Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness
Melanie Yergeau
Top 10 Best Quotes
“Autistic traits, taken together, represent everything that allistics devalue in an audience or social exchange.”
“Part of the autistic experience is not being believed.”
“I believe that disclosure represents a particular kind of inventional site within autism land. Because autism, in the cultural imagination, is an ambiguous and often mystery-laden construct, any disclosure around autism invokes questions, invokes guesswork, incites demands for particularity. One cannot claim autism without being pressed for more -- more information, more cross-examination, more refutation, more response, more words flowing from more mouths. But there is likewise a problem of ethos (or kakoethos, to quote Jenell Johnson) inherent in these disclosures, wherein autistic people are figured as lacking authority to speak on or from within autism. Autistic academic Dinah Murray laments these figurations of autism and ethos, noting, "Disclosure of an autism spectrum diagnosis means disclosure of the fundamentally flawed personhood implied by [autism's] diagnostic criteria. It is likely to precipitate a negative judgment of capacity involving permanent loss of credibility." In disclosing autism, we are both too autistic and not autistic enough...”
“Echophenomena, such as autistic echoing of phrases, are largely considered involuntary, even if such echoing is done voluntarily. (Such are the paradoxes of compliance.) Conversely, imitation, such as complying with a behavioral analyst's demand to mirror her jumping body, is regarded as voluntary, even if it is coerced or scripted.”
“What ABA has come to signal for autistics is an in-made rhetorical paradox from which escape is difficult: the laughable presumption that autistics can only communicate their feelings about ABA because they've endured ABA.”
“The rhetorical training of ABA might be best understood as a kind of "we are always watching you.”
“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 corporeal 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.”
“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.”
“...the default assumption is that it's better to be nonautistic than it is to be autistic, always. And this assumption has done great damage to autistic and nonautistic people alike.”
“...ABA doesn't aim to offer neuroqueer children new repertoires of meaning. To smile isn't to signify one's contentment; it's to comply with a behavioral and prosocial demand.”
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Book Keywords:
allism, capitalistic, feelings, assumptions, aba, surveillance, compliance, dismissed, double-standards, inherent-value, commodification, coercion, behaviorism, functioning-labels, rhetoric, dismissal, abuse, autism, social-norms, disclosure, credibility, communication, autistic, applied-behavioral-analysis, autistic-author
