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

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To oppose a medicalized flattening of autism to a passive embodiment of seemingly autonomic dysfunction, Yergeau makes a powerful case for 'autism’s rhetorical potentials' grounded in the resilient ways that autistic people self-consciously 'story' their desires for better, more inclusive futures. I was drawing connections to loved ones in my own life who are on the spectrum, but also learning a great deal about the history of autism and its relationship to queerness. Further, it seems to me that the way it uses academic words does not function to make it more precise and concise but rather the exact opposite.

Even when I looked up every single word in a sentence that I was not absolutely sure of what they meant that only made the sentence seem even more unclear and ambiguous. My rhetorical interests would not normally draw me to this book, so I did not have high expectations beyond the society's accolades. Yergeau in fact mentions in the first chapter that as both a queer person and an autist they are very wary of attempts to correlate autism and queerness, despite certain preliminary statistics that indicate that a greater percentage of autists are queer than the general population. None the less, it's a sharp, insightful, and truthful book I recommend to anyone, if a crash course in queer theory and gender studies can be had first. 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.She also critiques early intensive behavioral interventions—which have much in common with gay conversion therapy—and questions the ableist privileging of intentionality and diplomacy in rhetorical traditions. I am uncertain about the "academization" of the word "queer," for one, which did not help my opinion on the book.

In clinical settings, autistic practices are often better termed autistic symptoms, for when autism modifies practice, practice resides in the pathological. 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. This is without doubt the most thoroughgoing, rigorous, and creative work on authoring autism I have read.One's status as AFAB or AMAB is a simple matter of fact, not identification, and Yergeau really should have recognized that. They also critique early intensive behavioral interventions—which have much in common with gay conversion therapy—and questions the ableist privileging of intentionality and diplomacy in rhetorical traditions. The rhetoric that bolsters the hegemonic place of ABA therapy and diagnostic tools used by psychologists, such as ToM, simultaneously criticizes people labelled with autism for passively inhabiting "out of control" and "inappropriately" active bodies while also depending on the depiction of the passive subject that can be shaped by the demands of normalcy.

Under a social model, societal barriers, segregation, barriers to inclusion, and discrimination are what constitutes disability.That adults can receive autism diagnoses often comes as a shock to those outside the autistic community, including the very professionals who conduct diagnostic assessments - because isn't autism a childhood thing? For example, she points out that while stories circulate about autistic bodies that are out of control, the rhetoric of the passive autistic subject is necessary for ABA therapy to exert its hegemonic place in its role of cure or at the very least management of autism.

if literally anything and everything can be said to be "queer" (and i'll be damned if this is not the prerogative of parasitic *hip* theory), then the term becomes meaningless.For those not in the know, ASAB language was developed within the trans community to make it possible to refer to the sex/gender one had been assigned by society without having to make a statement about one's personal identity in the process. i only got 10 pages and the word "rhetoric" has lost all meaning i dont get what she means and i feel dumb for not understanding and the thought of trying to for another 200 pages sounds worst than death.