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.
“Have you still got your space? Your soul, your own and necessary place where your own voices may speak to you, you alone, where you may dream. Oh, hold onto it, don’t let it go.”
— — Doris Lessing, from her Nobel lecture “On not winning the Nobel Prize” (via lifeinpoetry)