Governing the Voice: A Critical History of Speech-Language Pathology

This essay argues that Speech-Language Pathology (SLP) emerged as a response to the early twentieth-century demand for docile, efficient, and thus productive speech. As the capacity of speech became more central to the industrial and democratic operations of modern society, an apparatus was needed t...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inFoucault studies no. 24; pp. 151 - 184
Main Authors St. Pierre, Joshua, St. Pierre, Charis
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published CBS Open Journals 29.06.2018
Subjects
communication
disability
genealogy
speech
speech-language pathology
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Summary:This essay argues that Speech-Language Pathology (SLP) emerged as a response to the early twentieth-century demand for docile, efficient, and thus productive speech. As the capacity of speech became more central to the industrial and democratic operations of modern society, an apparatus was needed to bring speech under the fold of biopower. Beyond simple economic productivity, the importance of SLP lies in opening the speaking subject up to management and normalization—creating, in short, biopolitical subjects of communication. We argue that SLP accordingly emerged not as a discreet institution, but as a set of practices which can be clustered under three headings: calculating deviance, disciplining the tongue, and speaking the truth of pathologized subjects. 
ISSN:1832-5203
1832-5203
DOI:10.22439/fs.v0i24.5530