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

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Yergeau argues both that autistics are capable of intentional rhetoric and that even if they weren’t, non-intentionality has its own rhetoricity which has been overlooked to horrifying results in clinical contexts. 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. and, to be honest, it's made me reluctant to pursue either an unofficial or official diagnosis –– unofficial because while I too struggle with intentionality and subtext in verbal communication in particular, I do not experience the physical difficulties Yergeau charts here as part of her experience, official because the book leaves no doubt that autistic folks face very real discrimination and condescension on the basis of that diagnosis. Ford suggests that autism is a divergent way of perceiving, an interbodily, beyond-the-skin experiential of detail and overwhelm and intricacy. Many of the gains made in disability rights and community participation have arguably come into being because of the social model.

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. Perhaps you must have studied rhetoric extensively to have any chance of making much sense of this book. 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. It is an insightful, often refreshingly irreverent argument that should be read by professors, administrators, and students.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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

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. Using storying as their method, they present an alternative view of autistic rhetoricity by foregrounding the cunning rhetorical abilities of autistics and by framing autism as a narrative condition wherein autistics are the best-equipped people to define their experience. 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. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average.Becoming nonautistic is likewise becoming nonqueer-for anything that registers as socially deviant may fall under autism's purview.