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

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You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. On the other, it was difficult for me as a non-rhetorician to stay engaged in Yergeau's writing for any length of time. 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.

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. Krumins notes that others viewed her communion with an among things as a young girl being unladylike rather than a young girl being autistic.Yergeau questions and critiques the common taken for granted trope of the out of control autistic body that is simultaneously representative of being too active in non-normative ways (e.

If you don't understand rhetoric, if you don't know queer theory, and even if you know nothing about disability studies - read it. Sketching new terrains of thought, Authoring Autism gestures toward vibrant words, images, and textures that sit with us, and we feel their weight. In so doing, they demonstrate how an autistic rhetoric requires the reconceptualization of rhetoric’s very essence. Beneath the humor, however, bubbles a righteous and justified rage that such a book even has to be written, that Yergeau essentially has to spend all this time pointing out that autism is not, in fact, a lack (as everything from the clinical literature to organizations that at least ostensibly 'speak' for autism seem to portray it as); that she has to defend herself and autistic people as human. g. twitching, flapping, spinning) as well as too passive, as in the inability of the mind to contain or constrain what is read through the normative gaze as [End Page 483] excessive bodily motion.It's one of the most intellectually stimulating and inspiring books that I've read in a very long time. This in some ways contradictory tack is necessary because, as Yergeau shows, clinicians have denied the rhetoricity of autists in contradictory ways, saying at once that autists are too autistic to be able to weigh in on their own condition, and yet also not autistic enough to be able to weigh in on autism, a diagnosis that also applies to many nonverbal people.

To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Winner of the 2019 Conference on College Composition and Communication (CCCC) Lavender Rhetorics Award for Excellence in Queer Scholarship Book Award. 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.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. Becoming nonautistic is likewise becoming nonqueer-for anything that registers as socially deviant may fall under autism's purview. They also critique early intensive behavioral interventions—which have much in common with gay conversion therapy—and questions the ableist privileging of intentionality and diplomacy in rhetorical traditions. As a reader I have been changed, my attention drawn to the necessity to attend not only to the style, and to writing, but to the terms according to which some of us are given access to these voices we too often take for granted. 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.

The substance which is, a polemic on those that abuse those with autism by treating them as near monsters.In this thorough, rigorous, and thoroughly, rigorously playful look into the rhetorical dehumanization of queer(ed) autistic subjects, Yergeau melds critical historical analysis with autie-biography through theories as "low" as the shit-stained wall and high as the very tip of the ivory tower. Thus, in seeking to trouble the western-centric, ableist, heteronormative claims of rhetoric, Authoring Autism also disrupts conceptions of the normative human subject.