MEMPHIS, Tenn. (Sept. 17, 2012) — Jane Fraser, president of the Stuttering Foundation, made the following comments concerning the Sept. 15, 2012, Saturday Night Live skit ridiculing those who stutter:

We are deeply troubled by Saturday Night Live’s recent decision to make light of stuttering, a communication disorder faced by more than three million Americans and 68 million people worldwide. The release of The King’s Speech was a giant step forward for the stuttering community, bringing understanding and acceptance to those who stutter. SNL’s poor judgment was an equally huge step backwards.

The most troubling part was the obvious research conducted by producers, writers and cast into stuttering, evidenced by their use of the term ‘fluency.' They clearly did their homework but chose to overlook the pain felt by many who stutter and their families for just a cheap laugh.

The Stuttering Foundation supported SNL’s Seth Meyers when Donald Trump chose to call him out as a ‘stutterer’ after the White House Correspondents’ dinner. What’s good for the goose is good for the gander.

Not funny, SNL. Not funny at all.

— Fraser (2012)

Mind your Ps and Qs is an English language expression meaning "mind your manners", "mind your language", "be on your best behaviour", "watch what you're doing".

• To our self.
• To others.
• How we talk about children who stutter.
• How children who stutter hear us talk about stuttering generally.

Action: helpful self talk to counter stereotypes.

• Gather evidence in real-life situations will lead to generating more balanced thoughts on the basis of their findings.
• People can identify helpful self-talk that will positively influence their emotional reaction and behaviour in a situation.
• Helpful self-talk can also be generated by reflecting on previous experiences that have gone well and what the person was saying to himself or herself at the time.

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For the Speech and Language Therapist

• Be aware of own thoughts, feelings and expectations around stuttering and our role as an SLT.
• Communication trumps fluency.

Action: helpful self talk.

• Handouts for teachers.
• Powerpoint for school presentation.
• Advice leaflet for parents (Generate discussion about what works in therapy  and helpful versus unhelpful advice).

We do not, as scholars from different disciplines, bring together our objects and practices to one another through a kind of free-trade agreement; rather we re-enter a long history of binding, tangling and cutting [across disciplines/practice] within which the current moves towards integration are much more weighted than they might first seem.

– Fitzgerald and Callard (2016)

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A ‘dynamic of entanglement’ rather than a push towards integration.

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We have tried to conjure a different palette of affective dispositions through which we might […] live in interdisciplinary spaces. Those dispositions (eddying around ambivalence, awkwardness, frustration, failure and so on) depart from the most common affective registers (critique, adulation, disinterested rigour) through which [many] have tended to approach the terrain of the medical, clinical or biomedical. We want resolutely to claim the stance of interestedness. But we also see interest as a stance that can be (indeed usually is) taken up without someone quite knowing the place at which they stand, or the entwinements through which they are always-already bound with/in others […]. So it is, to be entangled.

– Fitzgerald and Callard (2016)

• Facilitating cultural competence and awareness
• Understanding the dynamics of stigma, self-stigma and masking and the psychological consequences of living with a concealable stigmatised identity
  
• Exploring the lived experience and feelings associated with stammering in an ableist world that privileges fluency
  
• Understanding minority stress and ableist trauma
  
• Supporting the development of new affirming narratives around stammering
  
• Finding own unique stammering aesthetic
  
• Disclosure and self-advocacy
  
• Community

• Public information and education programmes
• Reducing barriers – creating a stammer-friendly environment and culture
• Campaigning
• Lobbying
• Representation
• Cultural change
• Celebration of stammering and difference

Albert Gutzmann (1837–1910)

• Published article on stuttering, Treatment of stuttering by organized and practically proven method (1879).

Hermann Gutzmann (1865–1922)

• Son of Albert Gutzmann.
• Medical doctor.
• Considered ‘The father of logopedics’.

Emil Froeschels (1884–1972)  

• Founded the International Association of Logopedics and Phoniatrics in 1924 (IALP).
• Stammering as psychological origin.
• Chewing method.
• Incorporated different theories.

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1931 – University of Iowa researchers, psychiatrist Samuel Orton (1897–1948) and psychologist Lee Edward Travis (1896–1987)

• Cerebral Dominance Theory of Stuttering.

1940s – Wendell Johnson (1906–1965)

• Diagnosogenic theory.
• ‘Anticipatory hypertonic avoidance reaction’.

1972 – Charles Van Riper (1905–1994)

• The Nature of Stuttering (1972).
• Stuttering stigma.
• Learning theories.
• Attitudes.
• Psychogenic desensitization.
• Neurogenic: acquired ‘Hesitation Phenomena’.

1959 – Howard Maclay and Charles E. Osgood

• Filled and unfilled pauses, repeats, false starts

1969 – Howell & Vetter

• '… cognitive complexity of the utterance…’

1961; 1968 – Goldman-Eisler

• Pausing.
• Interjections.
• Repetitions.
• Tempo changes.
• ‘Normal’ non-fluencies: filled and unfilled pauses 30% of the time.

You have to see yourself in society to be a part of that society

Visual activism to confront and challenge societal preconceptions:

Look → Think → Act

Simi Linton (1998) in Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity quoted by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson:
 "We wield that white cane, or ride that wheelchair or limp that limp” … luxuriate in that stammer?

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The portrait invites us to stare, engrossed perhaps less with the “strangeness” of this woman’s disability and more with the strangeness of witnessing such dignity in a face that marks a life we have learned to imagine as unliveable and unworthy, as the kind of person we routinely detect in advance through medical technology and eliminate from our human community.

— Garland-Thomson (2009)

Flaunt the visible marks of disability. The relish with which disabled people can live their identity and present themselves to the starees.

What is the fluent gaze? Can we see it in cinema? Is the gaze the right conception due to the auditory nature of stammering? Is there an oppositional gaze: a stammered/dysfluent gaze?

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‘The scene for the portrait is designed by a stammerer; photographed and painted by a stammerer; of a stammerer stammering. The stammered gaze.’ — Patrick Campbell

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Close-up of Dysfluent mono typeface, in use in Dysfluent magazine issue 1.

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Our starting-point is again ‘something mechanical encrusted upon the living.’ Where did the comic come from in this case? It came from the fact that the living body became rigid, like a machine. Accordingly, it seemed to us that the living body ought to be the perfection of suppleness, the ever-alert activity of a principle always at work. But this activity would really belong to the soul rather than to the body. It would be the very flame of life, kindled within us by a higher principle and perceived through the body, as if through a glass. When we see only gracefulness and suppleness in the living body, it is because we disregard in it the elements of weight, of resistance, and, in a word, of matter; we forget its materiality and think only of its vitality, a vitality which we regard as derived from the very principle of intellectual and moral life, Let us suppose, however, that our attention is drawn to this material side of the body; that, so far from sharing in the lightness and subtlety of the principle with which it is animated, the body is no more in our eyes than a heavy and cumbersome vesture, a kind of irksome ballast which holds down to earth a soul eager to rise aloft. Then the body will become to the soul what, as we have just seen, the garment was to the body itself—inert matter dumped down upon living energy. The impression of the comic will be produced as soon as we have a clear apprehension of this putting the one on the other. And we shall experience it most strongly when we are shown the soul TANTALISED by the needs of the body: on the one hand, the moral personality with its intelligently varied energy, and, on the other, the stupidly monotonous body, perpetually obstructing everything with its machine-like obstinacy. The more paltry and uniformly repeated these claims of the body, the more striking will be the result. But that is only a matter of degree, and the general law of these phenomena may be formulated as follows: ANY INCIDENT IS COMIC THAT CALLS OUR ATTENTION TO THE PHYSICAL IN A PERSON WHEN IT IS THE MORAL SIDE THAT IS CONCERNED.

— Bergson (1912)

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Bergson’s theory that laughter functions as social correction

Laughter appears to stand in need of an echo, Listen to it carefully: it is not an articulate, clear, well-defined sound; it is something which would fain be prolonged by reverberating from one to another, something beginning with a crash, to continue in successive rumblings, like thunder in a mountain. Still, this reverberation cannot go on for ever. It can travel within as wide a circle as you please: the circle remains, none the less, a closed one. Our laughter is always the laughter of a group.

To understand laughter, we must put it back into its natural environment, which is society, and above all must we determine the utility of its function, which is a social one. Such, let us say at once, will be the leading idea of all our investigations. Laughter must answer to certain requirements of life in common. It must have a SOCIAL signification.

— Bergson (1912)

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In a public speaker, for instance, we find that gesture vies with speech. Jealous of the latter, gesture closely dogs the speaker's thought, demanding also to act as interpreter. Well and good; but then it must pledge itself to follow thought through all the phases of its development. An idea is something that grows, buds, blossoms and ripens from the beginning to the end of a speech. It never halts, never repeats itself. It must be changing every moment, for to cease to change would be to cease to live. Then let gesture display a like animation! Let it accept the fundamental law of life, which is the complete negation of repetition! But I find that a certain movement of head or arm, a movement always the same, seems to return at regular intervals. If I notice it and it succeeds in diverting my attention, if I wait for it to occur and it occurs when I expect it, then involuntarily I laugh. Why? Because I now have before me a machine that works automatically. This is no longer life, it is automatism established in life and imitating it. It belongs to the comic.

We begin, then, to become imitable only when we cease to be ourselves. I mean our gestures can only be imitated in their mechanical uniformity, and therefore exactly in what is alien to our living personality. To imitate any one is to bring out the element of automatism he has allowed to creep into his person. And as this is the very essence of the ludicrous, it is no wonder that imitation gives rise to laughter.

The gestures of a public speaker, no one of which is laughable by itself, excite laughter by their repetition.

— Bergson (1912)

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Alanka Zupančič’s The Odd One In: On Comedy (MIT Press, 2008)

• Zupančič argues Bergson misunderstood the primary thrust of his theory that we laugh when we recognize the mechanical encrusted upon the living.
• The missed revelation of Bergson’s theory is comedy’s unceasing vacillations between the living and the mechanical.

Communication as Ritual

• Communication, commonness, communion.
• James Carey: the model directs our attention “not toward the extension of messages in space but toward the maintenance of society in time; not the act of imparting information but the representation of shared beliefs".
• Akin to religious mass.
• Akin to reading a paper “[n]ews reading, and writing, is a ritual act and moreover a dramatic one. What is arrayed before the reader is not pure information but a portrayal of the contending forces in the world [emphasis added]” (p. 16).

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Dysfluent Accidents as Ritual

• Carol Padden: Ritual emphasizes “performance, activity, and the materiality of communication itself. In this framework, meaning is not so much the definition of a word or sentence but instead is constructed in situ, in social and cultural activity” (p. 44).
• Unlike sending a message, meaning gets enacted in the very midst of unruly bodies that excrete “all levels of expression, from the minute details of discourse—from pitch, emphasis, gesture, head tilts, and eye gaze” (p. 44).
• Moreover, since communication happens “on site,” time cannot be transcended or otherwise avoided with speed but must be lived through.

• Crossed Wires: perhaps it's not that my grumpy co-worker “misheard” my stuttered speech, but that he didn’t want to listen and did not want to belong in time to a common world with this disabled person.
• The Stall: “Part of it feels like my body goes into a kind of supplication or prayer almost. I have a friend who once referred to it as ‘watching me ask for the word’” (Ellis, 2020, n.p.).
• The misfire: “The unexpectedness of stuttering forces both listener and speaker into a space of trust and vulnerability. They must both give up control of the situation. The person speaking does not know when and for how long they will stutter. Likewise, the person listening does not know when to expect a stutter. In order for both people to communicate, they must trust one another. (Constantino 2016, para. 5)
• Ritual? Anti-ritual?