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

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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.

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. But then, I consider a reliance on dense idiosyncratic jargon to be both a sign of authorial bad faith AND a waste of my goddamn (autistic crip queer) time.Not only does Yergeau do a fantastic job of giving you a well-rounded understanding of these issues by the end of the book, they make these issues important to you in a way they never were.

I often had to pause and look up word-meanings and such (which is unusual for me to need to do), but it was 100% worth it and I'm planning to reread this book every year until I am unable to read. she eviscerates ABA and baron-cohen's cisheterosexualizing tendencies and suggests an ambiguous affinity between being autistic and being queer. 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.

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. 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. 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.