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

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Ford suggests that autism is a divergent way of perceiving, an interbodily, beyond-the-skin experiential of detail and overwhelm and intricacy. 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. One's status as AFAB or AMAB is a simple matter of fact, not identification, and Yergeau really should have recognized that. Yergeau unpacks this and other ways that the clinical literature on autism has been completely unaware of its own morass of paradoxes.

While initially a challenge to break into (at least for me, as a non-rhetorician), Yergeau's writing is intimate and entertaining, and their application of rhetorical concepts to autistic experience was a great help to my understanding. Melanie Yergeau’s double perspective as a rhetorician and autistic activist that makes Authoring Autism valuable to a larger audience. While behaviorism makes no claim of cure, it does make claims of optimal outcomes, lessened severity, and residual (as opposed to full blown) disability, Recoverym then, is not the process of becoming straight or cisgender or nondisabled, but is rather the process of faking the becoming of normativity.To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Personally, I do not find the academization of "queer" appropriate, as I think it takes away from the suffering associated with the word. So saying that one "identifies as AFAB and nothing more" makes about as much sense as saying one "identifies as having been born in Cleveland. 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. In so doing, they demonstrate how an autistic rhetoric requires the reconceptualization of rhetoric’s very essence.

Authoring Autism will be appropriate for graduate courses in rhetorical theory, whether feminist, queer, disability, posthuman, material, or embodied. 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. This is not to deny the existence of disability, nor is it to suggest that every autistic action is of necessity a symbolic, meaningful, or social move. Yergeau's queered and disabled reading of rhetoric unfolds through many "in" sights into the dehumanizing gaze of pathological, clinical, and diagnostic renderings of autistic people.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. 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. Only by redefining the very definitions and conventions of rhetoric can we begin to attend to these autistic narratives on their own terms. Yergeau’s book is a welcome history of autism and critique of contemporary perceptions and 'treatments' of it.