Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness

Thought in the Act

by Melanie Yergeau

In Authoring Autism M. Remi Yergeau defines neurodivergence as an identity—neuroqueerness—rather than an impairment. Using a queer theory framework, Yergeau notes the stereotypes that deny autistic people their humanity and the chance to define themselves while also challenging cognitive studies scholarship and its reification of the neurological passivity of autistics. 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. 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. 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. In so doing, they demonstrate how an autistic rhetoric requires the reconceptualization of rhetoric’s very essence.

Genres: Autistic Spectrum Disorder, Nonfiction, Disability, Psychology, Disability Studies, Queer, Theory

312 pages, Paperback

First published December 1, 2017

Reviews

[0 · Rating 3 out of 5]

(w)riting like t/his is pun-ishing to the reader(s?) and nearly always less smartifying and (un)queer than the writer (demirhetorically) "thinks" it will be

>:(

the basic gist of the book seems to be that autistics express themselves differently than allistics...which seems obvious to me. in the face of hegemonic schemas that pathologize and dehumanize autistics, it's worth insisting upon, but I did not appreciate parsing 250 pages of neologisms, jargon, and wordplay to get there.

some interesting questions about the relations between autism and queerness are forestalled by yergeau's rather annoying tendency to fall back upon the academic appropriation of "queerness" as signifying something akin to différance that can be completely divorced from the realms of sexuality and gender. which i hate. autism's dynamism and haecceity do not make it "queer" (nor do they make it "mestiza," ugh), they simply indicate its conceptual vagueness. moreover, as yergeau argues with the example of zeno's flying arrow, dynamism and vagueness are not *unique* to autism, but are properly ontological predicates that can be applied to all existing things. if literally anything and everything can be said to be "queer" (and i'll be damned if this is not the prerogative of parasitic *hip* theory), then the term becomes meaningless.

with that being said, i am thrilled to see a book about autism, written by an autistic person, that is critical of the dominant discursive frameworks that position autistics as, on the one hand, failed subjects, and on the other hand, advocates for them to be included in the universal category of humanity, where "human"=a rhetorical subject. yergeau argues that, regardless of whether they literally speak or not, autistics *do* possess rhetorical capacities in their embodied intentionality, which is socially oriented to a more-than-human world. 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. she eviscerates ABA and baron-cohen's cisheterosexualizing tendencies and suggests an ambiguous affinity between being autistic and being queer. and finally, she celebrates the autistic tendency to repeat gestures, words, routines, (echophenomenality) as akin to a kind of nietzschean joyous affirmation of eternal recurrence (without drawing the connection explicitly).

[A.D. · Rating 2 out of 5]

"Authoring Autism" is the worst of academic writing, wherein simple observations and ideas are discussed with such virtuosic ambiguity that the author almost deserves credit for rendering language itself the direct enemy of communication. This book is appropriative, elitist, and overblown in equal measure. It earns itself two stars for at least *sort of* having a point, even if it is largely lost in the weeds of absurd terminology and self-congratulatory navel-gazing in lieu of radical politics.

To be fair, Yergeau's book does anticipate several of these critiques-- especially the one about the navel-gazing. But just because one anticipates a critique, that doesn't render it invalid. And lampshading the flaws in one's own work is not the same thing as addressing them.

Another reviewer referred to the style in which this book is written as "punishing," and I couldn't agree more. To say the language is "inaccessible" would be putting it mildly. 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. Like, seriously? Did anyone even try reading this book out loud before it was published? Do so and you'll find that many of Yergeau's "fun" and "quirky" linguistic choices become borderline incomprehensible.

There is a fascinating book to be written on the overlap between queerness and autism, both in terms of how the two concepts have been framed throughout history, and how people labeled as "queer" and/or "autistic" have been (and continue to be) mistreated by society.

This is not that book.

In the proud tradition of many a white queer academic, Yergeau rips queerness from its historical, gendered, & racialized context, dilutes it to the point of parody, and proceeds to yoke it to the proverbial harness, apparently in the name of rendering all discourse on autism a spectral house of mirrors in which one can know nothing for certain and about which one can say even less. In Yergeau's world we trade intersectionality for fractionalism, agency for inertia, and meaningful analysis for hollow, smirking equivocation. (Just like Gerald Ford!)

In my opinion, if every permutation of the word "rhetoric" were cut from this book, it would be immeasurably improved. But then, I consider a reliance on dense idiosyncratic jargon to be both a sign of authorial bad faith AND a waste of my goddamn (autistic crip queer) time. But then, maybe that's just Yergeau "queering" my concept of "good writing."

Yeah, right.



Ok, sorry, ONE MORE THING (because my rigid autistic mind just can't let it go):

On pg. 186, Yergeau writes (on the subject of "demi" sexual/gender identities): "perhaps the person in question identifies as AFAB (assigned female at birth) and nothing more"

For those not in the know, ASAB language was developed within the trans community to make it possible to refer to the sex/gender one had been assigned by society without having to make a statement about one's personal identity in the process. So instead of saying "I was born a girl," for example, one could say "I was assigned female at birth." In the first sentence, history and personal identity are conflated. In the latter, they are not. That is, in fact, the whole fucking point.

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." One's status as AFAB or AMAB is a simple matter of fact, not identification, and Yergeau really should have recognized that.

This is, to be sure, a minor quibble-- but the fact that Yergeau couldn't be bothered to put in five minutes of research (or thirty seconds' worth of thought) so as to avoid such an obvious error is a more damning critique of the quality of analysis in this book than I could ever hope to make.

[Sarah Cavar · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a life-changing, world-altering text. 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. 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.

In addition, rather than simply looking at autistic (and neuroqueer more broadly) autonomy through a lens of lack, Yergeau beautifully illustrates the pleasurable crevices in which our counter-rhetorics bloom, stim, and echo, places in whose neurotypical-avoidance we find the greatest possible freedom. With an unexpected, delightful turn to theorization of asexual and demisexual experiences as evidence of the autistic "demi-rhetorician"'s power, Yergeau concludes with an opening, especially for queer and trans studies. I am so excited to think, feel, and learn with this text again and again.

[Rain · Rating 5 out of 5]

The first book about autism which I wholeheartedly recommend. The academic style is in some ways a necessary evil but is still unfortunately exclusionary. None the less, it's a sharp, insightful, and truthful book I recommend to anyone, if a crash course in queer theory and gender studies can be had first.

[Pelle "sometimes here" Parrafin]

I am like the JONKELER Sometimes I dip my fries in Ice Creme Yuo cannot control m e Welcom to my twisted mind... 10/10

[Magnus Lidbom]

I gave up at 10% of my kindle book. I bought it because it was recommended in Neuroqueer Heresies: Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Possibilities, a book that I very much appreciated. It touted this as the best and most complete critique of the pathology paradigm. I was stoked. I had little doubt I would love this book. Boy was I disappointed.

This book is nothing like what I hoped. The way it is written makes it all but incomprehensible to me. The way it seems to try to view everything about autism through the lens of how autism relates to rhetoric makes no sense to me at all. 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. 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. Perhaps you must have studied rhetoric extensively to have any chance of making much sense of this book. I have not, my interest is in neuroqueerness and autism.

Since I did not understand it nor get further than 10% I will not rate it. Perhaps it is brilliant if you understand it.

[Carol · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

It has been a good long while since I read a book about rhetoric, and I’d forgotten how hard it is. I’m not sure a reader would make it through without a background in literary theory. Fortunately, Yergeau infuses the text with a lot of personality and humor, and it’s a subject I have many strong feelings about: the idea that autism/neurodivergence is a narrative identity, and the best people to define and describe that identity are the people living it.

[Betsy · Rating 5 out of 5]

I absolutely loved this book! As an autistic person, myself, I thought it was a challenging read in many ways; but it was lovely. Melanie Yergeau uses words in ways that are thrilling.

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.

[a · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is quite engaging and readable for theory, I think!

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. 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. Yergeau unpacks this and other ways that the clinical literature on autism has been completely unaware of its own morass of paradoxes.

Contrary to another review here, I don’t believe Yergeau is attempting to assimilate autism to queerness. Rather the widely used concept of “neuroqueerness” refers to the fact that autism and queerness have been treated similarly by clinicians and by the broader culture—the conditions have been at times medicalized, attempts are made to train people out of it, the list goes on. So it makes sense to steal some tactics from queer theory when making autism theory. Yergeau in fact mentions in the first chapter that as both a queer person and an autist they are very wary of attempts to correlate autism and queerness, despite certain preliminary statistics that indicate that a greater percentage of autists are queer than the general population.

[elizabeth · Rating 5 out of 5]

→ 4.5 stars (★★★★.5)

this novel is a deep dive into autism (and neuroqueerness, more generally) from a disability theory and queer theory perspective, and i loved every second of it. Yergeau's writing is academic and dense with technical vocabulary, and therefore requires lots of attention and care to read, but i believe that their style suited the complex ideas they explored in their analysis.

Authoring Autism is no light read, but if you are looking for a brilliant theoretical analysis of autistic rhetoric and neuroqueerness, i recommend it very highly.

“Clinical rhetorics present serious challenges to disability disclosure. To claim autism is to claim rudeness, silence, tactlessness, nonpersonhood; it is to invite doubting others to lay-diagnose or question one's rhetorical competence. And yet it is precisely these claims and challenges that buttress much of the autistic culture movement's embrace of public disclosure, of uncloseting one's autism.”

[Dawn · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the funniest books I’ve read about autism. The writer grapples with concepts of rhetoric in incredibly personal and empowering ways. I’m not an academic (perhaps I’m a demi-academic) so this book felt to me like a really great self-help book: a complicated and complicating approach to neurodiversity and neuroqueerness that gave context and significance to many feelings I’ve found inexpressible in my life. As a parent of an autistic kiddo, I found the chapters on invitation and invention very informative and I will definitely reference as the spectre of middle school looms large over my daughter’s future. (The chapter on ABA was a bit more socially and politically geared but it’s something I’ll forward to anyone considering this kind of therapy).

[Aiden R]

i cant deal with trying to read this. i feel alienated as an autistic person as i feel i cant comprehend this book. i only got 10 pages and the word "rhetoric" has lost all meaning i dont get what she means and i feel dumb for not understanding and the thought of trying to for another 200 pages sounds worst than death. dnfed until i somehow get a phd of comphersention. also if anyone thought like i did that "nueroqueerness" was the intersections of being queer (lgbtqia+) and being nuerodivergent. then you are wrong and that is not what this book is about. im done.

[Jessica · Rating 5 out of 5]

"What autism provided was a discursive framework, a lens through which others could story my life. ... My very being became a story, a text in dire need of professional analysis. This, my body, this was autism - and suddenly, with the neuropsychologist's signature on my diagnostic papers, I was no longer my body's author." (p. 1)

"... autism politics routinely reward those who are multiply privileged. The logics of ableism are intertwined with the logics of racism, classism, and heterosexism." (p. 5)

"... 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. (p. 5)

"Autism research operates on the hope that there will be no autistic future." (p. 19)

"Autism is core to my very being. It's how I sense, interact with others, and process information. Autism is my rhetoric. But what's at risk here is who tells my story and, more broadly, who tells the story of my people. What's of concern is who gets to author our individual and collective identities, who gets to determine whether we are, in fact, narrative creatures, whether we are living beings in rhetorical bodies, whether we are even allowed to call ourselves human." (p. 21)

"Autistics don't tell us what we want to hear, nor do they tell it to us in the manner in which we wish to hear it." (p. 22)

"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." (p. 27)

"Autism disclosure is often agonistic, expectant of allistic refutation. 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." (p. 33)

"...researchers must confront the idea that being autistic confers ways of being, thinking, and making meaning that are not in and of themselves lesser - and may at times be advantageous" (p. 34).

"Autism, I am suggesting, is a mode of becoming, is continuous motion that defies the clinical" (p. 43).

"Ironically, champions of functioning labels often purport that eradicating such labels would collapse or singularize autistic difference; and yet, all the while, such continua are themselves a profound flattening of the diversity of humanity one might find under the label autism." (p. 51)

"... autistic writer Star Ford relates autistic perception as a negotiation between foreground and field, between expanse and parts, in which detail isn't experienced as detail but as direction of focus, as textural totality. .... Ford suggests that autism is a divergent way of perceiving, an interbodily, beyond-the-skin experiential of detail and overwhelm and intricacy. 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." (p. 56)

"Autistic moves remake moments" (p. 65).

"The neuroqueer is that which is in continuous, teleporting motion." (p.72-73)

"Queerness and disability may not be equivalent or even analogical, but they are resonant and interweaving constructs, and they are norm-shattering ways of moving," (p. 84) see more p. 85

"In clinical settings, autistic practices are often better termed autistic symptoms, for when autism modifies practice, practice resides in the pathological." (p. 90)

"Autistic people have long identified with or as the queer - whether by means of sexuality or gender identity, or by means of a queer asociality that fucks norms. ... One one level, autistics are of necessity queer because ours is a condition that defies sociality. .... autistic people theoretically hold little to no referentiality with regard to gender and sexuality, with regard to any norms of any kind. Ours is disorientation rather than orientation. Our relational capacities are queerly configured and queerly practiced." (p. 92-93)

"Behaviorist discourse employs the language of recovery ... 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." p 105

"Under a social model, societal barriers, segregation, barriers to inclusion, and discrimination are what constitutes disability. Moreover, social models of disability (especially U.K. models) generally make a distinction between disability and impairment. Whereas disability is social construction (and a social oppression), impairment represents embodies experience and the phenomena that accompany having a neuro/physio/divergent body. ... The social problems of disability, then, are not problems of brains, tissues, or bodies, but are rather societal infrastructures, material and conceptual, that privilege specific embodied experiences of the world." p. 107

"Many of the gains made in disability rights and community participation have arguably come into being because of the social model." p. 108

"In this professional moment, I became unprofessional: this is the effect that studying oneself often has, especially when self is a neuroqueer self." p. 138

"... the vast majority of autistics are not children. ... That adults can receive autism diagnoses often comes as a shock to those outside the autistic community, including the very professionals who conduct diagnostic assessments - because isn't autism a childhood thing?" p. 156

"... Krumins notes that others viewed her communion with an among things as a young girl being unladylike rather than a young girl being autistic. Cisnormativity governs autism's diagnostic constructions. ... 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. Becoming nonautistic is likewise becoming nonqueer-for anything that registers as socially deviant may fall under autism's purview." (p. 159)

"... diagnosis is clinically framed as identifying the pathological, generally for the purposes of eradicating or mitigating the freshly labeled pathology. To seek diagnosis for acceptance-for something like autism-flips the bird at what diagnosis generally intends." (p. 165)

"Part of the autistic experience is not being believed." (p. 167)

"In the absence of ethical, friendly, or sustained academic research on autistic rhetorics and cultures, autistic people have generated their own robust methodologies and means for determining, contesting, and theorizing notions of autistic ethos." (p 169)

"But I do not subscribe to functioning labels because functioning labels are inaccurate and dehumanizing, because functioning labels fail to capture the breadth and complexity and highly contextual interrelations of one's neurology and environment, both of which are plastic and malleable and dynamic. Functioning is the corporal gone capitalistic-it is an assumption that one's body and being can be quantitatively measured, that one's bodily outputs and bodily actions are neither outputs nor actions unless commodifiable." (p. 176)

"To be autistic is to live and lie in a between space-the crevices that neurotypicals can ignore often function as the entirety of what neuroqueer subjects perceive." (p. 177)

"Any approach to autism is an approach towards autistic people." p. 206
______________________________________________
Social stories that reinforce cis/heteronormative behaviors p. 29
trans and gender issues p. 70-71
Reginald "Neli" Latson (autistic while black) p.82
ABA p. 98, 147
tic vs stim

[jack]

'Under such logics, I have written this book, presumably unaware of my reader and my (non)self. The involuntary actions, thoughts, writings, and behaviours of my autistic body negate my claims to writerhood, rhetorichood, and narrativehood. Instead, this book might be better understood as a cluster of symptoms.

Achoo.

You're welcome.' (pg. 13)

–––

'Autistic narrative persists. It persists in the face of discourses that would render us arhetorical and tragically inhuman. It persists across genre and mode, much of it ephemeral and embodied in form. Autistic people persist and insist on the narrativity of their tics, their stims, their echoed words and phrases, their relations with objects and environs. We persist in involuting, in politicising the supposedly involuntary. We can't help it after all.' (pg. 23)

–––

'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. 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. Rather, it is to suggest that not only is autism a world (à la Sue Rubin), but that autism is a negotiation between rhetorical and arhetorical worlds. And, while at times these worlds may be idiosyncratic or mutually unintelligible, these worlds hold value, meaning, and at times meaninglesness. They are inventional movements, stimpoints that force us to question long-held notions about rhetoric and its privileged topoi.' (pg. 205)

–––

I filled up about 38 pages of my notebook with quotes while reading this over the course of a few weeks. It's one of the most intellectually stimulating and inspiring books that I've read in a very long time. Yergeau's writing is so rich, so multifaceted, so full of irony and sarcasm. I'm sure I'll be returning to this many times in the future.

[Aubrie Johnson · Rating 4 out of 5]

The field of psychological research surrounding autism has been inundated for some time with frustrated, time-poor parents desperate to help their children to succeed, or at least fit in. If this is you, I would not recommend this book (yet). On one hand, Authoring Autism is a thorough and thoughtful primer for any person, autistic or allistic, interested in understanding a wide range of issues relevant to autistic people in general from a high level.

On the other, it was difficult for me as a non-rhetorician to stay engaged in Yergeau's writing for any length of time. Rhetoricians don't exactly follow the same "less is more" mantra other writers go by, and instead prefer to lead you on a slow, careful, meandering walk through a garden of flowery language teeming with both 1) words that are incredibly important to the topic and possibly new to the reader, and 2) completely made-up words you've never seen before and will likely never see again, invented purely for rhetoric's sake. I mean...it's a book about neurological queerness and rhetoric, after all.

As an autistic psychotherapy student who is already familiar with these issues, I appreciated Yergeau's insights on agency, neuroqueer activism, and socialization from the lens of an autistic scholar, and I think if you're willing to take a long walk to get to those thoughts, you will enjoy this book, too. 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.

[Megan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I did not read this like academic literature is meant to be read, studiously, looking up words I did not understand. 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.

Still a very worthwhile read –– for me the book drove home the way that social and rhetorical norms "unperson" autistics, given that autistic people do not have access to or use intentionality and rhetoric in the same way, do not participate in persuasion or invention (which assumes two equal parties, often not the case), the way that like queerness, autism has been, often violently, suppressed by the medical and scientific communities in purported attempts at cures and that autistic people, like queer folks, are denied expertise on their own lived experience, because of that lived experience, the way that autism, like queerness, defies boundaries and crafts meaning and pleasure out of experiences and landscapes that are not inherently meaningful to those who share them.

I read this after somebody in my own life suggested I look into a diagnosis (!!) 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.

A lot of the reviews here pan the book because of it's difficult language. Honestly? *Insert GIF of Michael Bluth saying, "Well, I don't know what I expected." It's an academic book, it uses academic language. Could there be similar books or articles in non-academic language? Sure. Probably there should be. But that's not what this book is.

[Jessica DMJ · Rating 2 out of 5]

Writing this review as a queer autistic person. Was recommended this, and I feel really iffy about it. I am uncertain about the "academization" of the word "queer," for one, which did not help my opinion on the book. Personally, I do not find the academization of "queer" appropriate, as I think it takes away from the suffering associated with the word. But that's another debate.

The introduction and the first two chapters are incredibly difficult to read, as Yergeau uses a lot of academic jargon and phrases I'd consider inaccessible. I would consider myself educated; I'm in the first year of my masters degree at the time of writing this. If this book is difficult for a well-educated person to understand it, I can only wonder how difficult it is for those who aren't as privileged as I am. And that is a problem. Unless you're reading this on a computer, it gets tiring having to look up everything, and I gave up on doing that only a few pages in.

On that note, Yergeau defines some of these terms, but only once she is halfway or more than halfway through the book, which felt pointless to me. I think the book could benefit from a glossary, but it really needs to be more accessible in general.

Some good points were that I enjoyed Yergeau's sense of humour. There were jokes hidden in the footnotes, which I really appreciated. However, the "shit" joke got kind of weird because she kept using it throughout the whole book...but maybe that was the point.

[Joss Morfitt]

Incredibly arresting work of crip-queer theorisation: this leaves other works in the canon (I think specifically of McRuer’s Crip Theory) in the dust. I read this to understand better the ‘neuroqueer’ concept; I came away with an entirely new perspective on crip’s relationship to the neurological, on the anti- or demi-rhetorical mechanics of autistic invalidation, and on those fabulous parallels between cognitive divergence and its (queerly) sexual counterparts. While Nick Walker’s manifesto-approach to the neuroqueer presents a useful inroad, this blows the concept wide open. Pertinently, the book lays bare the true implications of a holistic, undiscriminating, and discursive queer identity, post-Cartesian in its focus on neuro-disability (as opposed to merely the somatic). In this idiom, queerness’ sexualised (and even gendered) alignments are recalibrated and rerouted towards the diversity of the neurological nebula. Fascinating comparisons between Aut behavioural therapies (such as Applied Behaviour Analysis or ABA) and queer conversion practices are evoked. It is an engrossing and convincing call for a more fluid mode of intersectional empowerment. And more than this, Yergeau’s prose is a dance. A vital text.

[Maya 維欣 · Rating 5 out of 5]

This should be required reading for anyone who considers themself a rhetorician or a humanist. Full stop.

If the author is dead, the allistic author is beyond dead and it’s high fucking time. Shoutout Yergeau for dealing the killing blow with rhetorical (hehe) finesse and delicious, brilliant, angry, hilarious prose.

My main frustration is the (admittedly necessary) adherence to academic voice, as I wish Yergeau’s ideas were accessible enough here to permeate popular discourse. But if you have the ability to parse this kind of writing, I charge you in the name of everything sacred in the universe to read. this. book. !!

[Chloe · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really loved this one, especially the introduction. The third chapter in particular started doing that thing that happens in academia where the text starts using its jargon kind of a lot, but if you interpret that as a kind of stim or echophenomenon perhaps it is an interesting locus of further writing itself. I am particularly drawn to thinking from the position of the nonhuman, of the 'us' that contains no 'i', no subjects or persons but only an open field of being in which I am just as other from my own hand as I am from my cat.

[Niza Cuéllar · Rating 1 out of 5]

It's impossible to comprehend anything that is said in this book without having to google some things. This book comes off as very angry and aggressive while trying to shove their ideology down your throat.

[Diane · Rating 5 out of 5]

Beautifully written. Wonderful insight on autism, its history with behavioral sciences and relationship with queerness.

[Nathaniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is great. V academic, but well worth a slog if you take your time and have a discussion buddy.

[Élaina Gauthier-Mamaril · Rating 5 out of 5]

Funny, compelling, invigorating. A must read for anyone interested in rhetoric, queerness, autism, disability, and philosophy.

[David Gray-Hammond · Rating 4 out of 5]

Book is very complex which may affect accessibility for some readers, but overall I vital text on the rhetorical discourse surrounding Autistic people.

[anonymous side quest · Rating 4 out of 5]

never thought i'd look at autism through queer theory

[Burton DeWitt]

DNF

[Molly Stewart-Gallus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Completely blew my mind.

Though, a bit heavy on the jargon.

As a warning, discusses heavy topics of ableism and ABA.

[Andie · Rating 4 out of 5]

4/5 stars because while I love the writing, I don’t know that I could’ve figured it all out on my own without the help of a class focusing on being neuroqueer.

I think about this book constantly

[Remy Jakobson · Rating 4 out of 5]

The language feels at times overly complex without reason. Overall, an amazing book.