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

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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. 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. The author switches so easily from academic prose to a highly accessible style as she moves from theory to practice and back again. 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. In my opinion, if every permutation of the word "rhetoric" were cut from this book, it would be immeasurably improved.

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. 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. Under a social model, societal barriers, segregation, barriers to inclusion, and discrimination are what constitutes disability.In clinical settings, autistic practices are often better termed autistic symptoms, for when autism modifies practice, practice resides in the pathological. Only by redefining the very definitions and conventions of rhetoric can we begin to attend to these autistic narratives on their own terms. Also, as a person who uses a screen reader (because of autism-related visual processing issues), I found it bitterly ironic how poorly formatted this book was for those who use assistive technologies. It's one of the most intellectually stimulating and inspiring books that I've read in a very long time. Yergeau unpacks this and other ways that the clinical literature on autism has been completely unaware of its own morass of paradoxes.

One's status as AFAB or AMAB is a simple matter of fact, not identification, and Yergeau really should have recognized that.Because I am hopelessly lost on rhetoric (and, disappointingly, queer studies), I'll admit that the introduction and first chapters took me multiple days and many hours of reading to understand, but damn - it was worth it. 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. Deftly integrates rich theoretical analysis with moments of humor, irony, autoethnography (autie-ethnography), and poetic insight.

I am uncertain about the "academization" of the word "queer," for one, which did not help my opinion on the book. So saying that one "identifies as AFAB and nothing more" makes about as much sense as saying one "identifies as having been born in Cleveland. This is without doubt the most thoroughgoing, rigorous, and creative work on authoring autism I have read. I am delighted to have learned so much about autism and behavioral development--two subjects I would not normally seek out.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. 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. According to Yergeau (48): "Ours is a continuous motion across not one but infinite diagnostic and symptomatological scales.