Reflections on the Conceptions of the Body in Speech-Language Therapy and the Challenges that Arise from Cripistemology

Abstract

This article proposes a critique of the truth-knowledge-power relationship that underlies the notions of the normative body established by medical knowledge since the Modern era, and that is still sustained in the present thanks to the actions of disciplines such as speech-language therapy. From this perspective, speech-language therapy is identified as a source of production and reproduction for these notions, following binary reasonings based on dualisms such as health/disease, functionality/dysfunctionality, and ability/disability. I describe Cripistemology as a new critical form of resistance to the biomedical knowledge that established these dualisms and that has maintained forms of power and entrapments of life in which people with disabilities are entrapped, excluded, and relegated. I conclude that, just as the social model of disability posed new epistemological and ethical challenges for how society should politically respond to disability at the end of the twentieth century, today, through the proposal of Cripistemology, the social movements for disability call on the biomedical knowledge and the professions that base their activities on it, to reconsider how they build, validate, and generalize knowledge about disability. Taking on this challenge will lead to transformations in speech therapy practices that involve thinking of actions, not on the body, but from the bodies, to construct knowledge situated in embodied subjects, capable of distancing themselves from the traditional, Eurocentric, English-speaking, and hegemonic biomedical knowledge.