aspie rhetor

On November 19, I participated in a panel at NATTAP. Now in my fourth year of graduate study, I’ve presented at several academic conferences. This conference, however, was unlike any I’ve previously attended. I suppose, more than an academic conference, it was a “professional” conference (though that lexical distinction remains somewhat fuzzy in my brain — who says that academic isn’t professional?). I spoke for ten minutes about the women’s Asperger’s group that is hosted/supported by the Nisonger Center at OSU.

This was very uncomfortable for me, as are most conferences, I suppose. This discomfort, however, stemmed from something different — it wasn’t simply a matter of my unease with speaking and socializing. Rather than positioning myself as someone with “expertise” on a subject, I was positioned as the beneficiary of someone else’s expertise. Rather than positioning myself as an academic invested in a particular line of inquiry, I was positioned as the line of inquiry itself. And it was really, really weird.

Jim Sinclair, one of the founders of Autism Network International, coined the term “self-narrating zoo exhibit” to describe the role spectrumites are frequently squeezed into at NT-dominated autism conferences: that of the weirdo, that of the puzzle, that of the walking-autism-answer box. This role resembles not merely that of a freak, but that of a freak who is obligated to answer every question that comes his way, no matter how personal or ridiculous.

In the days prior to the conference, I began to worry that I might be construed as the panel’s aspie specimen, the magic eight-ball of aspiedom. My ten-minute task was to describe the challenges that I encounter as a woman with Asperger’s and how the women’s group has been helpful. In going forward with speaking, I had to continually remind myself why my presence at this venue might be useful, might be important: there are very, very few support programs for adults on the spectrum and even fewer for women on the spectrum. Moreover, as Amanda Baggs describes, some questions are OK questions — I’d rather parents seek answers from spectrumites than from celebrities, DAN!, or Autism Speaks.

Despite the potential positives, I was very queasy about all of this, about how I would be treated and represented, and even my walk across the convention center parking lot heightened my nervousness: never before have I seen so many puzzle bumper stickers so thickly concentrated in one geographical location. So much of this event was a question of audience, an audience against which I felt very, very alien. And as much as I want us/them binaries to be broken down — NT/autistic, aspie/autie, PWD/TAB — I felt like a neon them for a day.

Yet, despite my feelings of foreignness (which, to be honest, I’ve felt since my earliest memories), the panel wasn’t psychologically devastating for me. It was largely positive. I inadvertently did something smart in my presentation: as I was discussing some of my academic/vocational challenges, I mentioned how every time I attend a conference, I get depressed because I can’t socially navigate, and I hate the Q&A sessions at the end of presentations because, inevitably, someone asks me something for which I haven’t scripted a response, and spontaneity freaks me out. My railing against questions, according to a fellow grad student in the audience, kept NTs from asking me questions. If I’m right about this audience-empathy thing (which would be nice — being right is fun), then perhaps NTs need to be led by the hand as much as aspies and auties do when it comes to entering a discourse that is foreign to them: how else are they to know of their faux pas?

(Of course, conversely, by only asking questions of the “experts” on the panel — social workers and a psychologist –  the audience arguably cared less about autistic perspectives and more about NT perspectives on autism. However, the fact that my feelings were respected astounded me: I was prepared for a day of autie trauma. I only received one question, which was from an autistic woman/mother, who asked if I was on a certain Yahoo listserv. A very easy, yes-or-no question.)

I have been lately wishing that I could do the same thing at rhet-comp conferences that I did at NATTAP. While post-presentation discussion sessions are certainly useful and sometimes necessary, they’re so unpredictable. I realize that everyone, on some level, fears being asked a question they don’t know the answer to. That’s human. However, I additionally fear getting questions that I do know the answer to: sometimes my brain just shuts down, especially when I’m up front, where most of the fluorescent lights are. There’s so much to think about: I have to feign eye contact at several junctures, and I have to very consciously think about my volume level, and I have to keep my hands civilized, and I have to worry about “conversing” with an unpredictably sized audience. I like the idea of having an e-chat discussion after a conference presentation. But that’s probably unrealistic.

Many listservs have recently posted the CFP for Autreat 2009, which I’ve never attended. Upon reading about the history of this conference and ANI, I was struck by Jim Sinclair’s description of “interaction badges”:

Even verbal autistic people are likely to have difficulty being verbal all the time, especially under conditions of sensory overload such as are likely to occur at a conference. Many of us had found ourselves struggling with speech shutdown at conferences. Non-autistic people would want to talk to us, when we needed to be left alone for a while. Of course we could always leave and go off somewhere by ourselves; but sometimes we were still interested in listening to presentations or being around our friends, even when we weren’t up to having interactions. After discussing these situations on ANI-L, we created color-coded interaction signal badges. These were plastic name badge holders, with a piece of red paper on one side, and a piece of yellow paper on the other side. People needing to restrict interaction could wear a badge with the red side facing out to signify “Nobody should try to interact with me,” or with the yellow side facing out to signify “Only people I already know should interact with me, not strangers.”

The interaction signal badges were easy for autistic people to use, and easy for both autistic and non-autistic people to understand. We still use them at Autreat. In 1997 we added a third color to the badges, in response to a concern expressed by an autistic person who was planning to attend her first Autreat, and said she sometimes wanted to interact with other people but had trouble initiating an interaction. We added a piece of green paper to signify, “I want to interact but am having trouble initiating, so please initiate an interaction with me.”

I especially relate with the green badge (though there are certainly times where I wish I had a big yellow one). I’m terrible at initiating conversations with people. However, I’m probably worse at sustaining conversations. When I first started graduate school a few years back, one professor told me he had no clue that I was paying attention until he read my writing because, in class, I was very non-responsive and hardly looked at him. So maybe the addition of an orange badge would alert conversants that the badge-holder is listening and/or enjoying the conversation, even if she appears bored or mentally out to lunch.

I can dream, right?