Distending Straight-Masculine Time:

A Phenomenology of the Disabled

Speaking Body
JOSHUA ST. PIERRE

Drawing upon feminist, queer, and crip phenomenology, this essay argues that the distinct
temporality of the lived, stuttering body disturbs the normalized choreography of communication and thereby threatens the disabled speakers recognition as a speaking subject. Examined 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 incalculable and therefore irrational bodily choreography, the disabled speaker is foregrounded
against an objective, instrumentally ordered world constituted by a disembodied and hegemonic 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 nonproductive 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.

SPEECH

AND

EMBODIED CHOREOGRAPHY

Although disabled speech is now beginning to gain some much-needed attention

within disability studies (for example, Paterson 2012; St. Pierre 2012; Dolmage 2013;
Eagle 2013), the lived experience of the disabled speaker remains underdeveloped
and obscured. By drawing on feminist, queer, and crip phenomenology in this paper,
I highlight the idealization of bodily time by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Alfred
Schutz and contend that the disabled speakerattending specifically to the stutterer
experiences a violent and persistent temporal decentering as he1 is folded into
uncomfortable communicative rhythms and tempos woven around the bodily time of
Hypatia vol. 30, no. 1 (Winter 2015) by Hypatia, Inc.

50

Hypatia

his interlocutors. This judgment of his temporality as abnormal or deficient is structured by what I term the straight-masculine time order: a future-directed linearity
abstracted from the flux of bodily time. Through this temporal displacement the
disabled speakers performance of masculinity is disrupted and diminished. He is
further decentered by unchanging, objective, or clock time, which disciplines speakers to move in standardized, efficient motions and thereby conform to strict temporal
parameters. Disturbing the normalized bodily choreography of speech through the
delayed, unpredictable, and unmalleable temporality of the disabled speaking body,
the disabled speaker risks his recognition as a speaking participant in the world. Yet
in articulating the contingent nature of dominant and ableist temporalities, disabled
speakers accentuate the co-constitution of being and engender new modes of relationality.
Theorists such as Nick Crossley have established the use of choreography as an
analytic for human communication. Social choreography examines how perception,
action, and speech cohere in the communicative event. In resisting any abstraction
of communication theory, a choreography of human communication grounds this
activity in the body itself. Crossley maintains that speaking bodies are interconnected
in communication, as rhythms and tempos of movement and speech are perceived,
mirrored, and reciprocated. In his words, body-subjects respond to [others] and are
absorbed in a common action. Each action by the one calls forth an action in the
other, which calls forth an action from the first, and so on (Crossley 1996, 32).
Recognizing this dynamic interplay pulls abstracted theories of communication
back to the lived experience of embodied speakers, which is a promising move for
disability theory.
Translating Crossleys work into a new context, Kevin Paterson helpfully employs
the matrix of choreography to probe the exclusion of disabled speakers, arguing that
communication disablement is not a problem of botching a carnal performance
(giving the wrong verbal or non-verbal cue). It is a matter of being estranged by the
dominant choreography of everyday life (Paterson 2012, 171). The choreography
taken for granted by able-bodied speakers is not simply a neutral script guiding
human communication, but consists of normalized rules played against disabled bodies
who cannot hit the right cues, or speak quickly or fluidly enough. For Paterson, disabled speakers are accordingly objectified because they belong to a different communicative culture. Highlighting the delineation of able-bodied communicative practices
is important; however, the notion of choreography has much more to offer a theory
of disabled speech than Paterson has explored.
My project details the temporality of the lived stuttering body in relation to dominant choreographies that dictate the intelligibility of communicative action, privileging certain types of movements and speeds and marginalizing others. I use
choreography to denote the normalized structuring of bodily and inter-bodily communicative practices. To perform normalized speech one must move according to a
particular rhythm, analogous to dance, as the correct production of speech relies
upon an intricate coordination of breathing, articulation, facial expression, bodily
stance, and gesture. Moreover, an inter-bodily choreography must also be taken into

Joshua St. Pierre

51

consideration since the disabled speaker performs bodily choreography improperly

not only in relation to himself, but also in relation to other body-subjects. To frame
the temporal choreography of the disabled speaking body, I turn to phenomenology,
in which temporality is not a mechanical by-product of having a body, but is constitutive of its metaphysical condition.

PHENOMENOLOGY

AND THE

DISABLED SPEAKING BODY

Following Edmund Husserl, the humanworld relation for Merleau-Ponty is not a

relation of subjectobject that takes perception as a projection onto a fully determined world standing in objective relation to me. Rather, as a mode of being-in-theworld, perception dialectically grasps a world of significance: I perceive and am called
upon to respond by my context. In this way, intentionality is not for Merleau-Ponty
an act of pure consciousness, but an embodied perception, a bodily engagement with
the world that allows me to move through it meaningfully. It spreads itself out
through the body in a practical engagement with the world such that consciousness
is not primarily an I think that, but an I can. My bodily perceptions and capabilities structure the existential possibilities available to me to engage in projects and
relationships in the world.
If living bodies are not mechanistic objects, but organic bodies who open up an
array of possible actions, an intentional arc, in their holistic orientation to the world
(Hass 2008, 182), then speech must likewise be understood as an existential movement, a bodily engagement with the world. Much like perception, speech is a means
of communion, calling forth (and being called forth by) meaning from situations
around us. For Merleau-Ponty, the categorical distinction between gestural behavior
and the rational, signifying activity of speech gives way to a continuity of expressive actions enacted by the body. Dividing the speech act into thought and language
or bodily act and external meaning relies upon an unphenomenological fracturing of
the intentional arc of the speaking body. Performed by the lived body, the intention
to speak can only be found in an open experience: it appears, as boiling appears in a
liquid, when, in the thickness of being, empty zones are constituted and move outward (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 202). Put otherwise, speech is an activity of establishing
a world of meaning never fully determined.
Merleau-Ponty makes a helpful distinction at this point between a speaking
speech and a spoken speech. The former refers to language in a primary stage
where meaningful intentions are nascent and in the process of coming into being. In
this moment what is sought in speech is empirical support to materialize our relation
with others and the world. Speaking speech is, for example, the fumbling at the edges
of our vocabulary in an attempt to participate in shaping a common world of significance. Once expressed, the act of speech constitutes a linguistic and cultural world,
it makes that which stretched beyond fall back into being (Merleau-Ponty 2012,
203). The fall back into common significance results in spoken speech, which is
open to a wide range of culturally sedimented significations.

56

Hypatia

Yet speech qua voice troubles the pure masculine performance of rational discourse and identity. As Iris Young notes, The entrance of the body into speech
into wide gestures, movements of nervousness, or body expressions of emotionare
signs of weakness that cancel out ones assertions or reveal ones lack of objectivity
and control (Young 1996, 64). Although masculine speech unavoidably requires the
body, and more particularly, the voice, it masquerades as disembodied and therefore
objective. Disability therefore not only wrinkles the purity and objectivity of masculine speech by dramatizing the bodys role in the production of speech, but in this
process evinces a weakness over ones body and an inability to live up to gendered
expectations of assertiveness, confidence, and self-masteryparticularly since these
norms are implicated with male sexuality.6
The phenomenological generalization of speaking bodies governed by masculine
norms can thus be understood to produce not a speaking body, but a paradigmatic
subject position that denies particularity and materiality: what might be termed a
universal speaker. It is here that the gendering of temporality becomes apparent.
Abstracted from the confines of particular bodies, the universal speaker correspondingly imagines himself free from bodily time. Whereas feminine time is culturally
sedimented around bodies, rhythms, and imposed material structures, the universal
speaker, wielding the voice of phonocentrism, is simultaneously speaking from
nowhere and everywhere; he seeks to erase and thereby master time by disavowing
his embodiment and material conditions. Without flux, masculine time is unwavering
and homogeneous.
Straight and masculine time overlap in the construction of the disabled speaking
body. This hybrid time orderthe perspicuity and future-oriented linearity of straight
time infused with a uniform and unyielding momentumprovides the rigid backdrop
against which able-bodied, straight masculinity must be performed. The gender performance of the male disabled speaker is obscured since he secretes a communicative
time neither straight nor masculine (thereby nonproductive and nonrational). The
disabled speaking body is thus unmoored from the capitalist logic animating the modern performance of masculinity; the noninstrumental(izable) speaking speech of the
stutterer is cast out of time. To examine how this time order is used to constitute and
discipline the disabled speaking body, it is necessary to examine first the experience
of time as lived by the disabled speaker. To do this I will draw upon the Bergsonian
distinction between duration and outer time.

CHOREOGRAPHING BODILY TIME

IN

SPEECH

Stressing the time of the subject as it is lived as opposed to the worldly objective
time of scientific and economic vivisection, Henri Bergson eschews the interpretation
of time as a succession of nows through a critique we might anachronistically term
phenomenological. In Bergsons view, the lived experience of time does not consist
of distinct moments marked evenly against a spatial backdrop, but is rather a continuity of successions that melt into and permeate one another, without precise

62

Hypatia

impervious to the inherent flux of lived time. The disabled speaker feels this disembodied, straight-masculine time oppressively forced upon him, time that does not flex
and has no sense of becoming. Asked to give an oral presentation within the strict
parameter of ten minutes, for example, the stutterer is constrained to operate with a
finite sum of temporal successions without accommodation for bodily time that
expands and contracts, nor any awareness of the temporal openness of dialogue that
does not conform to predetermined parameters. He is here abandoned to a time that
is not in the process of becoming, but is always running out, inhospitable to the specific rhythms of his temporalizing body.
Through the regulated patterns of choreographed speech, the body of the disabled
speaker is compelled to move in standardized, efficient motions and thereby conform to
strict temporal parameters. In Foucaults terms, disciplinary time creates docile bodies
that are temporally malleable: productive and efficient. In failing to comport to this
unyielding tempo and rhythmplayed out individually and intersubjectivelyhis body
ceases to be a docile, calculable, and invisible medium for communication. Surpassing
the violence of the mutual tuning-in relationship, the economy of time defines the stutterer by his aberrant bodily characteristics foregrounded against an objective, instrumentally ordered world. To be recognized as a speaking subject here requires integration
into a dominant logic of temporalized and gendered body-politics.8
Although communicative space can be dangerous and even unlivable for the disabled speaker, it must not be forgotten that the disciplinary power of hegemonic temporalities lies primarily in obscuring its contingency. The universalization and
instrumentalization of time are peddled as natural and simply given, yet they are
derived from a masculinized and sterile human ecology. Articulating the contingency
of dominant temporalities challenges communicative normalcy and engenders possibilities of enacting new modes of relationality, possibilities for disabled speakers to
shape communicative space otherwise. In the late 1990s, the distinguished French
novelist and stutterer Patrick Modiano appeared on a prominent French television
show; displaying his admiration for Modiano, Derrida later reflects that, hes managed to get people to accept that they need to be patient when he cant find his
words. . .. Theres someone who has succeeded in transforming the public scene and
forcing it to go at his own speed (Peeters 2012, 480).9
The disabled speaker is capable of transforming communicative space in this manner not by assuming control of time, but by accentuating the co-constitution of being.
The communicative present is forged through a shared responsibility (irrespective of
appeals to objective time) as hearers and speakers are dialogically bound in the act of
communication. Disabled speech distending straight-masculine time is thus an existential opening: both an invitation to orient around and gather within a nonproductive present, and a call for the hearer to take responsibility for her role in creating a
shared horizon and the subsequent release of the disabled voice into beingthat is,
into a crip future. There is no neutral position to be taken within this dance. If subjectivity is indeed bound up with communicative intelligibility and normalized temporalities, the stakes are high for the creation of a choreography within which we
can hear one another.

54

Hypatia

A queer/crip reading of temporality is helpful here, bearing upon the intersection

of embodied temporality and the normative encoding of time; an encoding that
defers the present for an ableist and heteronormative future. Lee Edelman famously
argues in No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive that social order in American
politics is structured around the Child, insofar as the telos of reproduction and posterity configures the sociopolitical good. We are always working for the children and
investing in their futures such that futurity is unintelligible outside of a heteronormative framework. Edelman accordingly calls for a refusal of the future, a refusal of the
coercive belief in the paramount value of futurity (Edelman 2004, 6). To be queer is
to live outside this dominating temporality. Judith Halberstam convergently defends
the need for queer spaces and times that lie outside the purview of capitalist futurity.
Queers, she writes, will and do opt to live outside of reproductive and familial time
as well as on the edges of logics of labor and production. By doing so, they also often
live outside the logic of capital accumulation: here we could consider ravers, club
kids, HIV-positive barebackers, rent boys, sex workers, homeless people, drug dealers,
and the unemployed (Halberstam 2005, 39). Queer bodies call attention to the
immediacy of the present without, quite literally, cashing in on the future.
Alison Kafer, in Feminist, Queer, Crip, knits the conceptions of queer and crip
time together, suggesting that Edelman and Halberstam could just as easily be indexing disabled as queer bodies in their articulation of queer time. Disabled bodies
resonate within discussions of HIV/AIDS where futures are in question, cut short,
unable to be projected into domestic (heteronormative) bliss. Disabled bodies are
often desexualized and pushed outside reproductive and familial time. They dwell in
temporalities incongruent with the logic of capitalism: moving slowly or unexpectedly
and stunting the normative socioeconomic developmental trajectory. These shifts in
timing and pacing can of necessity and by design lead to departures from straight
time, Kafer notes, whether straight time means a firm delineation between past/
present/future or an expectation of a linear development from dependent childhood
to independent reproductive adulthood (Kafer 2013, 34).
Shoring up Merleau-Ponty and Schutzs reading of bodily time, we might thus
understand the disabled speaker to embody crip and queer time, employing Kafers
description of straight time as the firm delineation between past/present/future and
a linear developmental trajectory. Oral signification, at least in the metaphysical (logocentric) tradition, is marked by the steady temporal march of reason. Meaning
unfurls through a simultaneous push/pull movement to the future by way of the past.3
The meaning of an utterance loops and is buttressed through the past, while directed
by the anticipated unfolding of the futureprolepsis. Many futures are simultaneously
opened through the perspicuity of the past, and rendering these multifarious possibilities intelligible by calling some into being while dismissing others is the sine qua non
of communication. Within normalized communicative choreographies, transparency
between past/present/future thus facilitates and even guarantees the act of communicating.
The disabled speaking body conversely arrests time since the oblique relation
between past/present/future produced by awkward pauses, gaps in signification, and

Joshua St. Pierre

55

stuttered syntax makes temporal movement viscous. An aporetic future and a stubborn present queers communicative time. Notice that straight time instrumentalizes
and eclipses the communicative present in the movement from the past to the
future.4 This is precisely why a hard block on a word may be so aggravating for an
interlocutor who wishes the stutterer would just spit it out! Analogous to the way in
which the queer time of the epidemic deflects attention away from the future altogether, attending only to this moment, finding urgency in the present (Kafer 2013,
35), the temporalizing rhythms of the disabled speaking body spurn the cardinal value
of futurity and invite interlocutors to gather in a noninstrumentalized and nonproductive present.5
However, pace queer time, the political impulse behind crip time in Kafers assessment is imagining subaltern temporalities within which disabled people are not out
of time and can flourish. That is, since disability pejoratively represents tragedy and
loss, Kafer contends that the task. . . is not so much to refuse the future as to imagine disability and disability futures otherwise, as part of other, alternate temporalities
that do not cast disabled people out of time, as the sign of the future of no future
(Kafer 2013, 34). Cripping queer (communicative) time accordingly requires nurturing choreographies that open up an array of communicative futures suppressed or cut
off by straight time.
Revealing the distinctly gendered construction of bodily time producing inhospitable choreographies/temporalities is an essential part of this task. In distending masculine time through speech, I suggest that the male disabled speaker fumbles, or at least
disrupts, the performance of masculinity. The relation between masculinity and
speech is particularly noteworthy since the majority of those who stutter are male (at
a ratio of 4:1) and speech has often been conceptually cast as masculine.
Adriana Cavarero, following Emmanuel Levinas, argues that the metaphysical tradition has long confused the notions of speech and reason. Originating with Plato,
this tradition devocalizes speech such that thought becomes a silent discourse within
the soul with itself (Cavarero 2005, 46). Spoken discourse is sonorized thought, as
the (dia)logos within the soul streams through the mouth, taking on a physical form.
Not surprisingly, this formulation that separates and hierarchizes reason/body is inextricably gendered:
Symptomatically, the symbolic patriarchal order that identifies the masculine with reason and the feminine with the body is precisely an order that
privileges the semantic with respect to the vocal. . .. This voice becomes
secondary, ephemeral, and inessentialreserved for women. Feminized
from the start, the vocal aspect of speech and, furthermore, of song appear
together as antagonistic elements in a rational, masculine sphere that centers itself, instead, on the semantic. (Cavarero 2005, 6)
Women may chauvinistically be represented as the chatty, nattering gender, but this
caricature results in part from womens voices being bound to their bodies and emotions rather than to reason. Conceptually removed from embodiment, speech qua
rational discourse properly belongs to men.

56

Hypatia

Yet speech qua voice troubles the pure masculine performance of rational discourse and identity. As Iris Young notes, The entrance of the body into speech
into wide gestures, movements of nervousness, or body expressions of emotionare
signs of weakness that cancel out ones assertions or reveal ones lack of objectivity
and control (Young 1996, 64). Although masculine speech unavoidably requires the
body, and more particularly, the voice, it masquerades as disembodied and therefore
objective. Disability therefore not only wrinkles the purity and objectivity of masculine speech by dramatizing the bodys role in the production of speech, but in this
process evinces a weakness over ones body and an inability to live up to gendered
expectations of assertiveness, confidence, and self-masteryparticularly since these
norms are implicated with male sexuality.6
The phenomenological generalization of speaking bodies governed by masculine
norms can thus be understood to produce not a speaking body, but a paradigmatic
subject position that denies particularity and materiality: what might be termed a
universal speaker. It is here that the gendering of temporality becomes apparent.
Abstracted from the confines of particular bodies, the universal speaker correspondingly imagines himself free from bodily time. Whereas feminine time is culturally
sedimented around bodies, rhythms, and imposed material structures, the universal
speaker, wielding the voice of phonocentrism, is simultaneously speaking from
nowhere and everywhere; he seeks to erase and thereby master time by disavowing
his embodiment and material conditions. Without flux, masculine time is unwavering
and homogeneous.
Straight and masculine time overlap in the construction of the disabled speaking
body. This hybrid time orderthe perspicuity and future-oriented linearity of straight
time infused with a uniform and unyielding momentumprovides the rigid backdrop
against which able-bodied, straight masculinity must be performed. The gender performance of the male disabled speaker is obscured since he secretes a communicative
time neither straight nor masculine (thereby nonproductive and nonrational). The
disabled speaking body is thus unmoored from the capitalist logic animating the modern performance of masculinity; the noninstrumental(izable) speaking speech of the
stutterer is cast out of time. To examine how this time order is used to constitute and
discipline the disabled speaking body, it is necessary to examine first the experience
of time as lived by the disabled speaker. To do this I will draw upon the Bergsonian
distinction between duration and outer time.

CHOREOGRAPHING BODILY TIME

IN

SPEECH

Stressing the time of the subject as it is lived as opposed to the worldly objective
time of scientific and economic vivisection, Henri Bergson eschews the interpretation
of time as a succession of nows through a critique we might anachronistically term
phenomenological. In Bergsons view, the lived experience of time does not consist
of distinct moments marked evenly against a spatial backdrop, but is rather a continuity of successions that melt into and permeate one another, without precise

Joshua St. Pierre

57

outlines, without any tendency to externalize themselves in relation to one another,

and without any affiliation to number (Muldoon 2006, 80). This experience of time
as seamless heterogeneity is what Bergson terms dur
ee, or duration. Only when we
abstract from this first-person experience of time can time be cut into a series of nows
related externally to one another as a before or an after, and constitute an objective, measurable, outer time. I argue more specifically that the lived experience of
time is necessarily structured by the particularities of embodiment, including the way
in which these particularities are mediated and governed by straight-masculine time.
This distinction is marked by my reference to duration as lived time. I will contrast
lived time with two forms of outer time. In the first place, outer time is understood,
most generally, as time that is measureable though not necessarily measured and standardized in daily life. A second and more exact form of outer time is denoted by
clock time, which refers to standardized outer time accruing an explicit economic
and disciplinary valence.
The distinction between lived and outer time enables a phenomenological description of the disabled speakers temporal experience. Just as duration exists with varying
intensities and qualitative featuresfor example, lived time possess a fluidity when
listening to a symphony, or stretches during a hot afternoon classso is duration
inflected by the capabilities and possibilities of the body. Jezer is lucid on this point:
I do not understandor perhaps I cannot acceptthe lateral movement
of time. . .. My urge is always to telescope time into itself. . . and speed it
up. People with a normal sense of time can count one, two, three, four,
five systematically. I, on the other hand, would count out five as one,
two, threefourfive.. . . The words collapse upon themselves. My urge is to
blast through them as fast as I can, to make a sandwich of them, to compress them together. (Jezer 1997, 11)
The lived time experienced by the stutterer is uneven, compressing and expanding
unpredictably with the continual labor of bringing speech into being. This distinct
experience of lived time is not restrained to the activity of speech for Jezer, but overflows into daily, mundane activities. For example, Jezer describes in some detail his
compulsion to flush a urinal before he is finished, unable to wait even when he wants
to (12). His experience of lived time, in other words, is slightly ahead of objective
time through his struggle to spit out words as quickly as possible and thereby keep
up with the outer world.
Compressed lived time is nothing but phenomenological variation. That the stutterer experiences and organizes time differently is simply an aspect of his embodied
existence. However, the stutterers experience of compressed time distending as he
blocks on a word and rapidly contracting as a fluent moment unfolds in front of him
is only partially structured by his own temporalizing body. The experience of compression and distension is more fully a dialectical response to the assumed temporality
of the generalized other. The stutterer senses time is distending through a judgment
of how fast he should be talking in relation to his interlocutors. This judgment is
structured and normalized by the universality of straight-masculine time. Only when

58

Hypatia

the disabled speaker relates to other temporalizing body-subjects through communication, here marking the transition from intra- to inter-bodily choreography, is his
experience of time deperspectivized and evaluated as deficient and abnormal.
The success of synchronized activities such as spoken and written communication, making music, or making love with another requires deperspectivizing ones
own temporal structuring of the world: merging ones lived time with the others
shared temporal horizons. It is precisely here that the disabled speaker finds his temporalizing body seemingly deficient, impeding what Schutz refers to as the mutual
tuning-in relationship: a living through of a common experience that grounds communication. Although all acts of communication rely on a coordination of events in
the outer world, the corporeal synchronization between two cellists, for example,
becomes meaningful only in relation to the performance through a further linking
up of lived time. It is within this temporal dimension that the flux of the musical
events unfolds, a dimension in which each performer re-creates in polythetic steps
the musical thought of the. . . composer and by which he is also connected with the
listener (Schutz 1976, 177). It is thus not tonal sounds nor the beating of the metronome in objective space that creates a shared experience between the two cellists
and the audience, but rather the diachronic, polythetic progressionthat is, the carrying forward of some but not all characteristics of the past into the presentthrough
the ongoing flux of music that unites the performers and listeners together in a communicative present.
Shifting attention to spoken dialogue, Schutz argues that the two fluxes of lived
time similarly become synchronous with each other in relation to an event in outer
timethe speech act itself. The stream of articulating cogitations of the speaker,
he explains, is thus simultaneous with the outer event of producing the sounds of
speech, and the perceiving of the latter simultaneously with the comprehending cogitations of the listener (Schutz 1974, 324). Through the organizing activity of objective speech patterns, two speakers (or a speaker and a listener) become united in a
common time dimension and thus live through a communicative present together.
Put otherwise, the speaker and listener are tuned-in to each other not merely
through a common measurable time, but more foundationally through a dialogical
co-performance in simultaneity of the polythetic steps by which a we is constituted.
The formulation tuning-in describes with some clarity both the synergistic
experience of two collaborators excitedly dialoguing, and that of being held in rapt
attention by a skilled orator, proverbially hanging on her every word not in outer time
(which disappears), but in lived time as the meaning of her words unfolds masterfully
in polythetic steps. In both of these cases, the former correlating with the tuning-in
between the cellists and the latter to the audienceperformer relationship, we live
together in a shared present. Merleau-Ponty describes this mutual tuning-in relationship in terms of speech being called forth by commonality between two interlocutors:
In the experience of dialogue, a common ground is constituted between me and
another; my thought and his form a single fabric. . .. We are, for each other, collaborators in perfect reciprocity: our perspectives slip into each other, we coexist through
a single world (Schutz 1974, 370). Similar to physical environments that elicit

Joshua St. Pierre

59

specific actions from an athlete, the shared communicative situation elicits shared
possibilities from interlocutors. For both Schutz and Merleau-Ponty then, the constitution of a shared world underlies our perception of, or lived engagement with, others
through speech.
Schutz and Merleau-Ponty, however, problematically assume a basic communicative temporality derived from generalized bodily time. The result is an idealization
that obscures the average, everyday experiences of a wide range of speaking bodies.
Living intersubjectively through the present relies upon a great number of equivalencies unacknowledged by either Schutz or Merleau-Ponty. For example, the communicative present is broken if a listener is not intellectually capable of following the
polythetic steps as quickly as the speaker, or if the (disabled, tired, or distracted)
speaker cannot move from thought to speech as transparently and fluidly as MerleauPonty assumes. He writes, the orator does not think prior to speaking, nor even
while speaking; his speech is his thoughts. The listener similarly does not think about
the signs (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 185). The normalizing politics inherent within this
phenomenological description of the so-called original act of speaking cannot be
ignored.
The possibility of living through a shared present provokes the question: whose
present are we talking about? This is not simply a question of abled/disabled bodily
time, but of temporality writ large. Straight-masculine time, as suggested above, instrumentalizes the present in service to the future. The communicative now ubiquitously produced by fluent speech (at least as governed by straight-masculine time)
might thus be better understood as the continuous deferral of an attenuated present.
The unceasing nature of this deferral, as the future overloaded with meaning steadily
folds into the past, produces the experience of a stable and calm present.
The experience of straight-masculine time is, in this manner, analogous to traveling at a consistent highway speed. It is only when one dramatically accelerates or
decelerates that inertia produces the feeling of motion. Similarly, only embodied temporalities out of sync with straight-masculine time experience this time order as such.
The future-directed linearity of straight time is thus rendered conspicuous only
through disruption: in this case, via stalled or fractured speech. (At the same time,
masculine speech, putatively owning time, can opt out of this order at will. The
distension without disruption of straight-masculine time reinscribes privilege.) Interlocutors are as such tuned-in to each other through a shared and unfixed now as
they speak toward where the other speaker is going. The disabled speaker thus struggles not to mimic the dominant temporal choreographysimply to keep upbut
continually to engage with the onrushing futurity of a tenuous present.
It nevertheless cannot be denied that, at least in one regard, the delimiting possibilities of the disabled speaking body do indeed interrupt the (normalized) mutual
tuning-in relationship. By virtue of the outer activity of stuttering, the listener may
have difficulty entering into a synchronous relation with the stutterer since the temporal choreography of the stuttering body is unpredictable and difficult to match.
Moreover, the lived and outer time of the stutterer himself often do not align,
obstructing the protention of disabled speech from the stutterers perspective, but

60

Hypatia

even more so from the perspective of the interlocutor attempting to enter a shared
present. The listener may as such get frustrated or distracted because the uneven
polythetic steps being taken by the stuttering body are not transparently open to
interpretation through a shared lived time, especially the shared time regimented by
straight-masculine speech. Correspondingly, the listener may rush ahead to interpret
what he believes the outer activity of the stuttering body is attempting to call into
being, or lag behind trying to decipher unclear articulations.
Lived time gets away from us the more it is decentered from our own experience
and oriented around the bodily time of another, or further, around generalized, universalized, and dominant time orders. For the disabled speaker, as I have argued, this
means that speech will almost inevitably result in a persistent and pervasive decentering of his temporal structure as he is folded into uncomfortable rhythms and tempos
in an attempt to establish a shared horizon. Reversing Merleau-Pontys assessment of
dialogue as a shared ground, the stuttering body thus risks being reduced to a behavior or object in the phenomenal field of the listener rather than existing alongside an
interlocutor in a shared present. Exposing the phenomenological idealization of
speech reveals that time both consolidates lived experience and prejudicially constricts it in the same movement.
Yet the disabled speaker is temporally decentered not only in relation to the
lived, bodily time of others, but also in relation to abstracted clock time, which
standardizes the socioeconomic temporal parameters of speech. The analysis of the
disabled speaker in relation to intersubjective lived time thus needs to be shored
up by a socioeconomic reading of time that attends to the objective use and control of time in disciplining bodies and to the contingency of communicative rules.
This move is made by examining clock time as the furthest orbit of decentered
time, the decisive manifestation of straight-masculine time abstracted from the
body.

DISRUPTING OBJECTIVE, DISCIPLINARY TIME

Christina Schues argues that social relations are often structured according to how
long someone is required to wait or how much time someone has: When you consider the question of who controls whose time? you can determine the hierarchy of
a relationship (Sch
ues 2011, 68). The prisoner and the CEO are the archetypes
here. Evidenced by the late Steve Jobs, who notoriously occupied disabled parking
spaces and waited for no one, the summer intern constantly on call, or the prisoner
whose schedule is tightly regulated, control over time both indicates and constitutes
power. Disciplinary force maps clearly onto the dynamics of socioeconomic class, but
also configures in more subtle ways the negotiation of body-politics. Gendered, fat,
elderly, and disabled bodiesbodies outside the universal positionare evaluated
temporally, and read as a loss or a waste of time for not performing within normative parameters. I argue that the disabled speaker is disciplined not merely for occupying time, but for embodying time grotesquely: controlling time that does not

Joshua St. Pierre

61

properly belong to him. The disciplinary and exclusionary use of time forced upon
the disabled body does not primarily trade upon bodily time, but upon an abstracted
sense of clock time that requires elucidation.
Unlike the natural rhythms of day and night, seasons, and birth-cycles lived
through the body, the time-frames generated by hours, minutes, and seconds are
marked, argues Barbara Adam, by principles of invariance, context independence and
precision (Adam 1995, 24). For example, fracturing a day into twenty-four equal segments irrespective of daylight or sleep patterns introduced a standardization and rationalization of time that would not otherwise exist. In this way, clock time manifests
the culminating ideal of universalized, masculine time, utterly released from the heterogeneity and fallibility of particular bodies and bodily time. No longer tied to the
invariance and entropy of bodily or seasonal time, clock time inaugurates perfect
repeatability, the ideal of Fordism and modernity, and is congruent with what Max
Weber terms instrumental rationality, or rationally calculable action employed in
service to productivity.7 Saturated with economic potentiality, clock time is wound
up like kinetic energy to release its potentiality in measurable, calculable increments.
It is this construal of time that Benjamin Franklin famously equates with money and
that Karl Marx indicts in his determination that the economy of time, to this all
economy ultimately reduces itself (Marx 1973, 173).
It is thus only by understanding time as a commodity that expressions like wasting time become salient. With clock time in mind, Jezer writes, So as not to waste
my listeners time (and risk their turning away from me impatiently) or my own time,
I felt compelled to rush through my counting, breathing, and speaking (Jezer 1997,
65). The stutterer is continually and arduously aware of the temporal incongruity
between his bodily speech and the temporal rhythms of the socioeconomic world (cf.
St. Pierre 2012). Notice that objective, disciplinary time highlights the convergence
of crip and queer temporalities. Both queer and crip bodies are outliers in the domain
of (late) capitalist productivity. However, it is not merely the relative delay of disabled speech that construes it as waste, but its utter incalculabilityits spasticitythat
denies estimable protention and cuts against the invariance and rationality of clock
time. In his failure to comport to the standardization of clock time, the stutterer
seemingly wastes time that is understood as a rationalizing economic tool. This prodigal use of time is constructed within the economic sphere proper (for example, stuttering in the board room) but is also projected outward insofar as the economy of
time subsumes all aspects of social activity.
Presented as an unmalleable temporal body, the disabled speaker is disciplined by
the objective time order, which attempts to absorb the dysfluent body into the dominant communicative choreography, or to signify a temporal hierarchy, or both. Particularly when I am forced into an activity or a situation, and hence into an
experience, Schues helpfully points out, I feel even more strongly the sense of being
taken by a time order that is not mine (Sch
ues 2011, 70). Controlling time thus
not only regulates the activities of bodies, but also disciplines the temporal structuring of lived time. Passing beyond the orbit of shared bodily time, choreographies of
speech are often not structured by anybodys time, but by objective clock time

62

Hypatia

impervious to the inherent flux of lived time. The disabled speaker feels this disembodied, straight-masculine time oppressively forced upon him, time that does not flex
and has no sense of becoming. Asked to give an oral presentation within the strict
parameter of ten minutes, for example, the stutterer is constrained to operate with a
finite sum of temporal successions without accommodation for bodily time that
expands and contracts, nor any awareness of the temporal openness of dialogue that
does not conform to predetermined parameters. He is here abandoned to a time that
is not in the process of becoming, but is always running out, inhospitable to the specific rhythms of his temporalizing body.
Through the regulated patterns of choreographed speech, the body of the disabled
speaker is compelled to move in standardized, efficient motions and thereby conform to
strict temporal parameters. In Foucaults terms, disciplinary time creates docile bodies
that are temporally malleable: productive and efficient. In failing to comport to this
unyielding tempo and rhythmplayed out individually and intersubjectivelyhis body
ceases to be a docile, calculable, and invisible medium for communication. Surpassing
the violence of the mutual tuning-in relationship, the economy of time defines the stutterer by his aberrant bodily characteristics foregrounded against an objective, instrumentally ordered world. To be recognized as a speaking subject here requires integration
into a dominant logic of temporalized and gendered body-politics.8
Although communicative space can be dangerous and even unlivable for the disabled speaker, it must not be forgotten that the disciplinary power of hegemonic temporalities lies primarily in obscuring its contingency. The universalization and
instrumentalization of time are peddled as natural and simply given, yet they are
derived from a masculinized and sterile human ecology. Articulating the contingency
of dominant temporalities challenges communicative normalcy and engenders possibilities of enacting new modes of relationality, possibilities for disabled speakers to
shape communicative space otherwise. In the late 1990s, the distinguished French
novelist and stutterer Patrick Modiano appeared on a prominent French television
show; displaying his admiration for Modiano, Derrida later reflects that, hes managed to get people to accept that they need to be patient when he cant find his
words. . .. Theres someone who has succeeded in transforming the public scene and
forcing it to go at his own speed (Peeters 2012, 480).9
The disabled speaker is capable of transforming communicative space in this manner not by assuming control of time, but by accentuating the co-constitution of being.
The communicative present is forged through a shared responsibility (irrespective of
appeals to objective time) as hearers and speakers are dialogically bound in the act of
communication. Disabled speech distending straight-masculine time is thus an existential opening: both an invitation to orient around and gather within a nonproductive present, and a call for the hearer to take responsibility for her role in creating a
shared horizon and the subsequent release of the disabled voice into beingthat is,
into a crip future. There is no neutral position to be taken within this dance. If subjectivity is indeed bound up with communicative intelligibility and normalized temporalities, the stakes are high for the creation of a choreography within which we
can hear one another.

Joshua St. Pierre

63

NOTES
I greatly appreciate the many people who provided invaluable feedback on drafts of this
paper: Marie-Eve Morin, Charis St. Pierre, Lindsay Eales, Rob Wilson, Kristin Rodier,
Emily Parker, Cressida Heyes, Kim Hall, and the two Hypatia reviewers.
1. Since the majority of stutterers are male (at a 4:1 ratio) and speech has conceptually been cast as masculine, I will employ the masculine pronoun throughout and
focus particularly on the performance of masculinity disrupted by disabled speech. This
focus is not meant to diminish the marginalization of female disabled speakers, who often
experience gendered silencing and shaming that inflects and exacerbates the effects of
ableism.
2. A blind persons use of a cane, for example, is incorporated into a different totality
of lived significations that moves towards its equilibrium (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 155).
3. Ferdinand de Saussure, for example, considers that the spoken signifier: a) represents a span, and b) the span is measurable in a single dimension; it is a line (Saussure
2006, 844). Although this characteristic is perhaps so obvious that it is often overlooked,
Saussure argues that the whole mechanism of (spoken) language depends upon it. In contrast to visual signifiers, he contends, auditory signifiers have at their command only the
dimension of time (844).
4. It is also worth noting the curious affinity, or perhaps complicity, of Merleau-Pontys cyclical account of time with straight time: The present that it brings to us is never
really present, since it is always past when it appears, and the future has there but the
appearance of a goal toward which we are moving, since it soon arrives in the present and
since we then turn toward another future (Merleau-Ponty 2012, 479). Cripping MerleauPonty offers a way of arresting and dwelling in the present that is missed phenomenologically if a wide range of bodies are not taken into account.
5. One might also consider Jay Dolmages fruitful articulation of the rhetorical
device m^etis as an alternative to logos, a cunning rhetorical intelligence worked through
the body that breaks (with) the linear progression of logos. Cf. Dolmage 2013, especially
chapter 4.
6. Consider that numerous ancient cultures associated thinking with breath. Homeric
Greeks, for example, understood thumos or spirit as the exhalation of blood originating
in the lungs (Cavarero 2005, 63). Thinking, as Cavarero quips, was done with the lungs
and not the brain. Accordingly, the verb psycho, from which psyche is derived, means
to breathe and would have evoked sexual ejaculation (63). Regardless of the metaphysical tradition and modern physiology disavowing the relation between breath, ejaculation,
and (fluent) speech, this association remains familiar in the cultural imaginary. Chris Eagle
picks up on this association within modern literature: What distinguishes. . . portraits of
the stuttering male [in Melville, Kesey, and Mishima] is the causal directness with which
the associations between sexual ejaculation and fluent speech and between sexual repression and stuttering are made (Eagle 2011, 201). Eagle argues that stuttering often implies
being weak-willed and unconfident, psychologically unable to perform gender expectations.
7. The present work could be further developed by examining the fluid temporality
of post-Fordism in relation to the disabled speaking body.

64

Hypatia

8. In this regard, the disabled speaking body is displaced not only for speaking too
slowly, but also for moving dys-fluidly. Like the clock, speech that accords with the principles of instrumental rationalitybeing repeatable and calculableis constituted by fluid
motion, by invariant movement through space. Disrupting the rationality of clock time is
as such not only an interruption of a temporal order, but, more primally, the skewing of
orderly motility. The disabled speaking body fails to embody rational, calculable, and
therefore economically useful movement.
9. My thanks to Ada Jaarsma for this anecdote.

REFERENCES
Adam, Barbara. 1995. Timewatch: The social analysis of time. London: Polity.
Cavarero, Adriana. 2005. For more than one voice: Toward a philosophy of vocal expression.
Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Crossley, Nick. 1996. Intersubjectivity: The fabric of social becoming. Thousand Oaks, Calif.:
Sage Publications.
Dolmage, Jay Timothy. 2013. Disability rhetoric. Syracuse, N.Y.: Syracuse University Press.
Eagle, Christopher. 2011. Organic hesitancies: Stuttering and sexuality in Melville, Kesey,
and Mishima. Comparative Literature Studies 48 (2): 20018.
Eagle, Christopher, ed. 2013. Literature, speech disorders, and disability: Talking normal. New
York: Routledge.
Edelman, Lee. 2004. No future: Queer theory and the death drive. Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press.
Halberstam, Judith. 2005. In a queer time and place: Transgender bodies, subcultural lives.
New York: New York University Press.
Hass, Lawrence. 2008. Merleau-Pontys philosophy. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Jezer, Marty. 1997. Stuttering: A life bound up in words. Toronto: Harper Collins Canada/
Basic Books.
Kafer, Alison. 2013. Feminist, queer, crip. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Marx, Karl. 1973. Grundisse. London: Allen Lane, New Left Review.
Merleau-Ponty, Maurice. 2012. Phenomenology of perception. New York: Routledge.
Muldoon, Mark. 2006. Tricks of time: Bergson, Merleau-Ponty and Ricoeur in search of time,
self and meaning. Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press.
Paterson, Kevin. 2012. Its about time!: Understanding the experience of speech impairment. In Routledge Handbook of Disability Studies, ed. Nick Watson, Alan Roulstone,
and Carol Thomas. New York: Routledge.
Peeters, Benoit. 2012. Derrida: A biography. Malden, MA: Polity.
de Saussure, Ferdinand. 2006. Nature of the linguistic sign. In The critical tradition: Classic
texts and contemporary trends, ed. David H. Richter. New York: Bedford Books.
Sch
ues, Christina. 2011. The power of time: Temporal experiences and a-temporal thinking? In Time in feminist phenomenology, ed. Christina Sch
ues, Dorothea E. Olkowski,
and Helen A. Fielding. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Schutz, A. 1974. Collected papers I: The problem of social reality, ed. H. L. vanBreda and
M. A. Natanson. Hingham, Mass.: Kluwer Boston, Inc.

Joshua St. Pierre

65

. 1976. Collected papers II: Studies in social theory, ed. Arvid Brodersen. Hingham,
Mass.: Kluwer Boston, Inc.
St. Pierre, Joshua. 2012. The construction of the disabled speaker: Locating stuttering in
disability studies. Canadian Journal of Disability Studies 1 (3): 121.
Young, Iris Marion. 1996. Democracy and difference: Contesting the boundaries of the political.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.