Category Archives: stereotypes

Voicing the Real Self

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Such a joy to write for the American Speech-Language-Hearing Association, exploring the complex relationship between our voices and identities. Here’s an excerpt from the piece. To read the full article jump on over to the ASHA Leader website:

“If you sat across from a blindfolded stranger and started to speak, what might they infer from your voice? They might guess your age, your gender and your background. If they listened a little harder, they might try to determine how you’re feeling, what your sexual orientation might be, what kind of education you’ve had or what kind of person you are.

They would draw upon their own intimate knowledge of speaking and tie that with the popular stereotypes of their culture. You might feel the urge to mold their opinions, to project a particular image. In doing so, you might highlight pieces of your speech to convey a certain emotional state or tie yourself to a particular group identity. Within certain boundaries, you could try to mold what they hear.

It is clear that our voices, often understood to be fundamental markers of our identity, are also objects of design, actively crafted to achieve various social meanings. The unique qualities of our voices are determined by our individual bodies, yet our voices also have to be actively produced, unlike other attributes such as our skin color or facial features, writes Deborah Cameron, professor of language and communication at Oxford University’s Worcester College, in her 2003 article “Designer Voices”.

Our voice “signifies both embodiment and subjectivity, and in that sense can be seen as the most personal attribute of a human being,” says Cameron. “We want to believe the voice is the willed and authentic expression of an individual’s ‘true’ identity.”
If our voice is a constant articulation of our identity, what happens if we don’t like the performance we give or the reactions we elicit?”

Voicing the Real Self

Stuttering and the Power of Suggestion

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stereotypes

Let’s play a word association game. What is the first word you think of when you hear the word ‘stutter’?

If you are a journalist, in all likelihood you will lean toward the word ‘debilitating’. In fact, the phrase ‘debilitating stutter’ is so ingrained into the habits of writers that it has been used to describe men and women as varied as Joe Biden, Emily Blunt, Tim Gunn and Ed Sheeran.

In publications as wide ranging as People magazine, The Daily Beast, NPR and the LA Times, it is near impossible to find a ‘successful’ stutterer who has not been described as having a childhood marred by a ‘debilitating stutter’.

This badge is affixed to them by the outside world. They rarely, if ever, describe themselves in such terms. Why would they? Their stories are not pitiable, they are not figures of weakness. In fact, their stories are full of grit and fortitude. These are people who have faced difficulties and prevailed. Debilitated they are not.

If we agree with George Herbert Mead’s idea of the ‘looking-glass self’, the idea that our own self-image derives in large part from how we are viewed by others, then the language we use to describe stuttering becomes centrally important.

Stereotypes are insidious things. If someone reads an article describing a ‘debilitating stutter’, they would be forgiven for seeing someone who stutters through that reductionist lens. Perhaps a young person who stutters reads the word ‘debilitating’ and feels less competent, less able to aspire to something greater, less a part of the world around them.

The stereotype hangs in the air and, whether you believe in the stereotype or not, you become worried that your behavior may end up proving the stereotype true. Your anxiety spikes, acting like lighter fuel to your speech. You stutter more, panic more, fight against it more. You become more like the stereotype you so deplore.

This paradoxical problem, known as the ‘stereotype threat’, is certainly not only felt by stutterers. Everyone is a member of a group that has some stereotype affixed to it.

We can, of course, hope that the world around us will stop measuring us in ever-narrowing stereotypes. We can hope that we will be seen as the jagged mass of individuals that we are.

In the meantime, I believe that it is worth finding ways to reduce the impact of the threats that surround us.

Writing in his book Whistling Vivaldi, Claude M. Steele introduces the ideas of critical mass and refusing to see people through the lens of their identity stereotype. The more people we see succeeding and stuttering openly, the more the stereotype of debilitation erodes. The more we tell children who stutter that they are capable of great things, the more we expect from them, the greater their ability to thrive becomes.

Take, for example, men like Joe Biden and Jack Welch (another stutterer ‘debilitated’). Each man has described their mothers telling them that were too smart, that they thought too quickly and their stuttered voices were just trying to catch up. How differently they must have felt about themselves as children when the ‘problem’ was framed in that light.

So, let’s go back to that word association game. What happens if you connect the word ‘stutter’ with words like ‘strength’ and ‘capability’? How does that change the narrative of someone’s life?