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A review by jessicaleza
Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness by Melanie Yergeau
5.0
"What autism provided was a discursive framework, a lens through which others could story my life. ... My very being became a story, a text in dire need of professional analysis. 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." (p. 1)
"... autism politics routinely reward those who are multiply privileged. The logics of ableism are intertwined with the logics of racism, classism, and heterosexism." (p. 5)
"... 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. (p. 5)
"Autism research operates on the hope that there will be no autistic future." (p. 19)
"Autism is core to my very being. It's how I sense, interact with others, and process information. Autism is my rhetoric. But what's at risk here is who tells my story and, more broadly, who tells the story of my people. What's of concern is who gets to author our individual and collective identities, who gets to determine whether we are, in fact, narrative creatures, whether we are living beings in rhetorical bodies, whether we are even allowed to call ourselves human." (p. 21)
"Autistics don't tell us what we want to hear, nor do they tell it to us in the manner in which we wish to hear it." (p. 22)
"Autism treatment enterprises, many of which share origin stories with gay conversion therapies, enact a rehabilitative response as a means of de-queering the autist." (p. 27)
"Autism disclosure is often agonistic, expectant of allistic refutation. The ability to say, "I have autism," for example, is often viewed as evidence that one does not have autism - or, at least, not real or severe autism." (p. 33)
"...researchers must confront the idea that being autistic confers ways of being, thinking, and making meaning that are not in and of themselves lesser - and may at times be advantageous" (p. 34).
"Autism, I am suggesting, is a mode of becoming, is continuous motion that defies the clinical" (p. 43).
"Ironically, champions of functioning labels often purport that eradicating such labels would collapse or singularize autistic difference; and yet, all the while, such continua are themselves a profound flattening of the diversity of humanity one might find under the label autism." (p. 51)
"... autistic writer Star Ford relates autistic perception as a negotiation between foreground and field, between expanse and parts, in which detail isn't experienced as detail but as direction of focus, as textural totality. .... Ford suggests that autism is a divergent way of perceiving, an interbodily, beyond-the-skin experiential of detail and overwhelm and intricacy. It is not the prosocial rhetoric of making toy cars go vroom, but is rather an engagement with the materiality of the toy car abd tge rubbery feeling of wheels against skin." (p. 56)
"Autistic moves remake moments" (p. 65).
"The neuroqueer is that which is in continuous, teleporting motion." (p.72-73)
"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. 84) see more p. 85
"In clinical settings, autistic practices are often better termed autistic symptoms, for when autism modifies practice, practice resides in the pathological." (p. 90)
"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. ... One one level, autistics are of necessity queer because ours is a condition that defies sociality. .... autistic people theoretically hold little to no referentiality with regard to gender and sexuality, with regard to any norms of any kind. Ours is disorientation rather than orientation. Our relational capacities are queerly configured and queerly practiced." (p. 92-93)
"Behaviorist discourse employs the language of recovery ... While behaviorism makes no claim of cure, it does make claims of optimal outcomes, lessened severity, and residual (as opposed to full blown) disability, Recoverym then, is not the process of becoming straight or cisgender or nondisabled, but is rather the process of faking the becoming of normativity." p 105
"Under a social model, societal barriers, segregation, barriers to inclusion, and discrimination are what constitutes disability. Moreover, social models of disability (especially U.K. models) generally make a distinction between disability and impairment. Whereas disability is social construction (and a social oppression), impairment represents embodies experience and the phenomena that accompany having a neuro/physio/divergent body. ... The social problems of disability, then, are not problems of brains, tissues, or bodies, but are rather societal infrastructures, material and conceptual, that privilege specific embodied experiences of the world." p. 107
"Many of the gains made in disability rights and community participation have arguably come into being because of the social model." p. 108
"In this professional moment, I became unprofessional: this is the effect that studying oneself often has, especially when self is a neuroqueer self." p. 138
"... the vast majority of autistics are not children. ... 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?" p. 156
"... Krumins notes that others viewed her communion with an among things as a young girl being unladylike rather than a young girl being autistic. Cisnormativity governs autism's diagnostic constructions. ... 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. Becoming nonautistic is likewise becoming nonqueer-for anything that registers as socially deviant may fall under autism's purview." (p. 159)
"... diagnosis is clinically framed as identifying the pathological, generally for the purposes of eradicating or mitigating the freshly labeled pathology. To seek diagnosis for acceptance-for something like autism-flips the bird at what diagnosis generally intends." (p. 165)
"Part of the autistic experience is not being believed." (p. 167)
"In the absence of ethical, friendly, or sustained academic research on autistic rhetorics and cultures, autistic people have generated their own robust methodologies and means for determining, contesting, and theorizing notions of autistic ethos." (p 169)
"But I do not subscribe to functioning labels because functioning labels are inaccurate and dehumanizing, because functioning labels fail to capture the breadth and complexity and highly contextual interrelations of one's neurology and environment, both of which are plastic and malleable and dynamic. Functioning is the corporal gone capitalistic-it is an assumption that one's body and being can be quantitatively measured, that one's bodily outputs and bodily actions are neither outputs nor actions unless commodifiable." (p. 176)
"To be autistic is to live and lie in a between space-the crevices that neurotypicals can ignore often function as the entirety of what neuroqueer subjects perceive." (p. 177)
"Any approach to autism is an approach towards autistic people." p. 206
______________________________________________
Social stories that reinforce cis/heteronormative behaviors p. 29
trans and gender issues p. 70-71
Reginald "Neli" Latson (autistic while black) p.82
ABA p. 98, 147
tic vs stim
"... autism politics routinely reward those who are multiply privileged. The logics of ableism are intertwined with the logics of racism, classism, and heterosexism." (p. 5)
"... 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. (p. 5)
"Autism research operates on the hope that there will be no autistic future." (p. 19)
"Autism is core to my very being. It's how I sense, interact with others, and process information. Autism is my rhetoric. But what's at risk here is who tells my story and, more broadly, who tells the story of my people. What's of concern is who gets to author our individual and collective identities, who gets to determine whether we are, in fact, narrative creatures, whether we are living beings in rhetorical bodies, whether we are even allowed to call ourselves human." (p. 21)
"Autistics don't tell us what we want to hear, nor do they tell it to us in the manner in which we wish to hear it." (p. 22)
"Autism treatment enterprises, many of which share origin stories with gay conversion therapies, enact a rehabilitative response as a means of de-queering the autist." (p. 27)
"Autism disclosure is often agonistic, expectant of allistic refutation. The ability to say, "I have autism," for example, is often viewed as evidence that one does not have autism - or, at least, not real or severe autism." (p. 33)
"...researchers must confront the idea that being autistic confers ways of being, thinking, and making meaning that are not in and of themselves lesser - and may at times be advantageous" (p. 34).
"Autism, I am suggesting, is a mode of becoming, is continuous motion that defies the clinical" (p. 43).
"Ironically, champions of functioning labels often purport that eradicating such labels would collapse or singularize autistic difference; and yet, all the while, such continua are themselves a profound flattening of the diversity of humanity one might find under the label autism." (p. 51)
"... autistic writer Star Ford relates autistic perception as a negotiation between foreground and field, between expanse and parts, in which detail isn't experienced as detail but as direction of focus, as textural totality. .... Ford suggests that autism is a divergent way of perceiving, an interbodily, beyond-the-skin experiential of detail and overwhelm and intricacy. It is not the prosocial rhetoric of making toy cars go vroom, but is rather an engagement with the materiality of the toy car abd tge rubbery feeling of wheels against skin." (p. 56)
"Autistic moves remake moments" (p. 65).
"The neuroqueer is that which is in continuous, teleporting motion." (p.72-73)
"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. 84) see more p. 85
"In clinical settings, autistic practices are often better termed autistic symptoms, for when autism modifies practice, practice resides in the pathological." (p. 90)
"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. ... One one level, autistics are of necessity queer because ours is a condition that defies sociality. .... autistic people theoretically hold little to no referentiality with regard to gender and sexuality, with regard to any norms of any kind. Ours is disorientation rather than orientation. Our relational capacities are queerly configured and queerly practiced." (p. 92-93)
"Behaviorist discourse employs the language of recovery ... While behaviorism makes no claim of cure, it does make claims of optimal outcomes, lessened severity, and residual (as opposed to full blown) disability, Recoverym then, is not the process of becoming straight or cisgender or nondisabled, but is rather the process of faking the becoming of normativity." p 105
"Under a social model, societal barriers, segregation, barriers to inclusion, and discrimination are what constitutes disability. Moreover, social models of disability (especially U.K. models) generally make a distinction between disability and impairment. Whereas disability is social construction (and a social oppression), impairment represents embodies experience and the phenomena that accompany having a neuro/physio/divergent body. ... The social problems of disability, then, are not problems of brains, tissues, or bodies, but are rather societal infrastructures, material and conceptual, that privilege specific embodied experiences of the world." p. 107
"Many of the gains made in disability rights and community participation have arguably come into being because of the social model." p. 108
"In this professional moment, I became unprofessional: this is the effect that studying oneself often has, especially when self is a neuroqueer self." p. 138
"... the vast majority of autistics are not children. ... 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?" p. 156
"... Krumins notes that others viewed her communion with an among things as a young girl being unladylike rather than a young girl being autistic. Cisnormativity governs autism's diagnostic constructions. ... 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. Becoming nonautistic is likewise becoming nonqueer-for anything that registers as socially deviant may fall under autism's purview." (p. 159)
"... diagnosis is clinically framed as identifying the pathological, generally for the purposes of eradicating or mitigating the freshly labeled pathology. To seek diagnosis for acceptance-for something like autism-flips the bird at what diagnosis generally intends." (p. 165)
"Part of the autistic experience is not being believed." (p. 167)
"In the absence of ethical, friendly, or sustained academic research on autistic rhetorics and cultures, autistic people have generated their own robust methodologies and means for determining, contesting, and theorizing notions of autistic ethos." (p 169)
"But I do not subscribe to functioning labels because functioning labels are inaccurate and dehumanizing, because functioning labels fail to capture the breadth and complexity and highly contextual interrelations of one's neurology and environment, both of which are plastic and malleable and dynamic. Functioning is the corporal gone capitalistic-it is an assumption that one's body and being can be quantitatively measured, that one's bodily outputs and bodily actions are neither outputs nor actions unless commodifiable." (p. 176)
"To be autistic is to live and lie in a between space-the crevices that neurotypicals can ignore often function as the entirety of what neuroqueer subjects perceive." (p. 177)
"Any approach to autism is an approach towards autistic people." p. 206
______________________________________________
Social stories that reinforce cis/heteronormative behaviors p. 29
trans and gender issues p. 70-71
Reginald "Neli" Latson (autistic while black) p.82
ABA p. 98, 147
tic vs stim