“When I first saw the original painting, I began to do some research on
that little boy. I could find everything I wanted about every other
detail in the painting, but there was nothing about him. No history. And
so I wanted to find a way to imagine a life for this young man that the
historical painting had never made space for in the composition: his
desires, dreams, family, thoughts, hopes. Those things were never
subjects that the original artist wanted the viewer to contemplate. In
order to reframe the discussion, I decided to physically take action to
quiet [and crumple] the side of the painting that we’ve been talking
about for a very long time and turn up the volume on this kid’s story.
And that’s the reason why I started that painting.” Via Artnet News 2019/03/27
Part of what disability activists argue is that disabilities should not be foremost understood as medical.
My speech impediment is not caused by the way tongue moves, by my vocal cords, my teeth, or my lips. My speech impediment is not even caused by my brain and the physiological way it interacts with my vocal organs.
Of course the speech of everyone who speaks vocally is caused by their lips, tongue, vocal cords, brain etc. But none of these things are what cause a speech impediment.
My speech impediment is caused by the way I speak being heard and understood as abnormal. As unfortunate. As inferior. My speech impediment only exists because our society has already decided that the way my lips and tongue move, the way my voice sounds, is not as good as the way that other people’s lips and tongues move, the way that other people’s voices sound. Society has just assumed that the mere differences in how I speak—the halting and repeated sounds, the fact that I take a little longer than those considered “normal”—must be bad differences.
This is one of the reasons Did I Stutter is critical of disciplines which “pathologize”—or treat as a medical condition—abnormal forms of speech. We simply don’t think that what’s really going on when we call some forms of speech “impediments,” “stutters,” “lisps,” “slurs,” or “bumps,” is medical at all. We believe that the way speech is understood and prioritized is always, first and foremost, a social judgement.
