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

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And, while at times these worlds may be idiosyncratic or mutually unintelligible, these worlds hold value, meaning, and at times meaninglesness. For the love of god dont talk about a macro structures like the pfc and some other random set of circuits you may have once seen while skimming a pop sci article or a psych 101 class. In Authoring Autism Melanie Yergeau defines neurodivergence as an identity—neuroqueerness—rather than an impairment. I filled up about 38 pages of my notebook with quotes while reading this over the course of a few weeks.

If you're just beginning to learn about neurodivergence, there are many other, more accessible books to start with, like Divergent Mind: Thriving in a World That Wasn't Designed for You or NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity.Further, it seems to me that the way it uses academic words does not function to make it more precise and concise but rather the exact opposite. Melanie Yergeau’s double perspective as a rhetorician and autistic activist that makes Authoring Autism valuable to a larger audience.

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. 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.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. here, yergeau draws upon merleau-pontyan theorists to elucidate the ways in which autistic subjectivies are expressed through pre-symbolic, affective and embodied modes of communication. 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. Forged from a partnership between a university press and a library, Project MUSE is a trusted part of the academic and scholarly community it serves. Using storying as her method, she presents 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.