When I stutter, I am speaking my own language fluently.
Erin Schick
Welcome to the handbook!
This introduction to some of the key themes in #dysfluency studies# is authored by stutterers and written for everyone, but especially for all those who speak with an abundance of repetitions, blurts, pauses, hesitations, and effort. A special welcome to you! We call these speech patterns #“dysfluency”## and affirm them as a natural variation in human #communication.# More generally then, this handbook is for all people who want to learn new stories about dysfluency, stories that affirm dysfluent speech as valuable. While our lived experience centers on stuttering and much of this handbook focuses on stuttering, we hope it will resonate widely with other communities of vocal difference.
To begin, we invite you to consider the Grenadian-Jamaican-American musician and composer JJJJJerome Ellis, who offers a metaphor to know dysfluency in a new way. Stuttering, Ellis explains, is like walking along a forest trail that unexpectedly opens onto a #clearing.#
Like fluent speech, a forest path is smooth and predictable. Fluent speech knows where it came from and where it is going. Then, without warning, a b——————————————lock h—————————————— appens in the middle of a sentence and people spill into an open clearing. In this moment, both speaker and listener feel disorientated: “Where are we? What do we do? Where is the path?”
Despite some initial feelings of uncertainty, this sudden plunge out of predictability can also spark excitement and new possibilities. A clearing, after all, is a space where people might ask: What can happen next? Can anything be different here?
The #clearing# is a powerful image within the stuttering community. The metaphor takes something familiar—having a ‘block’ in the middle of a sentence—and turns it on its head. It is common for people who stutter to believe that stuttering is shameful and that leaving the familiar path of fluent speech is dangerous for both themselves and others. The image of the clearing flips this script. It invites us to value stuttering for its potential to break free from the confines of #fluency.#
I may seem nervous, like I’ve forgotten what to say. But if people would stay quiet long enough, they could hear it. That space between my words is not empty, as much as the world will try to tell me it is empty. It is filled with intensity, passion and ego. It is anything but empty.
Spring Kwok
The clearing reminds us of how our understanding of time and space are often intertwined. We dwell in a clearing for an unknown period of time. Ellis asks us to share in these unpredictable moments. How might people relate with each other if we weren’t controlled by norms of fluency? What can stuttering teach us about ourselves and the world? And how do we create space for stuttering in a world that has little time for it?
These are the lines of inquiry that #‘dysfluency studies’# explores. These are the kinds of questions that arise when we leave the familiar path about stuttering and step into the clearing with people who stutter—people who, in fact, spend much of their time there. We thus invite you to think of the image of the clearing as an exploration of not just stuttering, but also the transformative ideas of dysfluency studies presented in this handbook.
From the start, it is important to note that, for Ellis, the concept of the clearing is both offered as an invitation to consider wide experiences of dysfluency, but also rooted in racial history (the oral resistance of African-American slaves gathered within forest clearings at night). To hold to this complex landscape, we seek to consider the intersections of dysfluency with other aspects of identity throughout the handbook.
What is dysfluency studies? It is an emerging field of study that explores stuttering (and other speech dysfluencies) from critical perspectives that question dominant #biomedical# models of cause, cure, and management. As we state in “A dysfluency manifesto”:
We challenge the medical models, social norms, and discriminatory practices that view dysfluency in terms of deficit, and we claim stuttering as a legitimate and valued form of speech variation within a soundscape of vocal difference and diversity.
The term dysfluency refers to speech patterns that do not conform to dominant expectations of fluency, such as involuntary tics, repetitions, prolongations, blocks, stops, and pauses. More broadly, dysfluency is a form of biological diversity that invites us to question narrow assumptions about how we communicate and find belonging. The aim of dysfluency studies is thus to move beyond harmful notions that stuttering must be “fixed” or “overcome,” and instead find value in the political, cultural, and social possibilities held in dysfluent speech.
Shaped by stuttering academics, activists, and artists, dysfluency studies thus refuses the often straightforward and harmful stories told about stuttering: that our speech patterns are a form of individual suffering to be overcome; an occasion for divine healing; or a neurological breakdown that must be fixed. People who stutter know these kinds of stories well. Dysfluency studies moves us into the clearing, where the questions, let alone the answers, about stuttering are still unsettled. Thus in many ways, one must dwell with dysfluency in that open space to grasp why these ideas matter. Throughout each section, you’ll find resources for exploration—dysfluent interruptions, mini-clearings in the text.
An affirmation of dysfluency as valuable can be difficult. Why? Because it first requires a willingness to linger with the messiness of dysfluency. Fluent speech travels fast and its value appears obvious, but the meanings of stuttered speech always grow in their own dysfluent time. In the same way, #ableist# stories about cause and cure race along well-worth paths. Appreciation for the possibilities in stuttering grow more slowly, and in unexpected bursts. We thus hope the ideas here can help foster conversation—within yourself and with others—about the constraints of fluency and, more importantly, about dysfluency as an important way of being human.
To create space for these conversations, we close this introduction with a broad outline of the kind of work dysfluency studies does, showing how it refuses fluency and, at the same time, affirms dysfluency across three different areas—the social nature of stuttering, the politics of speech & stuttering, and stuttering culture. As writers, we hope our words, in their dysfluent communication, will be well-received, that we will find some connection with our readers.
The Social Nature of Stuttering
Perhaps the foundational insight of dysfluency studies is that, at its core, stuttering is not individual but social. When it comes to disability, we tend to think of people as individual “parts” that are broken and need fixing. This is the #“medical model”# of disability, a well-worn path that, unfortunately, misdiagnoses the very meaning of disability. It treats disability as an individual and biological matter that can be fixed by ‘restoring’ individuals to a certain standard of health.
We hold that people are not individual parts, but beings deeply intertwined with each other and their environments, making dysfluency primarily a social issue—one that reflects how the world is arranged to empower some types of speech difference but exclude others. Speech is social. After all, whenever any of us speak, we always speak to others (even in the mirror) in particular social moments.
Moving beyond questions that turn us into broken parts—“why are you not normal?” and “what would make you normal again?”—dysfluency studies turns our attention to the social forces that create vocal and linguistic injustice in the first place. From this starting point, we can begin to ask more interesting questions than the medical model allows, questions like:
- How do cultural values, power structures, and communication norms shape our perceptions and the meaning of stuttering?
- How are our perceptions of stuttering tied up in our current position? How has stuttering been perceived otherwise across time and culture?
- How can we respond to stuttering besides therapeutic management and cure?
The Politics of Fluency & Dysfluency
A goal of dysfluency studies is to show that ideas that seem ‘natural’ and thus unavoidable, like #ableism# or the medical model of disability, are anything but. It is common to believe that the marginalization of dysfluent speakers is natural and thus inevitable, the result of a biological preference for smooth speech. In this way of thinking, the social order is unfair, yes, but also written into nature and thus inescapable.
We in dysfluency studies argue that much of what appears natural and unavoidable about stuttering is actually the result of layers of history, each layer a moment in time that could have turned out differently. Part of the work of dysfluency studies is to take a jackhammer to hardened assumptions about fluency and dysfluency, to show that how we all practice communication could still be different now!
The work of contending with ableism and compulsory fluency is political because it involves contesting power. For example, who holds authority over stuttering? Currently, #biomedical# experts hold the most power in shaping the conversations about stuttering. Disciplines like #Speech-Language Pathology# still hold sway over what stuttering is and how to respond. After all, they have the most money and data. In keeping with the motto of #disability activism,# “nothing about us without us,” dysfluency studies seeks to reclaim the authority over our voices and how they are treated, ensuring that the stuttering community is central in defining and guiding the discussion about itself.
Stuttering Culture
Finally, dysfluency studies examines how stuttering is portrayed in literature, film, television, art, and popular culture. We work to understand how cultural representations shape, reinforce, and resist broader perceptions of stuttering. By analyzing popular tropes, dysfluency studies explores the power of art to affect what society considers “normal” or “valuable” speech. At the same time, we nurture a #‘stuttering aesthetic’# that both values moments of rupture in art and affirms stuttered forms of communication as valid and even beautiful in their own right.
Reflection and Discussion Questions
- What are some “common sense” beliefs about stuttering from everyday life? How does dysfluency studies unsettle these assumptions?
- How does the metaphor of the clearing question traditional views of communication?
- This section defines “dysfluency” broadly (e.g., blocks, tics, prolongations). How might this expanded definition reshape solidarity among people with various speech or communication disabilities?
- This section mentions “straightforward and harmful stories told about stuttering.” What are some of these stories? Why do they persist? In what ways are such stories actually not straightforward?
