[the open secret is] a way of imparting knowledge such that it cannot be claimed and acted on.
— François (1999)
<hr>
Homophobia often insists on knowing rather than refusing to know about the sexuality of gay people.
— de Villier (2012)
<hr>
Linking the stutter and the unspeakable are logics of subterfuge, to be sure, but I find that Sedgwick’s construction of the “open secret” more closely relates to the kind of secrets that animate stuttering. The open secret is a form of coded disclosure that Sedgwick links to the closet, and it mobilizes language around the secret in order to disclose only to those in the know and hide from those on the outside. Anne-Lise Francois describes it as “a way of imparting knowledge such that it cannot be claimed and acted on.” The open secret is that which everyone knows but cannot discuss. I select this construction for the stutter because, while some stutterers can and do pass as fluent and come out of the closet by a discursive disclosure like “I stutter,” more often, the stuttered voice betrays her before any such disclosure can be made, and knowledge of the stutter is created without being acted upon or acknowledged. The stutter’s unspeakability is subtended by its audibility and uncontrollability. Sedgwick’s example of the open secret actually comes from a text featuring a stutterer, Herman Melville’s short story, Billy Budd. However, it is not the eponymous character’s stutter that reveals the structure of the open secret for Sedgwick but rather the possibility of mutiny onboard the ship on which Billy is impressed.
Like queerness, certain forms of discrimination against stutterers or unwanted social interactions often express themselves through a desire to know, and to know it as a symptom. Nicholas de Villier in The Opacity of the Closet argues that it is important to pay attention to the ways that “homophobia often insists on knowing rather than refusing to know about the sexuality of gay people.” Similarly, stutterers often encounter the diagnostic desires of others, the desire to know why and from whence. An example from my childhood: I was at summer camp and sitting in the camp nurse’s office for something mild. The nurse asked me questions about myself and I answered. Then we changed topics and I talked to her about my brother. She interrupted me and said, “did you know you only stuttered when you were talking about yourself, not your brother?” The nurse created her own interruption in my speech as if to master my stutter with her own impediment, and sought to psychologize the root of it as a symptom. This diagnostic desire is a practice of what Sedgwick calls, in a different work, paranoid reading, a kind of analytic reading that seeks to treat the text as a puzzle or stratagem to be untangled. Stuttering attracts this desire to know, in part, because it is an exemplary object of non-knowing. No one knows why people stutter. The stutter speaks to a great opacity within us, and that opacity might be productive of a different way of understanding the self and its relations to others.
<hr>
Society will not tolerate… that I should be… nothing, or, more precisely, that the something I am should be openly expressed as provisional, revocable, insignificant, inessential, in a word, irrelevant.
— Barthes (1981)
More information
- Barthes, Roland (1981) Preface. In: Camus, Renaud. Tricks. St Martins Press.
- de Villier, Nicholas. (2012) Opacity and the Closet. University of Minnesota Press.
- Francois, Anne-Lise. (1999) Open Secrets. Princeton University.
- Rodness, Roshaya. (2020) Stutter and phenomena: The phenomenology and deconstruction of delayed auditory feedback. Journal of Interdisciplinary Voice Studies 5(2), 197-213.
- Sedgwick, E. (1985) Between Men. Columbia University Press.
Related files
- Bersani, Leo. (1987) Is the Rectum a Grave? University of Chicago Press.
- Foucault, Michel. (1976) The History of Sexuality. Éditions Gallimard.
- K, E. (2015) Queer Stuttering: A Lesson in Justice. Did I Stutter?
- Rymer, J. M. (1855) The Unspeakable: or, the Life and Adventures of a Stammerer. Oxford University.
- Sedaris, D. (2000) Me Talk Pretty One Day. Little, Brown and Company.
- Sedgwick, E. (1985) Between Men. Columbia University Press.
“One of these days I’m going to have to hang a sign on that door,” Agent Samson used to say. She was probably thinking along the lines of SPEECH THERAPY LAB, though a more appropriate marker would have to be read FUTURE HOMOSEXUALS OF AMERICA. We knocked ourselves out trying to fit in but were ultimately betrayed by our tongues.
— Sedaris (2000)
In the first short story of David Sedaris’s 2000 collection, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Sedaris recounts four months of his 4th grade year, in which he was removed from class once a week at 2:30 on Thursdays to meet with the acerbic school speech therapist he called “Agent Samson” to treat his lisp. Her clients were all lisping boys, he noticed, and none of them conventionally boyish, and he jokes that if there were a sign on her door it should not read “Speech Therapy Lab” but “Future Homosexuals of America.” At this young age Sedaris already has an inkling that speech impediment, in his case lisping, is related to sexuality, a personal affectation continuous with a dislike of sports or a love of making one’s own curtains. Sederis taps into a cultural trend that includes the identification “gay voice,” and that states that one can read sexuality off the voice, particularly the male voice, through how one speaks, what one says, or what one does not say.
With expressions like “stuttering pride” and “coming out of the stuttering closet,” activism by people who stutter explicitly ties its historical struggles and political goals to queer liberation, and queer theory has offered a verdant store of language and concepts for re-imagining dysfluent speaking as a kind of queer form of being in the world. Moreover, these intersections point towards the critical potential of the dysfluency itself as a kind of queer object, an object that presents a problem for sexual and gender norms, as well as conventional forms of reading, expression, and time. I am interested in how the experiences of being queer and a stutterer interpenetrate, and how each informs the other. In the few first-person accounts I read from queer people who stutter I often saw the authors comparing their social encounters as queers and as stutterers. One person notes that homosexuality was removed from the DSM in 1973, but that stuttering or “child-onset dysfluency disorder” remains. Another said that they were encouraged to embrace their queerness but to cure their stutter, and that speech therapy for them amounted to a form of conversion therapy. What I saw were not necessarily similarities but cases in which people embody two marginal positions, where one could have been treated like the other, and was not. How do queerness and stuttering misconnect with each other? Returning to Sedaris: of interest to us in Sedaris’s story is the detail that there was no sign on Agent Samson’s door, and that “Future Homosexuals of America” does not substitute for other language but for an absence of language. Agent Sampson’s is a door with no writing that suggests that as much as her door clearly opens for a certain kind of boy, it offers no clear language for that child, and the name of the certain type of boy who goes through it for a certain type of speech remains in some sense unspeakable. Sedaris is not cured of his lisp, but rather like many young stutterers develops an enormous vocabulary in order to avoid the sibilant s. The s is occulted in Sedaris’s speech, and this haunting, unspeakable s produces not a reduction in language but an excess of language in the form of the enormous vocabulary. How might we think of writers as people who work by suppressing language? This connection between the unspeakable and the excess of language conceptually ties dysfluency to the emergence of male homosexuality as a pathological category in the 19th century.
<hr>
I've had therapy to help deal with the way my parents reacted when I came out, but the therapist never insinuated that things would be easier if I was less gay. On the other hand, the speech therapy I've had as an adult focused very strongly on how things would be easier for me if I was more fluent.
— Elias K (2015)
<hr>
Sexuality between men had, throughout the Judaeo-Christian tradition, been famous among those who knew about it at all precisely for having no name – ‘unspeakable,’ ‘unmentionable,’ or ‘not to be named among Christian men’.
— Sedgwick (1985)
<hr>
The unspeakable transformed in the 20th century to what she calls a “byword” likely most familiar in Lord Alfred Douglas’s phrase, “the love that dare not speak its name.”
Like Sedaris forming his vocabulary around the absent s, the unspeakability of male homosexuality did not correspond to a dearth of language about it, but what Michel Foucault famously refers to in The History of Sexuality as “a steady proliferation of discourses concerned with sex… a discursive ferment that gathered momentum from the eighteenth century onward.” For the Victorians male homosexuality may have been occulted in the language, but:
Silence itself – the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between different speakers – is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within over-all strategies… There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.
— Foucault (1976)
<hr>
The Victorians implicitly made the connection between homosexuality and stuttering. James Malcom Rymer’s fictional autobiography The Unspeakable: or, the Life and Adventures of a Stammerer, explores this link. Riley McGuire’s research on this novel argues that attaining mature heterosexual masculinity is predicated on attaining a fluent voice.
Freud’s famous diagnosis of stuttering as anal-sadistic is comprised of a few brief remarks made in passing. His more substantive thoughts on stuttering actually come earlier in a case study about woman with adult-onset stuttering and various neuroses. But the psychoanalytic understanding of stuttering as the unresolved frustrations of the narcissistic tendencies of the anal stage has captured more minds. Stuttering, after all, is the most uncomfortable type of shit-talk. But the threat of stuttering to masculinity also appears to be explained by the impediment’s root in anality, with its association with sexual submission, women, and the end of gender. There is a productive queer reading to be made about the threat of stuttering and the moral panic around sexual submission in gay male culture. At the end of his famous essay Is the Rectum A Grave? Leo Bersani finds in fantasies about the rectum “the place where the masculine ideal of proud subjectivity is buried”. Bersani offers a mythological location in which to reimagine the value of sexual submission. Besides being the “death” of male dominance, the anus is also the death of sexual difference, for we all have one.
“One of these days I’m going to have to hang a sign on that door,” Agent Samson used to say. She was probably thinking along the lines of SPEECH THERAPY LAB, though a more appropriate marker would have to be read FUTURE HOMOSEXUALS OF AMERICA. We knocked ourselves out trying to fit in but were ultimately betrayed by our tongues.
— Sedaris (2000)
In the first short story of David Sedaris’s 2000 collection, Me Talk Pretty One Day, Sedaris recounts four months of his 4th grade year, in which he was removed from class once a week at 2:30 on Thursdays to meet with the acerbic school speech therapist he called “Agent Samson” to treat his lisp. Her clients were all lisping boys, he noticed, and none of them conventionally boyish, and he jokes that if there were a sign on her door it should not read “Speech Therapy Lab” but “Future Homosexuals of America.” At this young age Sedaris already has an inkling that speech impediment, in his case lisping, is related to sexuality, a personal affectation continuous with a dislike of sports or a love of making one’s own curtains. Sederis taps into a cultural trend that includes the identification “gay voice,” and that states that one can read sexuality off the voice, particularly the male voice, through how one speaks, what one says, or what one does not say.
With expressions like “stuttering pride” and “coming out of the stuttering closet,” activism by people who stutter explicitly ties its historical struggles and political goals to queer liberation, and queer theory has offered a verdant store of language and concepts for re-imagining dysfluent speaking as a kind of queer form of being in the world. Moreover, these intersections point towards the critical potential of the dysfluency itself as a kind of queer object, an object that presents a problem for sexual and gender norms, as well as conventional forms of reading, expression, and time. I am interested in how the experiences of being queer and a stutterer interpenetrate, and how each informs the other. In the few first-person accounts I read from queer people who stutter I often saw the authors comparing their social encounters as queers and as stutterers. One person notes that homosexuality was removed from the DSM in 1973, but that stuttering or “child-onset dysfluency disorder” remains. Another said that they were encouraged to embrace their queerness but to cure their stutter, and that speech therapy for them amounted to a form of conversion therapy. What I saw were not necessarily similarities but cases in which people embody two marginal positions, where one could have been treated like the other, and was not. How do queerness and stuttering misconnect with each other? Returning to Sedaris: of interest to us in Sedaris’s story is the detail that there was no sign on Agent Samson’s door, and that “Future Homosexuals of America” does not substitute for other language but for an absence of language. Agent Sampson’s is a door with no writing that suggests that as much as her door clearly opens for a certain kind of boy, it offers no clear language for that child, and the name of the certain type of boy who goes through it for a certain type of speech remains in some sense unspeakable. Sedaris is not cured of his lisp, but rather like many young stutterers develops an enormous vocabulary in order to avoid the sibilant s. The s is occulted in Sedaris’s speech, and this haunting, unspeakable s produces not a reduction in language but an excess of language in the form of the enormous vocabulary. How might we think of writers as people who work by suppressing language? This connection between the unspeakable and the excess of language conceptually ties dysfluency to the emergence of male homosexuality as a pathological category in the 19th century.
<hr>
I've had therapy to help deal with the way my parents reacted when I came out, but the therapist never insinuated that things would be easier if I was less gay. On the other hand, the speech therapy I've had as an adult focused very strongly on how things would be easier for me if I was more fluent.
— Elias K (2015)
<hr>
Sexuality between men had, throughout the Judaeo-Christian tradition, been famous among those who knew about it at all precisely for having no name – ‘unspeakable,’ ‘unmentionable,’ or ‘not to be named among Christian men’.
— Sedgwick (1985)
<hr>
The unspeakable transformed in the 20th century to what she calls a “byword” likely most familiar in Lord Alfred Douglas’s phrase, “the love that dare not speak its name.”
Like Sedaris forming his vocabulary around the absent s, the unspeakability of male homosexuality did not correspond to a dearth of language about it, but what Michel Foucault famously refers to in The History of Sexuality as “a steady proliferation of discourses concerned with sex… a discursive ferment that gathered momentum from the eighteenth century onward.” For the Victorians male homosexuality may have been occulted in the language, but:
Silence itself – the things one declines to say, or is forbidden to name, the discretion that is required between different speakers – is less the absolute limit of discourse, the other side from which it is separated by a strict boundary, than an element that functions alongside the things said, with them and in relation to them within over-all strategies… There is not one but many silences, and they are an integral part of the strategies that underlie and permeate discourses.
— Foucault (1976)
<hr>
The Victorians implicitly made the connection between homosexuality and stuttering. James Malcom Rymer’s fictional autobiography The Unspeakable: or, the Life and Adventures of a Stammerer, explores this link. Riley McGuire’s research on this novel argues that attaining mature heterosexual masculinity is predicated on attaining a fluent voice.
Freud’s famous diagnosis of stuttering as anal-sadistic is comprised of a few brief remarks made in passing. His more substantive thoughts on stuttering actually come earlier in a case study about woman with adult-onset stuttering and various neuroses. But the psychoanalytic understanding of stuttering as the unresolved frustrations of the narcissistic tendencies of the anal stage has captured more minds. Stuttering, after all, is the most uncomfortable type of shit-talk. But the threat of stuttering to masculinity also appears to be explained by the impediment’s root in anality, with its association with sexual submission, women, and the end of gender. There is a productive queer reading to be made about the threat of stuttering and the moral panic around sexual submission in gay male culture. At the end of his famous essay Is the Rectum A Grave? Leo Bersani finds in fantasies about the rectum “the place where the masculine ideal of proud subjectivity is buried”. Bersani offers a mythological location in which to reimagine the value of sexual submission. Besides being the “death” of male dominance, the anus is also the death of sexual difference, for we all have one.
More than two in five adolescents reported often keeping their stuttering secret and a further one in five said they sometimes kept it secret.
— Erickson & Block (2013)
<hr>
I wanted to be different, I just didn’t want the difference to be stuttering.
— Client
More than two in five adolescents reported often keeping their stuttering secret and a further one in five said they sometimes kept it secret.
— Erickson & Block (2013)
<hr>
I wanted to be different, I just didn’t want the difference to be stuttering.
— Client
- A hypothetical scenario involving a child, Conor and his parents who go to see SLT, Róisín.
- While hypothetical, it is based on a range of real-life experiences of the author.
- It highlights the parents’ desire that part of SLT professional identity be “able to cure”.
- SLT resistance of that identity and choice to be an ally to Conor.
- The process of considering available evidence and seeking support from those with more experience in order to negotiate an identity regarding the type of alliance she will offer.
- Resistance of normalising discourse regarding fluency.
<hr>
Brian and Sandra – parents of Conor aged 3.4
- Conor – advanced language development, no concerns re speech errors.
- One day, out of the blue, Conor begins to repeat words and part-words.
- Sandra is surprised, then worried and… she reacts.
- Brian remembers his mother saying that one of his brothers had difficulty with speech but grew out of it.
- Conor continues to repeat, begins to prolong sounds and sometimes no sound comes out when he tries to say a word.
- Sandra and Brian decide it's time to go to a speech and language therapist and they meet Róisín.
- Their story about Conor – about their role - about Róisín and her role – their expectations.
<hr>
Róisín
- Róisín is 25 – has been working in same job since 21 – first class honours – manager affirms her excellence - more complex cases – wider range.
- Anne, specialist in stuttering/fluency disorders is on maternity leave so case is assigned to Róisín.
- Róisín consults the evidence – Fluency shaping approach with lots of evidence.
- Has notes from in-service Anne gave – decides to go with indirect approach and start with education – but assessment first including taking case history.
- And the plot thickens – Sandra ..(and Brian) want stuttering gone asap - yes parent sessions are fine – but when is she going to see Conor and fix his speech?
<hr>
Conor
- Conor loves fun – he likes lots of things, running, painting, lego, and he has lots to say.
- He has noticed that some words seem to have a mind of their own recently and it’s like they get stuck.
- Mom and Dad have said nothing - he has noticed they go very quiet and just look at him.
- One day last week, Granny Annie was minding him in the car and he was talking to her when a word was getting him stuck.
- She told him to “slow down, take a deep breath and start again”.
- He could not see her face, but she sounded a bit something different.
- Note to self – try to not let words get stuck!
<hr>
Assessment day for Conor
- Went lovely place with loads of toys and met Róisín who played with me and talked to Mom and Dad.
- She made a video of me.
- Mom does that sometimes too.
- I wonder why?
- Róisín seems to get stuck on some words too – not sure why I am here but Róisín has the best Lego and I am making an amazing bridge.
<hr>
Roisin's dilemma
- Wants to help – who? Conor? But parents want fluency.
- Her CPD, while limited, has her thinking that focusing on fluency might not be best choice.
- She takes her dilemma to supervision.
- She Googles and finds StutterTalk.
- She contacts the SIG/CEN.
- She decides that she needs to talk with parents about some of the difficulties she sees with focusing on fluency.
- A hypothetical scenario involving a child, Conor and his parents who go to see SLT, Róisín.
- While hypothetical, it is based on a range of real-life experiences of the author.
- It highlights the parents’ desire that part of SLT professional identity be “able to cure”.
- SLT resistance of that identity and choice to be an ally to Conor.
- The process of considering available evidence and seeking support from those with more experience in order to negotiate an identity regarding the type of alliance she will offer.
- Resistance of normalising discourse regarding fluency.
<hr>
Brian and Sandra – parents of Conor aged 3.4
- Conor – advanced language development, no concerns re speech errors.
- One day, out of the blue, Conor begins to repeat words and part-words.
- Sandra is surprised, then worried and… she reacts.
- Brian remembers his mother saying that one of his brothers had difficulty with speech but grew out of it.
- Conor continues to repeat, begins to prolong sounds and sometimes no sound comes out when he tries to say a word.
- Sandra and Brian decide it's time to go to a speech and language therapist and they meet Róisín.
- Their story about Conor – about their role - about Róisín and her role – their expectations.
<hr>
Róisín
- Róisín is 25 – has been working in same job since 21 – first class honours – manager affirms her excellence - more complex cases – wider range.
- Anne, specialist in stuttering/fluency disorders is on maternity leave so case is assigned to Róisín.
- Róisín consults the evidence – Fluency shaping approach with lots of evidence.
- Has notes from in-service Anne gave – decides to go with indirect approach and start with education – but assessment first including taking case history.
- And the plot thickens – Sandra ..(and Brian) want stuttering gone asap - yes parent sessions are fine – but when is she going to see Conor and fix his speech?
<hr>
Conor
- Conor loves fun – he likes lots of things, running, painting, lego, and he has lots to say.
- He has noticed that some words seem to have a mind of their own recently and it’s like they get stuck.
- Mom and Dad have said nothing - he has noticed they go very quiet and just look at him.
- One day last week, Granny Annie was minding him in the car and he was talking to her when a word was getting him stuck.
- She told him to “slow down, take a deep breath and start again”.
- He could not see her face, but she sounded a bit something different.
- Note to self – try to not let words get stuck!
<hr>
Assessment day for Conor
- Went lovely place with loads of toys and met Róisín who played with me and talked to Mom and Dad.
- She made a video of me.
- Mom does that sometimes too.
- I wonder why?
- Róisín seems to get stuck on some words too – not sure why I am here but Róisín has the best Lego and I am making an amazing bridge.
<hr>
Roisin's dilemma
- Wants to help – who? Conor? But parents want fluency.
- Her CPD, while limited, has her thinking that focusing on fluency might not be best choice.
- She takes her dilemma to supervision.
- She Googles and finds StutterTalk.
- She contacts the SIG/CEN.
- She decides that she needs to talk with parents about some of the difficulties she sees with focusing on fluency.