By Jarred Wiehe

Dysfluency haunted the soundscape of American politics in the Autumn of 2022.^[1] Prior to the only televised debate in the 2022 Pennsylvania U.S. Senate election, candidate Lt. Governor John K. Fetterman, who had suffered a stroke earlier that year, released a letter from his doctor. In the letter, Dr. Clifford Chen first discloses Fetterman’s vitals and then spends the majority of the paragraph describing Fetterman’s speech:

He spoke intelligently without cognitive deficits. His speech was normal and he continues to exhibit symptoms of an auditory processing disorder which can come across as hearing difficulty. Occasional words he will ‘miss’ which seems like he doesn’t hear the word but it is actually not processed properly. His hearing of sound such as music is not affected.^[2]

Under the aegis of medical authority, Fetterman’s communication is celebrated. “Intelligently” instead of “coherently” or “clearly” rhetorically marks Fetterman’s speech as tied to audible markers of cognitive ability. After all, as Joshua St. Pierre characterizes, “Oral speech has occupied a dignified position within humanist lineage, shaping central questions of what it means to be human, imbued with the power to persuade others, serve human affairs, and articulate truth.”^[3] Fluent speech is a powerful cultural marker of the human, as built upon Enlightenment fictions of rationality and autonomy.^[4] Dr. Chen’s letter reaffirms such liberal humanist frameworks for tying speech to rational able-mindedness and an intelligence deemed fit for leadership (and, well, personhood). His letter, too, reaffirms “normal” and normalcy.

Dr. Chen’s paragraph on speech ends by reaffirming a curative temporality. He writes, “His communication is significantly improved compared to his first visit assisted by speech therapy which he has attended on a regular basis since the stroke.” I’m struck by the inclusion of speech therapy, which is supplemental to Dr. Chen’s clinic and current examination, to assure readers that Fetterman is working towards fluency on a “regular basis,” and the therapy is working. The future-oriented progress narrative here might be one mode in which we see how fluency is made compulsory, especially in the political realm.^[5] A leader in liberal democracy must sound sound in mind.

From the outset of the debate between Dr. Mehmet Oz and Fetterman, the Lt. Governor’s prepared audiences for his new speech patterns. He says:

Let’s also talk about the elephant in the room. I had a stroke. He’s [Oz] never let me forget that. And I might miss some words during this debate, mush two words together, but it knocked me down, but I’m going to keep coming back up. (PA Senate Debate Opening remarks).

Here, Fetterman is teaching audiences how to experience his voice in time. Gaps and absences (“miss some words”) and quick elisions (“mush two words”) reshape the temporality of speech acts. If speech acts do not match audiences’ understandings of how speech should sound, dysfluency interrupts time and forces the listener to reflect on the auditory process.^[6]

Coaching audiences is a crucial move in many ways since, under ableist assumptions about how orators and audiences should relate to each other, expectations of normative time are key. Ostensibly “normal” communicators have an expectation that speaking should take a “normal” amount of time; the listeners carry with them to conversations, performance events, or media encounters a sense of the correct time a communicative act should take (based on fluency, a rational economy of words, and clarity/articulation). Of course, as St. Pierre affirms, such assumptions are about maintaining the political neutrality of the listener and say very little about the actual capabilities of the dysfluent orator. St. Pierre writes,

 The experience of compression and distension [in the dysfluent speaker] is more fully a dialectical response to the assumed temporality of the generalized other. The stutterer senses time is distending through a judgement of how fast he should be talking in relation to his interlocutors. This judgement is structured and normalized by the universality of straight-masculine time. (57)

The dysfluent speaker is made abnormal through the biased expectations of listeners (trained by chrononormative disciplining) because the listener has to work harder to stay present in the communicative dialogue. Fetterman’s foregrounding of potential distensions, elisions, and compressions tells listeners (aka voters) who tune in that in our shared, communicative present, please give the ableist assumptions a slight rest.^[7]

It is precisely this tension of a “communicative present” that I hope to theorize here because in the Autumn of 2022, U.S. audiences shared a flashpoint in the soundscape of disabilities. While the Fetterman debate provided dysfluent speech on a public, political stage, the movie theater offered an intimate space to encounter dysfluency with Zach Cregger’s Barbarian. In Barbarian, audiences encounter the soundscape of disability in ways that extend, distend, and compress communicative time. The experience capitalizes on audiences’ normative assumptions about abled, straight, masculinized time to produce horror. This is not to say that Barbarian caused the type of ableist backlash to Fetterman. Hardly. Rather, I hold these moments—filmic encounters and televised events— together to think through the similar and overlapping logics of compulsory fluency.

What’s at stake here is the sonic/aural life of U.S. liberalism and the fantastical construction and maintenance of the universalized white, Western, hetero-masculinist, rational interlocutor. Liberalism cannot imagine the everyman being represented by disabled (temporary or not) speakers.^[8] By turning to Barbarian, we see the ways the soundscapes of disability occupied theaters. Through this odd, monstrous comparison—Fetterman and Barbarian—I hope to lay bare the ways fear of and horror by dysfluency haunts contemporary U.S. socio-political imaginary in ways that reaffirm the policed linking of dysfluency with horror.

What online commentators—and even Cregger—seem to ignore, but what a reading informed by disability studies helps excavate, is that the themes of Barabarian are built on the history of stuttering. Andrew McGowan reflects on the resonances of the film’s title, positing that the barbarians are toxic men or those unhoused and made precarious and vulnerable by Detroit’s abdication of civic support.^[9] When Hunter Radesi asks Cregger if the title spawns from the address of the monstrous short-term rental (476 Barbary St.), Cregger responds, “I think that was probably what I was thinking. The first time I started writing, I named the street ‘Barbary Street’. So that probably was in my head. Like ‘Barbarian’, an inhabitant of this place.”^[10] But “barbarians” are, as Marc Shell reminds us, linked to stuttering:

The terms stutterer and barbarian both refer to ‘those people who do not speak our language.’ It does not matter much whether these people speak a human language other than ‘ours” […]. The terms stutterer and barbarian both also refer to ‘those people who, although they do speak our language, do not speak it ‘in our way.’ It does not matter much whether these people speak English with a foreign ‘accent,’ domestic ‘dialect,’ or more general speech ‘impediment.’^[11]

Cregger’s title, then, both intentionally broadcasts the exclusionary politics of urban development/abandonment and perhaps unintentionally primes audiences for the aural ramifications of making horrific dysfluent speech.

This logic of monstrous, distended time first emerges at the end of the film’s first act when we meet the Mother, a women who has been held captive for decades, in the bowels of 4766 Barbarian Street. Naked, screaming, and violent, she rushes from the dark, underground corridor towards Tess and Keith, two conventionally attractive, fluent speakers who are on the property because they rented it as an Airbnb. Framed by the shaky cam and lit by the flashing, inconsistent light from Tess’s cellphone, the Mother brains Keith against the wall. The soundscape is jarring and unnerving: the thudding from Keith’s head and the Mother’s grunts (closed captioned as “flesh squelches” and “creature grunting”) align monstrosity with inarticulate sounds. The film’s investment in incoherence bursts forth as the horror subgenre shifts from gendered and racialized psychological horror of space and safety to body horror creature feature. Cregger ends the first act with a low angle of the Mother’s mouth fully open, screeching, before cutting to black.

It is when Cregger brings us back to the basement and reveals the Mother that dysfluency, stuttering, and the concept of the “barbarian” congeal the most strongly. While in the cage, Tess urges to AJ, the abled, glib property owner, and says, “This is very, very important. You need to stay calm. You cannot freak out around her, okay? Trust me. […] You cannot get upset. If you get upset, she gets upset.” The impulse is towards self-control and maintaining self-discipline.^[12] The Mother’s hair slides into frame (and the cage) first, and AJ whispers in horror and confusion, “What is that?”. Gendered pronouns are replaced by objectifying language despite the visual emphasis on the monstrous feminine: a dirty bottle nipple. With a POV shot, audiences are put into AJ’s position as a ten second long lingering one-shot from a low angle of the bottle nipple shakes and wobbles towards us. The one-shot emphasizes distension in two ways: first, the time it takes is uncomfortable to viewers as we are forced to linger on the nipple, and second, Matthew Patrick Davis (the Mother) flexes his fingers, elongated through prosthetics, several times as viewers are offered the bottle. This distension of the body and shot time deliberately interpolates movie-goer’s mouths. The abjection we are asked to feel at the thought of AJ putting the filthy nipple in his mouth by the dysfluent monstrous Mother is pointedly oral.^[13] After Tess drinks, the Mother offers the bottle to AJ again (now with hair on it), and with a POV shot (closer up this time), audiences are confronted with the thought of putting it in their own mouths. The Mother continues to grunt, coaligning the sounds of inarticulate speech with the threat of gagging. Perhaps this makes audiences themselves tongue-tied as they are folded into the mouth horror.

After several montages that pivot between AJ in horror and the bottle, the Mother jumps into the cage and stutters her desires. She cradles Tess, and calls her baby. Then, in a tight, askew close up that brings the Mother’s mouth and face too close to AJ’s, she stutter’s “ba” in a series of disjointed segments. In this scene, the filmic elongation and distension of time use dysfluency and disability to shake audiences out of “normal” (straight/abled) time. The practical effects and prosthetic work makes audiences linger on the monstrous (read: disabled) body longer—there’s more limb to film. The tight close up at once compresses film space (centering mouths), but does so in a distended time, hailing audiences through the elongation of speech acts with the stutter. It’s the compression and elongation combination that folds audiences in in a jarring way. It takes multiple “ba”s in several sequences before the Mother drags AJ from the cage to be breast fed. The mother’s “Ba ba ba”s work as sonic proof of what the practical effects already show: disability and dysfluent speech hold audiences uncomfortably close in a distended, monstrous present.^[14]

Disability and dysfluency continue to shape the horrible basement at 467 Barbary St. Cregger’s ironic breastfeeding montage weaponizes the language of “natural” in the breastfeeding VHS with the visual unnatural acts from the Mother. When he is trying to escape, AJ discovers the father: bedridden and unable to make vocalized speech between coughs. One of the snuff films on top of the TV just has the label “BLIND” as the only identifying marker of the deceased. Pointedly, AJ’s interactions with the father is intercut with Tess’s interactions with the police. In the basement, confronted with non-verbal requests from a man gesturing to a bedside table, AJ, frustrated, responds, “I don’t know what you’re saying. What are you saying? What do you want?” As the Black officer brushes off Tess’s pleas for the last time before responding to shots fired in Midland, Tess asks, “Can you…Can you hear what I’m saying? […] What am I supposed to say to get you to listen to me? Seriously, what the fuck?”

This scene holds two conceits about liberal humanism and citizenship together. First, the father’s inarticulate coughing and gesturing mark him as outside the realm of the human—quite literally as the scene ends with his suicide. Tess’s encounter with the police reaffirm the ways the state cannot understand citizens they see as irrational. Both reaffirm what St. Pierre theorizes as the fear of “the social downturn that quickly follows the failure to uphold and project this ideal of mastery” in rationalist, fluent speech (“Cripping Communication” 17). For the aged, disabled father, the dysfluent Mother, and the “irrational” woman of color who needs to “sleep one off,” all are perceived to have failed in the neoliberal project of mastery. They are beyond the concern of the state.

Barbarian ends with a bang: a gunshot that cuts off the Mother’s dysfluent “ba”s before the credits roll. In many ways, this ending relies on a perverse sentimentalism. Audiences surely feel pleasure that AJ’s shameless, self-centered cruelty is punished by smashing in his eyes and popping his head. We love to see consequences for garbage men. But as the Mother turns around, shot from a low angle, she begins to stutter. “Ba, ba, ba.” She whimpers and stutters while holding her hands over Tess’s stomach wound, clearly feeling for and with her surrogate baby’s pain. “Ba, ba, ba,” she continues, as she brings Tess in for a hug into her bosom (which is never not on display here thanks to the fabulous practical effects and makeup work). As the Mother tries to pick Tess up, Tess screams in pain, and the Mother explains through gesture and “Ba’s” that she wants to take Tess back to the basement. Tess replies, “I can’t go back.” The Mother tries again. It’s almost a maudlin sequence of sympathetic motherhood. Tess raises her gun to the Mother’s face (which is still framed in a low angle as she has loomed above the audience for this whole scene’s duration). With the gun to her face, the Mother kisses her fingers, stutters “ba ba,” puts her fingers to Tess’s forehead, stutters again—and bang. While earlier encounters with the Mother relied on elongating time for horrific effects, this sequence draws out Tess and the Mother’s interaction for a more sympathetic/pathetic tone. Audiences are less shocked by the Mother’s stuttering (we’ve heard it for half the film), and the pacing is slowed down. As foundational disability studies have taught us, fear and pity are often two sides of the same objectifying coin.^[15] By silencing the violent stutterer, the film lets the audience finally breathe  as the unyielding final act comes to a close.

I think there’s a lot of powerful critiques embedded in Barbarian, and in many ways it explores the limits of neoliberal subjectivity and the limits of who counts as human in strategic state failures. But, as the Fetterman debate makes clear, the state cannot imagine dysfluent citizens, let alone leaders. Ultimately, we should consider this pairing (Fetterman and Cregger) because it illuminates how dysfluency remains a problem in the American socio-political realm. This is not because dysfluency is a problem, but because the aural landscape of the US coaches audiences to believe that the spaces of elongation, elision, and repetition are to be feared and that these spaces demarcate the limits of the human. It takes the natural—hiccups, gaps, slurs, tune outs, tune ins—and makes monstrous the present of dysfluent speech. Making a stalled reproductive futurism monstrous, dysfluency delineates the boundaries of the human and the biopolitics of reproduction. The film situates dysfluency as a problem of the past: an 80s nightmare Reagan baby. But in marketing to a present audience, with the Fetterman debate on the horizon, such filmic encounters with speech, time, and fluency prime U.S. audiences for a particular relationship to the aural and sonic life of disabilities and liberal humanism.

Author bio: Jarred Wiehe is an Assistant Professor of English at Texas A&M University, Corpus Christi. As a literary historian of disabilities, pleasures, and sexualities, he explores Restoration and 18th-century literatures and contemporary media (video games, comics, and TV) that think against the norms and violences of Enlightenment personhood. His favorite class to teach is “Slasher? I Barely Know Her: Genders, Genres, and Horror.”

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[1] “Dysfluency” helps names the range of communicative networks that disrupt able-bodied and able-minded conceptions of graceful and coherent speech. Such communicative modes might include stuttering, lisping, non-speech vocalizations, ticking or stimming as from Tourette’s, or other forms of sound that read as interrupting “normal” fluent communication. See, for instance, Camille Duque ad Bonnie Lashewicz “Reframing less conventional speech to disrupt conventions of ‘compulsory fluency’: A Conversation Analysis Approach” Disability Studies Quarterly, vol. 38, no. 2 (Spring 2018).

[2] https://johnfetterman.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/JKF-Health-Letter-10.15-.pdf

[3] “Cripping Communication: Speech, Disability, and Exclusion in Liberal Humanist and Posthumanist Discourse.” Communication Theory 25 (2015): 330.

[4] See Nirmala Erevelles “Signs of Reason: Rivière, Facilitated Coommunication, and the Crisis of the Subject” in Foucault and the Government of Disability, ed. Shelley Tremain.

[5] “Compulsory fluency” is indebted to both Adrienne Rich’s “Compulsory Heterosexuality and Lesbian Existence” and Robert McRuer’s “compulsory able-bodiedness” from Crip Theory. It marks the ways that through educational, medical, and social disciplining, speech acts must be aligned with making the speaker’s acts align with normal/straight/on time speech. For more on compulsory fluency and film time, see Jared S. Richman’s “The Royal Treatment: Temporality and Technology in The King’s Speech” in Disability Studies Quarterly, vol. 40, no. 4 (2020).

[6] St. Pierre writes, “the disabled speaker—attending specifically to the stutterer—experiences a violent and persistent temporal decentering as he is folded into uncomfortable communicative rhythms and tempos woven around the bodily time of his interlocutors. This judgement of his temporality as abnormal or deficient is structured by what I term the straight-masculine time: a future-directed linearity abstracted from the flux of bodily time” (49-50).

[7] By, “communicative present,” I draw from St. Pierre’s framework for seeing dialogue as an intra-bodily choreography and a collaborative meaning-making event: “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” (“Distending,” 58).

[8] To reinforce this, note how access options have remained absent          : “There’s never been a closed-captioned political debate in a high-profile Senate race where one of the candidates is dealing with a lingering auditory processing challenge while recovering from a stroke,” Fetterman’s campaign said earlier that day. Adaptive and assistive tech—let alone basic access needs for a range of bodyminds—cannot be imagined in democratic process and liberalism. Even reliance on a teleprompter is made suspect by the fantasies of autonomous, rationalist communication.

[9] McGowan writes, “the street’s destitute residents, especially given that ‘Barbarian’ often denotes someone living outside of civilized society—a tragically fitting nod to the way people view impoverished areas on the city’s outskirts.” https://collider.com/barbarian-title-explained

[10] https://www.murphysmultiverse.com/exclusive-barbarian-director-explains-films-title/

[11] Marc Shell, Stutter (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003), 73.

[12] In thinking through how liberal individualism makes use of fantasies of universal speakers, St. Pierre writes, “Rational speech, dispassioned, and disembodied, may at any moment be ruptured and must thus be constantly surveilled and managed. […] If to be truly human in liberal humanist discourse is to exercise autonomous reason, and if speaking realizes oneself as a rational and social agent within the public sphere, then having a voice has direct bearing on the universal citizen” (“Cripping Communication” 335). It is this underlying logic of the human that haunts Tess’s coaching for self-control.

[13]  Linda Williams thinks about “body films” and the affective/corporeal effects of watching horror, porn, and melodrama. She writes, “My hope, therefore, is that by thinking comparatively about all three ‘gross’ and sensation film body genres we might be able to get beyond the mere fact of sensation to explore its system and structure as well as its effect on the bodies of spectators” (2). In Cregger’s textual/sexual soundscape, the effect seems to be shocking viewers outside of themselves through distended speech and oral penetration. The disqualification of personhood here is driven by disability.

[14] St. Pierre turns to phenomenology to account for how disturbing straight and abled time is for dysfluent speakers: “I highlight the idealization of ‘bodily time’ by Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Alfred Schutz and contend that the disabled speaker—attending specifically to the stutterer—experiences a violent and persistent temporal decentering as he is folded into uncomfortable communicative rhythms and tempos woven around the bodily time of his interlocutors” (“Distending,” 49-50). Cregger’s film relies on the inverse: it decenters straight/abled time to fold audiences into a distended communicative present.

[15] See Lennard J. Davis’ Enforcing Normalcy: Disability, Deafness, and the Body (London: Verso, 1990); Joseph P. Shapiro, No Pity: People with Disabilities Forging a New Civil Rights Movement (New York: Times Books, 1993)