Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness (Thought in the Act)

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Many of the gains made in disability rights and community participation have arguably come into being because of the social model. There is a fascinating book to be written on the overlap between queerness and autism, both in terms of how the two concepts have been framed throughout history, and how people labeled as "queer" and/or "autistic" have been (and continue to be) mistreated by society. The ability to say, "I have autism," for example, is often viewed as evidence that one does not have autism - or, at least, not real or severe autism. Through her many invitational gestures Yergeau provocatively intervenes in the readings of the rhetoric of normalcy while also evoking new possibilities for distinctly different autistic rhetorics. So instead of saying "I was born a girl," for example, one could say "I was assigned female at birth.

It's impossible to comprehend anything that is said in this book without having to google some things. Under a social model, societal barriers, segregation, barriers to inclusion, and discrimination are what constitutes disability.the basic gist of the book seems to be that autistics express themselves differently than allistics. Authoring Autism" is the worst of academic writing, wherein simple observations and ideas are discussed with such virtuosic ambiguity that the author almost deserves credit for rendering language itself the direct enemy of communication.

Whereas disability is social construction (and a social oppression), impairment represents embodies experience and the phenomena that accompany having a neuro/physio/divergent body. Using a queer theory framework, Yergeau notes the stereotypes that deny autistic people their humanity and the chance to define themselves while also challenging cognitive studies scholarship and its reification of the neurological passivity of autistics. This is not just a landmark book; it's a book that opens up a whole terrain of discourse informed by the insights of queer theory and the disability rights movement. I did not read this like academic literature is meant to be read, studiously, looking up words I did not understand.To be fair, Yergeau's book does anticipate several of these critiques-- especially the one about the navel-gazing. I am particularly drawn to thinking from the position of the nonhuman, of the 'us' that contains no 'i', no subjects or persons but only an open field of being in which I am just as other from my own hand as I am from my cat. In questioning the dehumanizing discourses and methods of the scrutinizing gaze of medical and educational professionals, Yergeau foregrounds the ways rhetoric is used to exclude humans identified as autistic. ABA is more aptly termed a sociosexual intervention than a mere social intervention, seeking as it does to make neuroqueer subjects virtually indistinguishable from their neurotypical, heterosexual, and cisgender peers.

The third chapter in particular started doing that thing that happens in academia where the text starts using its jargon kind of a lot, but if you interpret that as a kind of stim or echophenomenon perhaps it is an interesting locus of further writing itself.

A closely argued, elegantly performed, and even joyfully humorous work of critical emancipatory scholarship. In so doing, she demonstrates how an autistic rhetoric requires the reconceptualization of rhetoric’s very essence. g. twitching, flapping, spinning) as well as too passive, as in the inability of the mind to contain or constrain what is read through the normative gaze as [End Page 483] excessive bodily motion.

Through exploring paradoxes such as those in the conceptions of passivity and activity, Authoring Autism provokes its readers to reconsider and trouble the taken for granted stories that circulate about autism. The introduction and the first two chapters are incredibly difficult to read, as Yergeau uses a lot of academic jargon and phrases I'd consider inaccessible.In this thorough, rigorous, and thoroughly, rigorously playful look into the rhetorical dehumanization of queer(ed) autistic subjects, Yergeau melds critical historical analysis with autie-biography through theories as "low" as the shit-stained wall and high as the very tip of the ivory tower.