We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. Deftly integrates rich theoretical analysis with moments of humor, irony, autoethnography (autie-ethnography), and poetic insight.

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. Yergeau wishes for us to embrace a future rhetoric full of tics and stims, and if this book is a glimpse of that future, it’s one every rhetorician should be advocating for. In Authoring Autism Melanie Yergeau defines neurodivergence as an identity—neuroqueerness—rather than an impairment.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. 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. 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. 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. This is an excellent book and a major contribution to our understanding of the cultural, political, and rhetorical dynamics of autism.

Thus, in seeking to trouble the western-centric, ableist, heteronormative claims of rhetoric, Authoring Autism also disrupts conceptions of the normative human subject. 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. For the love of god dont talk about a macro structures like the pfc and some other random set of circuits you may have once seen while skimming a pop sci article or a psych 101 class. Beneath the humor, however, bubbles a righteous and justified rage that such a book even has to be written, that Yergeau essentially has to spend all this time pointing out that autism is not, in fact, a lack (as everything from the clinical literature to organizations that at least ostensibly 'speak' for autism seem to portray it as); that she has to defend herself and autistic people as human.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. 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. 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. 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. 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.

Yergeau’s much-needed scholarship and activism crack open academic space to make room for those of us who do not fit the academy’s mandates for logic and legibility. I filled up about 38 pages of my notebook with quotes while reading this over the course of a few weeks. it’s also just so upsetting to consider in such depth and with such rigor how the autistic is constructed in opposition to all that is human. The substance which is, a polemic on those that abuse those with autism by treating them as near monsters. 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.

Authoring Autism will be a book of keen interest to disability studies scholars and activists who are engaged in intersectional approaches to troubling the rhetoric of normalcy. One of the ways Yergeau (10) questions the rhetoric of autistic bodies that are out of control, is by problematizing "the treatment enterprises that structure an autistic child's life. 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. Becoming nonautistic is likewise becoming nonqueer-for anything that registers as socially deviant may fall under autism's purview. 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.