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Distending Straight‐Masculine Time: A Phenomenology of the Disabled Speaking Body

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  06 November 2014

Joshua St. Pierre
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Abstract

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 speaker's 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.

Type
Articles
Information
Hypatia , Volume 30 , Issue 1: Special Issue: New Conversations in Feminist Disability Studies , Winter 2015 , pp. 49 - 65
Copyright
Copyright © 2015 by Hypatia, Inc.

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Footnotes

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.

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