Opening time: stuttering, temporality, and blackness in There are no children here (1993)

Despite affecting roughly 80 million people worldwide, stuttering is a verbal disability that often goes underrepresented in media. The most well-known examples of characters who stutter are outdated, harmful stereotypes that treat verbal dysfluency as a punchline to a joke, such as the lawyer in My Cousin Vinny (1992), or the infamous Billy Madison (1995) scene (“T-t-t-today, junior!”). Inspired by the stuttering pride movement of recent years, many artists and scholars are writing about the time and space stuttering creates and pushing back on the ableist notion that the gaps, pauses, silences, and repetitions of stuttered speech are a flaw to be fixed or overcome, instead arguing that embracing those moments of dysfluency can be a powerful act of refusal. The 1993 made-for-TV film There Are No Children Here, directed by Anita W. Addison, is an overlooked and under-researched example of a film that centers Black dysfluency and embraces the moment of stuttering both narratively and formally. This thesis combines approaches from film studies, disability studies, and temporality studies to illuminate how uninterrupted moments of stuttering on screen can disrupt ableist and racist systems of power and temporality. Through close readings, personal interviews, and film historiography, this thesis contends that There Are No Children Here creates a powerful, subversive portrayal of stuttering that should be echoed in future depictions of verbal dysfluency.