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

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Fortunately, Yergeau infuses the text with a lot of personality and humor, and it’s a subject I have many strong feelings about: the idea that autism/neurodivergence is a narrative identity, and the best people to define and describe that identity are the people living it. In addition, rather than simply looking at autistic (and neuroqueer more broadly) autonomy through a lens of lack, Yergeau beautifully illustrates the pleasurable crevices in which our counter-rhetorics bloom, stim, and echo, places in whose neurotypical-avoidance we find the greatest possible freedom.

According to Yergeau (48): "Ours is a continuous motion across not one but infinite diagnostic and symptomatological scales. 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.My rhetorical interests would not normally draw me to this book, so I did not have high expectations beyond the society's accolades.

Winner of the 2019 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) Lavender Rhetorics Award for Excellence in Queer Scholarship Book Award.Under a social model, societal barriers, segregation, barriers to inclusion, and discrimination are what constitutes disability. And, while at times these worlds may be idiosyncratic or mutually unintelligible, these worlds hold value, meaning, and at times meaninglesness.

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. Krumins notes that others viewed her communion with an among things as a young girl being unladylike rather than a young girl being autistic. If you're just beginning to learn about neurodivergence, there are many other, more accessible books to start with, like Divergent Mind: Thriving in a World That Wasn't Designed for You or NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity. 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 clinical settings, autistic practices are often better termed autistic symptoms, for when autism modifies practice, practice resides in the pathological.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. she eviscerates ABA and baron-cohen's cisheterosexualizing tendencies and suggests an ambiguous affinity between being autistic and being queer. Ford suggests that autism is a divergent way of perceiving, an interbodily, beyond-the-skin experiential of detail and overwhelm and intricacy. One of the ways Yergeau (10) questions the rhetoric of autistic bodies that are out of control, is by problematizing "the treatment enterprises that structure an autistic child's life. As an autistic psychotherapy student who is already familiar with these issues, I appreciated Yergeau's insights on agency, neuroqueer activism, and socialization from the lens of an autistic scholar, and I think if you're willing to take a long walk to get to those thoughts, you will enjoy this book, too.

As a reader I have been changed, my attention drawn to the necessity to attend not only to the style, and to writing, but to the terms according to which some of us are given access to these voices we too often take for granted. 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. The way it seems to try to view everything about autism through the lens of how autism relates to rhetoric makes no sense to me at all. She has a lovely way with irony that makes her points about theory of mind and empathy in autism superbly well. 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.

Using storying as their method, they present an alternative view of autistic rhetoricity by foregrounding the cunning rhetorical abilities of autistics and by framing autism as a narrative condition wherein autistics are the best-equipped people to define their experience.