Papers by Joshua St. Pierre
This essay argues that Speech-Language Pathology (SLP) emerged as a response to the early twentie... more This essay argues that Speech-Language Pathology (SLP) emerged as a response to the early twentieth-century demand for docile, efficient, and thus productive speech. As the capacity of speech became more central to the industrial and democratic operations of modern society, an apparatus was needed to bring speech under the fold of biopower. Beyond simple economic productivity, the importance of SLP lies in opening the speaking subject up to management and normalization—creating, in short, biopolitical subjects of communication. We argue that SLP accordingly emerged not as a discreet institution, but as a set of practices which can be clustered under three headings: calculating deviance, disciplining the tongue, and speaking the truth of pathologized subjects.
The article offers a crip reading of “hegemony” to shift attention away from ideology to the mate... more The article offers a crip reading of “hegemony” to shift attention away from ideology to the material site of disability politics. Related yet distinct from normalcy, “fluency” is a technology of optimization and closure that operates upon semiotic bodies at the intersection of biopolitics and hegemony. Only by inscribing social order in our bodies and smoothing over the site of politics can compulsory able-bodiedness manifest as a stable, seamless, and natural field—everywhere and nowhere at once. The article ends by highlighting the dangers of populist demands for legibility/intelligibility that restrict the possibilities (of access, participation, and belonging) for dysfluent people and instead imagines “dysfluency” as a distinctly material and crip resource against hegemony.
Thinking is most at a loss when it tries to say what time is.
Drawing upon feminist, queer, and crip phenomenology, this essay argues that the distinct tempora... more Drawing upon feminist, queer, and crip phenomenology, this essay argues that the distinct temporality of the lived, stuttering body disturbs the normalized “choreography” of communi- cation and thereby threatens the disabled speaker’s recognition as a speaking subject. Exam ined through the phenomenology of Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Alfred Schutz, the disabled speaking body is temporally “out of step” with the normalized bodily rhythms and pace of communicative practices in relation to both lived and objective time. Disciplined for his incal- culable and therefore irrational bodily choreography, the disabled speaker is foregrounded against an objective, instrumentally ordered world constituted by a disembodied and hege- monic “straight-masculine” time. Although dominant communicative choreographies may often be unlivable for disabled speakers, cripping communicative time rejects the cardinal value of futurity and invites interlocutors to gather in a noninstrumentalized and nonproduc- tive present. This reshaping of communicative space enacts new modes of relationality and opens up an array of communicative futures suppressed or cut off by straight-masculine time.
In this paper I bring communication and disability studies into dialogue, arguing that speech com... more In this paper I bring communication and disability studies into dialogue, arguing that speech communication has long been a dilemma within liberal humanism and posthumanism. While humanism venerates speech as the most privileged manifestation of rational human identity, it defers the immanent tension in speech between universal and particular by excluding non-normative voices from the realm of rational discourse. The reconfiguration of the humanist subject into the posthuman privileges informationally flexible and malleable bodies. The disabled speaker provides an important critique of the ableism and exclusion latent within communication theory and offers new modes of thinking about posthuman communication as an embodied and impure activity based on noise, relationality, and reciprocity.
Within the literature of disability studies, surprisingly little work has been done on communicat... more Within the literature of disability studies, surprisingly little work has been done on communicative disabilities as such. In this paper I intend to locate stuttering, as an exemplar of communicative disabilities, within the current literature. Highlighting the distinctively dialogical nature of communicative disabilities, I first argue that "broken speech" is constructed by both the speaker and the hearer. In this sense, the speaker alone does not bear the responsibility for her construction as abnormal and therefore disabled.
Interviews by Joshua St. Pierre
Hello, I'm Shelley Tremain and I'd like to welcome you to the seventh installment of Dialogues on... more Hello, I'm Shelley Tremain and I'd like to welcome you to the seventh installment of Dialogues on Disability, a series of interviews that I am conducting with disabled philosophers and post here on the third Wednesday of each month. The series is designed to provide a public venue for discussion with disabled philosophers about a range of topics, including their philosophical work on disability; the place of philosophy of disability vis-à-vis the discipline and profession; their experiences of institutional discrimination and personal prejudice in philosophy, in particular, and in academia, more generally; resistance to ableism; accessibility; and anti-oppressive pedagogy. My guest today is Joshua St. Pierre, a Ph.D. student in philosophy at the University of Alberta. Joshua has a wide range of interests within feminist philosophy, disability studies, posthumanism, eugenics, phenomenology, political theory, and communication studies. When Joshua is not writing, he edits a blog, takes trips to the off-leash park with his dog Scholar, reads graphic novels, or goes out for brunch. Welcome to Dialogues on Disability, Joshua! Before I ask you to talk about your current research on political theory and communication, I'd like you to fill us in on your background and education.
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Papers by Joshua St. Pierre
Interviews by Joshua St. Pierre