Joana

“I had naively thought that my diagnosis was all the evidence I needed to obtain the assistance I was asking for–I hadn’t realized that I had to perform the role of someone with that diagnosis. I hadn’t realized that this role necessitated that I display some kind of perceptible inferiority to my assessor. I had often failed at being a woman. Now, apparently, I was failing to be autistic.”
― Joanne Limburg, Letters to My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism

“What I understand this to mean is that adulthood is not a developmental stage but a social position, and as such cannot be attained or maintained without the support and acknowledgement of others. And what others are acknowledging is not the state of one’s innermost psychological, mental or spiritual development–whatever that may mean–but the observable adherence to certain norms, of speech, of behaviour, of appearance, and the successful performance of certain roles.”
― Joanne Limburg, Letters to My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism

“If a woman does not comply, then she is the problem, the ‘feminist killjoy’, the Old Dragon, the Battleaxe, the Termagant, the Nippy Sweety, the Uppity Cow, the Bitch. I’ve come to understand all that, and also to understand that ableism works in the same way, that as an autistic person I am not supposed to make assertions that cause non-autistic people–parents of autistic children, autistic professionals–to feel bad about themselves. If, as an autistic person, I make a non-autistic person feel bad about themselves in relation to autism, it must be because I am a defective person, lacking both an adult understanding of my own condition and empathy for the individuals who are trying so patiently to cope with the consequences of it. I see this very argument–if I must dignify it with that word–used on social media again and again, whenever an autistic person seeks to advocate for autistic people as a group.”
― Joanne Limburg, Letters to My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism

“In the 1860s and ’70s, the Victorians trained their talent for productivity and standardization onto the school system. In 1880, education became compulsory for all children aged between five and ten. This made many things possible for the first time: mass literacy was one; the establishment of a benchmark for normal cognitive development was another. Not only possible, but necessary. For efficiency in mass production, you need your employees to work at more or less the same speed. For efficiency in mass education, you need your pupils to learn and develop at more or less the same rate. Hence the emergence of a new problem in need of a solution: the slow or ‘backward’ child.”
― Joanne Limburg, Letters to My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism