The appearance of The King's Speech proved serendipitous for The Stuttering Foundation: its enthusiastic endorsement of the film reflects a decades-long crusade to increase understanding of a condition that affects nearly 68 million people worldwide, and, in turn, the film's critical acclaim and global appeal did much to raise public awareness of stuttering as well as The Stuttering Foundation's mission. Above the photo appears the tagline, "Stuttering Gets the Royal Treatment." 2 Such a rendering of the king, much like the film's, invites both sympathy and admiration for a disabled figure. In the foundation's ad, the monarch appears regal in military dress standing behind a large microphone. 1 One advertisement, which appeared in high profile periodicals such as Time, featured a black and white photograph of the real King George VI, the British monarch played onscreen by Colin Firth. Soon after the 2010 release of director Tom Hooper's Oscar-winning film, The King's Speech, The Stuttering Foundation, a non-profit advocacy group, initiated a print ad campaign endorsing the film. Ultimately, the essay locates The King's Speech as a film whose image of modern kingship grounds itself upon a notion of imperial authority as technologically constructed but ultimately disabled by a national fantasy of historical wholeness in the fabricated kinship between a monarch and his people. By reading the film's strategic deployment of radio technology alongside its troubled representation of class and his fraught invocation of Shakespeare's Hamlet, the essay reads attitudes towards vocal disability within the context of royalty, patriarchy, and national identity. The King's Speech thus situates compulsory fluency as an essential component of modern kingship. ![]() ![]() ![]() Crucially and somewhat ironically, with its emphasis on the nobility of the title character, the film sublimates an inherent tension between media technology and the lingering social stigma surrounding disability. The essay identifies the social codes enforcing correct and eloquent speech that create a political and social climate for "compulsory fluency"-the socially imperative verbal facility promoted as necessary to participate in public life. It argues that the film obfuscates modern scientific and critical understanding of communication disorders by rendering stuttering as a moral failure rather than by attempting to understand it as a socially constructed condition contingent upon established societal and temporal norms. This essay examines the intersections of class, technology, and disability manifest within The King's Speech.
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