently I labor over words; they gap and cram, clawing at my mouth. I used to deliberate over phrasing to avoid l’s and w’s—those pestery sounds that would not eject. But inevitably some other would take its place unexpectedly and inopportunely. It was a futile game of outwitting my tongue. Speaking is no longer this type of work. I now say whatever I Wwwaaa--- wANT, no matter the charitable interjections, the averted eyes, or the length of the Starbucks line. Yet there is still labor. Sarah Ahmed remarks that the embodied “repetition of work is what makes the signs of work disappear,” but for me redoubled work merely produces the repetition of signs. The labor theory of value suggests that (exchange) value is produced in relation to the labor invested in a commodity. Yet the value of speech seems to exist in an inverse relation to its production process. I feel the value and the weight of my words sharply decline as they linger in the air, shaped and reshaped. People edge away anxiously, wishing they had purchased a warranty, looking to shop elsewhere. I struggle to speak. I am a perversion of capitalist logic. Disabled speakers are nonetheless artisans. We welcome syllables like old friends and are not quick to part. We tongue the edges and clefts of phonemes. It takes effort and skill to do what we do. We form wor/l/ds with great care and sometimes with playful abandon. We stretch and clump language into polyglot shape, into our shape, into shapes that exceed our control. People tell me that I struggle to speak, that I struggle with stuttering. They are the ones who struggle, and fail, to understand. It may be true that our bodies knot winding time and limbs in the concerted effort to speak linearly. Yet read through a crip and queer phenomenology, perhaps the disabled are not the misshapen ones. Bodies, as Ahmed notes, are formed and twisted into straight shape through the forceful repetition of norms over time (553). The straightening of bodies is an achievement of history: being orientated and habituated to move predictably towards desirable (capitalist and heteronormative) futures. Defying straight norms, futures, and bodily comportments gathers the crip and queer together in generative dialogue. The production of fluent and linear speech—wringing tongues, contorting bodies, and sitting on hands—is complicit in reproducing straight distorted temporalities. Perhaps the rational and calculable trajectory of fluency, of logos, is a very condition of possibility for straight time and futurity. Shooting words like an arrow through time (or time like an arrow through words) is a capacity engendered by ableist choreographies of the body that restrict certain capacities in order to induce clear, fluid, and rational speech. How, then, are bodily capacities, relations, meanings, and futures cut off by the straightening of speech? More importantly, what queer/crip capacities, relations, meanings, and futures are made possible by crip/queered speech? … Stuttering crip is a transformation not in the phonological but the political-phenomenological register. Stuttering crip may often sound the same—grasping for words in crowds and chasing down runaway syllables scattering into noise. Yet to reduce our speech to floundering straight lines assumes an impossible mastery over language and communication. This is a basic intuition of disability politics: outsiders do not get to decide what our bodies mean. Stuttering crip is thus to stutter subversively, playfully, critically. It embodies the rhetorical posture of mētis, as Jay Dolmage describes it, in the effort of interrupting logical flows. Stuttering crip creates affective openings and invitations to gather within subaltern spaces and temporalities. Like claiming crip, stuttering crip is not grasping an identity as much as becoming into a political community. If stuttering crip is a struggle at all, it is not a struggle to communicate despite (and against) the body, but a sympoietic struggle with the body against those who delimit the range of intelligibility, police the boundaries of noise, and confine and straighten our voices. From “Straight Lines and Crooked Speech: Stuttering a Crip Politic,” Josh St. Pierre. Notes:
Ahmed, S. (2006). Orientations: Toward a queer phenomenology. GLQ: A Journal of Lesbian and Gay Studies, Volume 12(4), pp. 543-574.
Dolmage, J. (2014). Disability Rhetoric. Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press.