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

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Yergeau's queered and disabled reading of rhetoric unfolds through many "in" sights into the dehumanizing gaze of pathological, clinical, and diagnostic renderings of autistic people. I filled up about 38 pages of my notebook with quotes while reading this over the course of a few weeks. To oppose a medicalized flattening of autism to a passive embodiment of seemingly autonomic dysfunction, Yergeau makes a powerful case for 'autism’s rhetorical potentials' grounded in the resilient ways that autistic people self-consciously 'story' their desires for better, more inclusive futures. The third chapter in particular started doing that thing that happens in academia where the text starts using its jargon kind of a lot, but if you interpret that as a kind of stim or echophenomenon perhaps it is an interesting locus of further writing itself.

If autism is a rhetoric unto itself, then we must confront the idea that being autistic confers ways of being, thinking, moving, and making meaning that are not in and of themselves lesser—and may at times be advantageous. A new exploration—a work that defines, defies, and defiles the boundaries of rhetorical regimes of neurological oppression. 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. Deftly integrates rich theoretical analysis with moments of humor, irony, autoethnography (autie-ethnography), and poetic insight.

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. Ford suggests that autism is a divergent way of perceiving, an interbodily, beyond-the-skin experiential of detail and overwhelm and intricacy.

I am uncertain about the "academization" of the word "queer," for one, which did not help my opinion on the book.Project MUSE promotes the creation and dissemination of essential humanities and social science resources through collaboration with libraries, publishers, and scholars worldwide. That adults can receive autism diagnoses often comes as a shock to those outside the autistic community, including the very professionals who conduct diagnostic assessments - because isn't autism a childhood thing? Even when I looked up every single word in a sentence that I was not absolutely sure of what they meant that only made the sentence seem even more unclear and ambiguous.

Authoring Autism doesn’t just show us what the neuroqueer can offer rhetoric, what the embodied experience of autistic people have to teach us of rhetoric, it resists these clinical gazes for us to study and instead urges readers to consider their own rhetoricity. 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 would consider myself educated; I'm in the first year of my masters degree at the time of writing this. and finally, she celebrates the autistic tendency to repeat gestures, words, routines, (echophenomenality) as akin to a kind of nietzschean joyous affirmation of eternal recurrence (without drawing the connection explicitly).Even as someone who is quite absorbed in disability activism and autistic issues, this book completely changed and broadened my understanding in a way that I could not have expected or predicted before I had read it. The substance which is, a polemic on those that abuse those with autism by treating them as near monsters.