Defect vs Difference

Note: This section is heavily adapted and influenced from the book Stammering Pride and Prejudice: Difference not Defect¹. It is a really good read and explores deeper themes of stigmas, stuttering as a difference, relation to the disability movement, stuttering activism, etc.

Is stuttering a defect or simply a difference? Viewing anything as a defect puts the entire onus on the individual to change and fix the defect. A larger conversation could be had about what even constitutes a defect and who gets to decide that. But tabling that for now, lets touch on the different models of disability. These models serve as lenses through which one can view disabilities.

• The social model posits that disability is not an inherent trait of the individual, but rather a result of societal barriers like a flight of stairs blocking access to a building.
• The political (or relational) model states that such structural issues do no exist in isolation, but are rather the result of relations between people and their environments ¹. Who did we design our spaces for, who can access them and who did we exclude?

When viewed through the lens of the relational model, disability is simply the result of a mismatch between our bodies and the designed environments— “an attempt to fit a square peg into a round hole”. In the context of stuttering, PWS may face problems because the automated menus at telephone hotlines are not designed to accommodate stuttered speech, nor are the AI voice assistants. Conversational standards in this fast-paced world, with extra emphasis on speed and efficiency, are not designed to accommodate stuttering either. Highlighting such examples of mismatch helps to understand that the problem is not solely with the individual, but rather in the relation between the stuttered speech and the existing environments. When viewed through this lens, one can easily see why stuttering would be considered a difference - a difference from how “normal” people speak, for whom the environments were designed.

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