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

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Perhaps you must have studied rhetoric extensively to have any chance of making much sense of this book. Yergeau carefully intertwines lived experience, autistic memoir, clinical discourse, and humanities theory (particularly rhetorical studies, narrative theory, disability studies, and queer theory) to achieve a highly insightful hybrid discourse. 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. 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.

We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. In this professional moment, I became unprofessional: this is the effect that studying oneself often has, especially when self is a neuroqueer self.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. In so doing, they demonstrate how an autistic rhetoric requires the reconceptualization of rhetoric’s very essence. Still a very worthwhile read –– for me the book drove home the way that social and rhetorical norms "unperson" autistics, given that autistic people do not have access to or use intentionality and rhetoric in the same way, do not participate in persuasion or invention (which assumes two equal parties, often not the case), the way that like queerness, autism has been, often violently, suppressed by the medical and scientific communities in purported attempts at cures and that autistic people, like queer folks, are denied expertise on their own lived experience, because of that lived experience, the way that autism, like queerness, defies boundaries and crafts meaning and pleasure out of experiences and landscapes that are not inherently meaningful to those who share them. I did not read this like academic literature is meant to be read, studiously, looking up words I did not understand.

You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice.here, yergeau draws upon merleau-pontyan theorists to elucidate the ways in which autistic subjectivies are expressed through pre-symbolic, affective and embodied modes 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. 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. Authoring Autism will be a book of keen interest to disability studies scholars and activists who are engaged in intersectional approaches to troubling the rhetoric of normalcy.

Autistic people have long identified with or as the queer - whether by means of sexuality or gender identity, or by means of a queer asociality that fucks norms. It is essential reading for anyone who does rhetorical theory, and it will transform not only how we think about who a rhetor can be, but also what rhetoric should be. They are inventional movements, stimpoints that force us to question long-held notions about rhetoric and its privileged topoi.Queerness and disability may not be equivalent or even analogical, but they are resonant and interweaving constructs, and they are norm-shattering ways of moving," (p. I read it in a rush over the course of two days, skimming past the more horrific descriptions of medical abuse (in the name of curing autism), making my best guess at the meaning of some words and refusing to be troubled that I didn't understand others, taking away what I could. 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. 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. some interesting questions about the relations between autism and queerness are forestalled by yergeau's rather annoying tendency to fall back upon the academic appropriation of "queerness" as signifying something akin to différance that can be completely divorced from the realms of sexuality and gender.

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. Yergeau (211) disrupts the gaze of medical experts and in so doing contends that the "ga(y)ze" of autism offers fruitful contributions toward reconceptualizing rhetoric in a manner that simultaneously acknowledges and refuses its current role in the exclusions of disabled peoples and in particular, autistic peoples. 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. I am delighted to have learned so much about autism and behavioral development--two subjects I would not normally seek out. Rather, it is to suggest that not only is autism a world (à la Sue Rubin), but that autism is a negotiation between rhetorical and arhetorical worlds.

Only by redefining the very definitions and conventions of rhetoric can we begin to attend to these autistic narratives on their own terms.