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

Product Information

What autism provided was a discursive framework, a lens through which others could story my life. ... My very being became a story, a text in dire need of professional analysis. This, my body, this was autism - and suddenly, with the neuropsychologist's signature on my diagnostic papers, I was no longer my body's author." (p. 1) Julie Brown (2010). Writers on the Spectrum: How Autism and Asperger Syndrome have Influenced Literary Writing. Jessica Kingsley Publisher.

On that note, Yergeau defines some of these terms, but only once she is halfway or more than halfway through the book, which felt pointless to me. I think the book could benefit from a glossary, but it really needs to be more accessible in general. The call will doubtless be upheld upon further review, but Grandin did not take offense. On the contrary, the story moved her to disclose the fact—which we had not known before—that at the Arizona ranch of her childhood, her uncle was a vicious drunk who terrorized her aunt. As Savarese astutely notes, she thereby effectively substituted, for the clinical/neurological explanation for her celibacy, a psychological explanation unrelated to autism. She didn’t read “The Ecstatic Cry” the way Savarese wanted, or expected. Perhaps she did something better. Behaviorist discourse employs the language of recovery ... While behaviorism makes no claim of cure, it does make claims of optimal outcomes, lessened severity, and residual (as opposed to full blown) disability, Recoverym then, is not the process of becoming straight or cisgender or nondisabled, but is rather the process of faking the becoming of normativity." p 105 Given these misconceptions, perhaps the most important thing about Rodas’s Autistic Disturbancesis what it doesn’tdo, what it would prefer not to do, what it repeatedly refuses to do. It is not about diagnosing characters. (Yes, we’re looking at you, Bartleby the Scrivener.) Rodas has so little patience with ‘the surprisingly unself-critical conduct of academically trained literary and culture scholars in “diagnosing” unwitting students or fictional figures’ that she devotes a half chapter – no, really, it is numbered chapter 4 ½ (think Harry Potter or Being John Malkovich) – to explaining why Bartleby is not under discussion here. Rodas writes,Under a social model, societal barriers, segregation, barriers to inclusion, and discrimination are what constitutes disability. Moreover, social models of disability (especially U.K. models) generally make a distinction between disability and impairment. Whereas disability is social construction (and a social oppression), impairment represents embodies experience and the phenomena that accompany having a neuro/physio/divergent body. ... The social problems of disability, then, are not problems of brains, tissues, or bodies, but are rather societal infrastructures, material and conceptual, that privilege specific embodied experiences of the world." p. 107 Surveys have found that the majority of autistic people now prefer the identity-first term ‘(is) autistic’, while the general public, and family and friends tend to prefer the person-first term ‘with/has autism’ (Rhiannon, 2020, p23), Rhiannon prefers ‘(is) autistic’, and explains that because autistic people are ‘born wired differently’, ‘there is no separation of the person and the autism’ (2020, p25). So I will use the term ‘autistic writers’ and even ‘autistic writing’ to reflect this identity throughout the post. Strengths and differences in neurodivergence

Autism is core to my very being. It's how I sense, interact with others, and process information. Autism is my rhetoric. But what's at risk here is who tells my story and, more broadly, who tells the story of my people. What's of concern is who gets to author our individual and collective identities, who gets to determine whether we are, in fact, narrative creatures, whether we are living beings in rhetorical bodies, whether we are even allowed to call ourselves human." (p. 21) Autism disclosure is often agonistic, expectant of allistic refutation. 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." (p. 33) Many of the gains made in disability rights and community participation have arguably come into being because of the social model." p. 108 Autistic people think and experience the world differently to neurotypical people. In an interview, Joanne Limburg says that ‘Autism has been defined almost exclusively by what is apparent to those who do not have it’ (2017, here). So, to avoid this, here is a definition by an autistic artist, Megan Rhiannon in her wonderful book, Existing Autistic:I gave up at 10% of my kindle book. I bought it because it was recommended in Neuroqueer Heresies: Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Possibilities, a book that I very much appreciated. It touted this as the best and most complete critique of the pathology paradigm. I was stoked. I had little doubt I would love this book. Boy was I disappointed.

The field of psychological research surrounding autism has been inundated for some time with frustrated, time-poor parents desperate to help their children to succeed, or at least fit in. If this is you, I would not recommend this book (yet). On one hand, Authoring Autism is a thorough and thoughtful primer for any person, autistic or allistic, interested in understanding a wide range of issues relevant to autistic people in general from a high level. Opal Whiteley, another writer considered to be autistic by Julie Brown, has a similar experience with another (probably neurotypical) teacher. The narrator in her journals shows an extraordinary empathy and connection with animals, in stark contrast with her teacher. Her pig follows her to school and stands outside, then he comes in: I love the detail in this, and the anthropomorphism of everything. Even the air is ‘as puffed out as the robin’s chest’, suggesting the pride and excitement of spring. Like Limburg, Whiteley describes the mismatch of understanding between the autistic child and the (probably neurotypical) adult, contrasting with the child’s extraordinary affinity with animals, which extends to understanding their language. Next steps Many autistic writers write about the difficulty in understanding and playing by neurotypical ‘rules’. Joanne Limburg writes about this in a tender and funny way in The Autistic Alice (2017). In this collection of poetry, Alice become a kind of persona for the writer as a child, drawing on the character by Lewis Carroll. Incidentally, Lewis Carroll is also thought to be autistic by Brown in Writers on the Spectrum (2010).Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. (Recipient of the 2017 MLA First Book Prize, the 2019 CCCC Lavender Rhetorics Book Award for Excellence in Queer Scholarship, and the 2019 Rhetoric Society of America Book Award) Journal articles

autism politics routinely reward those who are multiply privileged. The logics of ableism are intertwined with the logics of racism, classism, and heterosexism." (p. 5) Autism isn’t an illness, it is a totally different neuro type – so managing my autism is managing who I am,” she said. Gibbs says she is sometimes described as “high functioning”, meaning she doesn’t fit the stereotype of autistic people as non-communicative and unable to form relationships. In the proud tradition of many a white queer academic, Yergeau rips queerness from its historical, gendered, & racialized context, dilutes it to the point of parody, and proceeds to yoke it to the proverbial harness, apparently in the name of rendering all discourse on autism a spectral house of mirrors in which one can know nothing for certain and about which one can say even less. In Yergeau's world we trade intersectionality for fractionalism, agency for inertia, and meaningful analysis for hollow, smirking equivocation. (Just like Gerald Ford!) Mollie Russell (2020). ‘My Nephew’s Second Birthday: A Saga of Self-Stimulatory Behaviour’ (poem). Published in The Emma Press Anthology of Illness. The Emma Press.In The Annotated Alice (p56), Alice is disappointed that she cannot go through the looking glass like her fictional counterpart ‘Alice through the looking glass’ (by Lewis Carroll). She asks her mother if she would go into another world if she went through the looking glass: ‘No, she said:/I’d wake up in hospital, being mended,/and I was so disappointed. I never meant/to stay on the nonsense side.’(2017, p56). Please note that the nonsense side here refers to the neurotypical world, and possibly also the adult world. Creating a Culture of Access in Composition Studies. Yergeau, Selfe, & Brewer. Composition Studies, 42.2. Fall 2014. Book chapters Fox also describes heightened sensory abilities, in ‘What could be called communication’, the people in the poem are described as being sensitive to light: ‘They think everyone can see/the fluorescent lights humming’ (2021, p50).