Beasley describes the good human as being governed by the requirement to speak, and to speak well (Beasley, 2021). The requirement for competent and competently speaking humans has been incorporated into the ableist norms to which we are all expected to conform. It is an imperative which is closely linked to other familiar humanist tropes of agency, bodily mastery, and boundedness (Davis, 1995; Moser, 2005), working to inform who can be considered fully human and who, in Campbell’s words, exists in ‘a diminished state of being human’ (Campbell, 2009, p. 5). Despite this, the presence of these ableist norms in relation to impaired speech is relatively under-researched.
Those living with a disability which affects their speech often experience a sense of social disconnection (Miller et al., 2006) and a sense that their humanity often goes unrecognised (Beasley, 2021). We invited Australian adults with life-long experience of impaired speech to talk to us about their experience of their speech and their ability to make themselves heard. These interviews work to place the focus back on the disabled voice, exploring not only how disability and competence are invented through large scale cultural discourses, but also how disabled speakers work within these possibilities, and sometimes at their edges, to invent themselves.
This paper will approach these semi-structured interviews with a view to exploring how impaired speakers navigate and move between various conceptualisations of disability and understandings of competence to position themselves as competent, or incompetent, speakers.
Paying attention to the ways in which impaired speakers play with, draw on, resist and subvert these ableist norms to validate their voices and their humanity allows us to not only expose the networks of beliefs which have invented the (competently speaking, able-bodied) human, but also to begin thinking about how the diversity of human voices might be invented differently.