Cripping Communication: Speech, Disability, and Exclusion in Liberal Humanist and Posthumanist Discourse

Abstract

In this article, I bring communication and disability studies into dialogue, arguing that speech communication has long been a dilemma within liberal humanism and posthumanism. While humanism venerates speech as the most privileged manifestation of rational human identity, it defers the immanent tension in speech between universal and particular by excluding nonnormative voices from the realm of rational discourse. The reconfiguration of the humanist subject into the posthuman privileges informationally flexible and malleable bodies. The disabled speaker provides an important critique of the ableism and exclusion latent within communication theory and offers new modes of thinking about posthuman communication as an embodied and impure activity based on noise, relationality, and reciprocity.

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