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

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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. Rather the widely used concept of “neuroqueerness” refers to the fact that autism and queerness have been treated similarly by clinicians and by the broader culture—the conditions have been at times medicalized, attempts are made to train people out of it, the list goes on. Yergeau unpacks this and other ways that the clinical literature on autism has been completely unaware of its own morass of paradoxes. Another reviewer referred to the style in which this book is written as "punishing," and I couldn't agree more. 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.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. 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.Unless you're reading this on a computer, it gets tiring having to look up everything, and I gave up on doing that only a few pages in. 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. Contending that autism represents a queer way of being that simultaneously embraces and rejects the rhetorical, Yergeau shows how autistic people queer the lines of rhetoric, humanity, and agency. Thus, in seeking to trouble the western-centric, ableist, heteronormative claims of rhetoric, Authoring Autism also disrupts conceptions of the normative human subject.

Authoring Autism will be appropriate for graduate courses in rhetorical theory, whether feminist, queer, disability, posthuman, material, or embodied. Authoring Autism" is the worst of academic writing, wherein simple observations and ideas are discussed with such virtuosic ambiguity that the author almost deserves credit for rendering language itself the direct enemy of communication. Through her many invitational gestures Yergeau provocatively intervenes in the readings of the rhetoric of normalcy while also evoking new possibilities for distinctly different autistic rhetorics.The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. 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. Through exploring paradoxes such as those in the conceptions of passivity and activity, Authoring Autism provokes its readers to reconsider and trouble the taken for granted stories that circulate about autism.

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. 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. They are inventional movements, stimpoints that force us to question long-held notions about rhetoric and its privileged topoi. i only got 10 pages and the word "rhetoric" has lost all meaning i dont get what she means and i feel dumb for not understanding and the thought of trying to for another 200 pages sounds worst than death.

it is impossible to deny that the arguments structuring public knowledges, understandings, and felt senses of autism are grossly ableist, powerfully violent, and unremarkably nonautistic.