Representation of Stutterers in the Media

Representation of Stutterers in the Media Have you guys ever noticed how all the “representation” we have in the media (celebrities who stutter, films like the King’s Speech, etc.) all seem to focus on people who have overcome, or are overcoming their stutter? A lot of the celebrities we can see speeches of or articles about online who supposedly “stutter” are all fluent, and when they talk about stuttering they seem to all just talk about how they overcame it, rather than how to realistically deal with it. This makes sense of course, since they no longer stutter, but it kind of pisses me off since “overcoming a stutter” is not feasible for most people. Even in the movie The King’s Speech, where the king is stuttering for like 90% of the movie, it ends off with him giving a fairly flawless speech without much stuttering. It’s really annoying because all the representation we tend to have of people who actually do stutter is usually negative. This might be a bad analogy, but it’s the one I came up with so whatever: If a black kid is growing up in an environment surrounded by poverty they will naturally try to seek out a role model in their quest to get out of their situation. For this they can look up to some black celebrities who have become successful WHILE being black. Now imagine if all those “black celebrities” they could look up to all used some very rare and inaccessible product that allowed them to change their race in order to avoid the racism that would prevent them from being successful. This is how I see the current state of POSITIVE representation of stutterers in media, and I feel that it has to change, but I also think it might unfortunately be a part of the reality that it is almost impossible to stutter AND be extremely successful in these career paths. Thoughts?