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.

This is not just a landmark book; it's a book that opens up a whole terrain of discourse informed by the insights of queer theory and the disability rights movement. Yergeau carefully intertwines lived experience, autistic memoir, clinical discourse, and humanities theory (particularly rhetorical studies, narrative theory, disability studies, and queer theory) to achieve a highly insightful hybrid discourse. 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. It's impossible to comprehend anything that is said in this book without having to google some things.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. 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. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. In Yergeau's world we trade intersectionality for fractionalism, agency for inertia, and meaningful analysis for hollow, smirking equivocation. And, while at times these worlds may be idiosyncratic or mutually unintelligible, these worlds hold value, meaning, and at times meaninglesness.

Yergeau’s book is a welcome history of autism and critique of contemporary perceptions and 'treatments' of it. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. Whereas disability is social construction (and a social oppression), impairment represents embodies experience and the phenomena that accompany having a neuro/physio/divergent body.Sketching new terrains of thought, Authoring Autism gestures toward vibrant words, images, and textures that sit with us, and we feel their weight. 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? In this professional moment, I became unprofessional: this is the effect that studying oneself often has, especially when self is a neuroqueer self.

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. 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. I would consider myself educated; I'm in the first year of my masters degree at the time of writing this. Only by redefining the very definitions and conventions of rhetoric can we begin to attend to these autistic narratives on their own terms.also if anyone thought like i did that "nueroqueerness" was the intersections of being queer (lgbtqia+) and being nuerodivergent.