9:13pm October 21, 2014

Making the Stutter Sexy

We as dysfluent people are used to having our social being made to feel distraught—-away from what the general human means—-alone with our wrongness and backwards—-lost along a shore of vast human difference.

I aim with this blog to think about speech impairment slightly differently.

The stutter can be sexy. The thing of gasping for air; moving tongues; flailing lips; breathing.

These are sexual motions, these are movements of the mouth, the delicate lips, the waving of the soft tongue.

To stutter is to wave the soft flesh of the face in rapid succession.

To stutter is to spurt syllables, to stumble over syntagma, to grasp in air for eloquence.

While the things that stuttering is associated with (such as delays, mistakes, anxiety) are not considered sexy, we can counter regimes of speech assimilation and argue that a stumble shows openness and intimacy in public.

When we stutter, we are produced in a moment of vulnerability. The unusual sounds heard are transformed into signs of unintelligibility. But because stutterers are vulnerable, when we stutter, we are naked in our impediments and imperfections.

Thinking about stuttering as an intimate act, akin to being naked, may change its constructed meaning and turn it into a moment of closeness with our community.

-Zach Richter, Making the Stutter Sexy, DidiStutter.org