Letters To My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism

Product Information

Once you have been pushed outside the first person plural, anything might be done to you, anything might happen.” PDF / EPUB File Name: Letters_to_My_Weird_Sisters_-_Joanne_Limburg.pdf, Letters_to_My_Weird_Sisters_-_Joanne_Limburg.epub There are things in the world that need fixing, and you cannot fix them without pointing out that they are broken; the fact that both the pointing out and the fixing makes comfortable people less comfortable is no reason not to do what you know to be right."

Letters to My Weird Sisters: On Book Review: Joanne Limburg’s Letters to My Weird Sisters: On

That being said, it is fully Joanne Limburgs prerogative to place focus on whomever she sees fit in a book of her own making. Simply a personal preference on my behalf. Whether they were women who went against the grain, or women whose identities and behaviours clashed with wider society (Jews and people with mental illness during the time of the Nazis, women behaving 'erratically' during a time of witch purges), Limburg's letters to these women feel like both an apology for how they were treated, and an attempt to find commonality with them. As part of this, Limburg weaves in her own stories and experiences, and, in doing so, makes an often beautiful and heartbreaking plea for understanding and action. Then an old friend of Limburg’s from Cambridge shifted her understanding of those criteria. Her friend said she had Asperger Syndrome, an autism spectrum diagnosis then (less now) applied to people who might experience some challenges but who displayed high intelligence and unimpaired language skills. “She wasn’t the stereotype at all!” says Limburg, still sounding surprised. “She was very sociable, empathetic… a very good actor. Then I typed ‘Aspergers’ and ‘women’ into Google. I’d never put the two words together before. And there I was, very recognisably, at the intersection.” While surviving the decade after graduation working at an assortment of short-lived jobs (including a comically inappropriate stint as a careers officer), Limburg met her future husband – a computer scientist called Chris – in her late twenties. “Dating was horrible,” she tells me. “Autistic women don’t simper. We have no interest in making a man feel big. Chris has been my only proper ‘relationship’, as opposed to ‘encounter’.”The letter to Virginia Woolf explores internalized ableism and the depiction of outcast femme characters in literature with examples pulled from Woolf’s biographical writings and Mrs. Dalloway, Stephen King’s Carrie, and Margaret Drabble’s novels. The letter to Adelheid Bloch speaks to Limburg’s experience as a Jewish and disabled woman. The letter to Frau V speaks to Limburg’s experience as a disabled mother and the child of a mother who did her best to advocate for her daughter in a society that offered absolutely no recourse to the kind of help and support she and her child needed. The letter to Katharina Kepler focused on the traumatic and literally life-threatening effects of social isolation and stigmatization of disabled people. And finally, the letter to the late Caron Freeborn is an emotional and moving “thank you” from the author to a fellow Autistic writer, inspiration, and friend. Letters to My Weird Sisters is a book where the author writes to four women in history who she identifies as her weird sisters. They are women that were outcasted from society and judged for their ‘not normal’ behaviour. In her sixth decade, Limburg reflects that “there is cultural space for outspoken older women. We still get vilified. But nobody knows what to do with you when you’re 22 and you think you have a speaking part. Being a girl is about looking cool or looking accommodating. It’s not about speech.” Because she experiences other people’s distress quite acutely, Limburg has developed a stereotypically female tendency to “smooth the room because I can’t cope with the jaggedness”. Limburg’s GP referred her to a specialist clinic where she was asked to fill in questionnaires which, she felt, suggested that medics were still clinging to outdated (and classically male) ideas of autism. “One question asked if I would prefer to go to the library or the theatre. I actually would prefer the library but some autistic people would choose the theatre. There are a lot of autistic actors [including Sir Anthony Hopkins], which makes sense because what are we doing to fit in, if not constantly acting? Another question asked if I had trouble understanding fiction. No I don’t, thank you very much!”

Letters To My Weird Sisters – Atlantic Books

Limburg describes movingly her own struggles as a new mother and the pressure of society's expectations...Through such delicately intertwined experiences, Limburg quietly shouts for change.' Times Literary Supplement Although feminist and gender perspectives have been employed to analyse a number of disability-related topics, autism––and neurodiversity more generally––occupies a limited space in the literature. The experiences of adult autistic women, in particular, have been largely under-explored and un-theorised by feminist frameworks. In this lacuna, British essayist and poet Joanne Limburg’s recent book, Letters to My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism (2021), establishes the foundations for a much-needed conversation between feminism and neurodiversity.Bettelheim, Bruno (1967) The Empty Fortress: Infantile Autism and the Birth of the Self. New York: Free Press. As Limburg writes of Woolf, the very nature and texture of their failures feels so familiar to me. Coming home, a mothering, a thought to think through. Thankful.