Letters To My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism

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I think it's a wonderful read for anyone interested in disability and gender, regardless of whether they're autistic. This heartfelt, deeply compassionate and wholly original work humanises women who have so often been dismissed for their differences, and will be celebrated by ‘weird sisters’ everywhere. It was a relief to follow Limberg as she patiently and delicately unfolded and put on display so many elements of autistic personhood and experience.

through letters to women considered 'weird' (limburg arguing who may in fact have autistic traits making them considered 'weird') she explores her own autistic experience and experience of womanhood, and the intersection of ableism and sexism, and therefore disability rights and feminism, throughout history. these brave women struggled on the page, as they tried to negotiate between the felt pressure of their own perceptions and experiences and the established forms of language which resisted their attempts to express them. I've only known I'm autistic for about a year, and I'm really starting to dig into some deeper ideas about how people relate to autism and how we fit into this world that doesn't make space for us.

I could honestly gush about this book for ages, so I'll stop myself now and just finish by saying that I would recommend this to anybody. It seemed to me that many of the moments when my autism had caused problems, or at least marked me out as different, were those moments when I had come up against some unspoken law about how a girl or a woman should be, and failed to meet it. For someone on the outside (but not entirely), I am - and others, too, I’m sure - often thirsty for more understanding and insight than a Twitter post can provide.

If you have any level of interest in this subject, you will find this book honest and enlightening and you will more than likely want to read more. I liked how I was able to learn more about women I know of, such as Virginia Woolf and women who I haven’t and how society treated them. For all that time, womanhood from the inside, as a way of experiencing and navigating and making sense of the world, was expressed, for the most part, only in unpublished words, in letters and private journals.I hope that in future editions of this book, the author can at least make a note acknowledging that she’s really mostly talking about people who were assigned female. That sentence you just read—it is not only part of a text, but also part of you, and part of the person who wrote it, all at the same time. Diagnosed with autism in midlife, Joanne Limburg finally felt she could make sense of what marked her as an outsider. This heartfelt, deeply compassionate and wholly original work humanises women who have so often been dismissed for their differences, and will be celebrated by 'weird sisters' everywhere. In media (social and otherwise) I find there’s often a focus on sympathy/praise for the parents rather than on the experiences of autistic people.

The essential anger of activism combined with the character limits of Twitter et al, can render the medium a blunt tool. Yes, we do have to say so every time, because every time we see another woman's body objectified, it is by implication an attack on our personhood, and when we are attacked in this way, we have every right to re-assert that personhood by refusing that objectification. I did feel the letter writing aspect lost it’s way a little, each letter started strongly, but then moved into a tangent that was more focussed on Limburg than on the recipient of the letter.Det er 4 kvinder som forfatteren identificerer som “werid sisters” som blev udstød pga der unormale opførsel. Within the first few pages, this book identified and articulated feelings and experiences I had not yet been able to name, process, or articulate myself.