Autism Rhetoric Is an Epidemic—Coming to a Campus Near You
Melanie Yergeau, Ohio State University, yergeau [dot] 1 [at] osu.edu

I. Constructions of crisis: "Our unfortunate reality"

Our unfortunate reality is this: I am teaching in our schools. I wake up in the morning, ride the bus, and then I step into a classroom and warp young minds with my flat mousy voice and unruly hands. Also: I repeat myself. I repeat myself. Multiple times. Multiple times.

Our unfortunate reality is this: I refer to Simi Linton as my imaginary BFF, transcribe student words into spirals on the whiteboard, and then I perseverate on the spirals, or on Simi Linton, or on both at the same time. Also: I memorized three city maps at age eight, toe-walked as an infant, failed driver's ed as a teenager, and once told my ninth grade homeroom teacher that her shirt gave me a headache. And these things might be contagious.

Our unfortunate reality is this: I have autism. It's taken me a long time to say this publicly. I have autism. And the words don't get easier, really -- because inevitably, I always have to follow up those words with more words, which is then followed by people throwing their words at me, expecting even more of my words in response. And then usually I take a benadryl and try to knock myself unconscious for several hours. It's a tiring affair, the autism-and-words thing. The benadryl thing, too.

But, our unfortunate reality is this: I have autism. And this seems to trouble non-autistic people more, I think, than it's ever troubled me.

Three main points that I want to hit on today:

1. Our unfortunate reality is a crock of a particular swear word. Or: our unfortunate reality is socially constructed (as both unfortunate and reality).
2. Autistic people can form and function as their own audiences, with their own cultural identity/ies.
3. How we speak/write/communicate about autism (and disability generally) indicates our respect (or lack thereof) for embodied forms of difference (see Wilson & Lewiecki-Wilson, 2001).

Popular autism discourse has reached epidemic status. Newscasts peddle autism as a mysterious condition, one that renders its victims emotionless and unempathetic; charities distribute e-interviews with exhausted parents who confess to thoughts of murdering their autistic children; college students organize walks in order to combat this “alarming” disorder. The rhetorics that pervade autism discourse position the autistic person as pitiable, damaged, and in need of cure.

As an autistic person, I object to such representations. Today I want to briefly discuss conceptions of the autistic as arhetorical and why these conceptions are so foul. I'll conclude (but not really) by discussing my involvement with an autistic rights organization—a campus chapter of the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network (ASAN)—and the ways in which we’ve begun to “speak back” to those organizations that claim to speak for us. In sharing our group’s encounters with those who consider autistic people empathetically challenged, I hope that we can begin to understand autism as rhetorical, to regard disability as a "crucial and necessary part of the human experience" (to borrow a phrasing from Nick Hetrick).

II. The arhetorical autist (ineffectively) stalks its prey

Before I discuss campus autism rhetorics, some necessary background.

Lennard Davis's Bending Over Backwards troubles the notion of a cohesive, coherent disability identity, troubles who it in/excludes, what it means, and what it can (and cannot) do for people with disabilities (PWDs). In reading Davis, I always seem to latch onto one question of his: “If all identities are socially constructed or performative, is there a core identity there? Is there a there?” (p. 13, emphasis added). When it comes to autistic identity specifically, though, the big question for me quickly becomes: Are we a we?

When I think about disability identity in the context of the autism world, I automatically cue into the concept of audience and all of the rhetorical baggage that such a concept entails. When I talk about autism and audience, I often feel the need to make a distinction between an autism community/culture and an autistic community/culture. These communities are very ideologically different, the former mainly comprised of parents and practitioners who view autism as a pathology in need of eradication, and the latter largely comprised of autistic people and supporters who adopt a social model of disability, a model that regards disability as socially constructed, a matter of societal discrimination. Per this model, social forces (outside the individual) are regarded as far more disabling than autism itself (see Robertson & Ne'eman, 2008).

Those in the autistic community are tied to the idea of an Autistic identity and often make comparisons to Deaf culture -- and they have an incredibly activist bent, blogging on issues of acceptance and discrimination, networking online and forming social relationships based on the communal fight for neurological diversity. Because of the communication affordances of digital technologies, much of Autistic culture percolates in online spaces. Clark and Van Ameron (2007) suggest that digital media technologies have enabled the autistic community to connect and to “speak back” to powerful, normate-run charities without having to meet face-to-face, without having to worry about nonverbal nuance, without having to worry about discourse conventions specific to writing or face-to-face communication (see Wilson, 2008).

The point in all of this is: if one believes in the existence of an Autistic culture (and many people do not), then the idea of autistic people forming and functioning as audiences -- audiences with specific expectations, cultural histories and traditions, and rhetorical commonplaces -- doesn’t seem so “out there.”

But the fact of the matter is, for those educators, parents, and professionals who locate their identities outside of Autistic culture, autism is, by definition, pathological audience unawareness, an inability to identify with anyone, a condition marked by egocentrism and personlessness. According to popular psychology, autistic individuals supposedly lack what has been termed “theory of mind,” or the ability to imagine the mental states of others (see Baron-Cohen, 1997). Per psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen (2001),

A theory of mind remains one of the quintessential abilities that makes us human.... [H]aving a theory of mind is to be able to reflect on the contents of one’s own and other’s minds. Difficulty in understanding other minds is a core cognitive feature of autism spectrum conditions. The theory of mind difficulties seem to be universal among such individuals (3) [emphasis added].

What's important to note here are the connections between humanity and the autistic's lack thereof -- connections made by a leading autism researcher. Disability is here represented as Simi Linton once put it -- as an "atypical experience of deficit and loss" (5).

Unfortunately, this impaired theory of mind theory has formed the basis of many conjectures about autism, humanity, and langauge. Rhetoricians such as Ann Jurecic (2007) have portrayed autistic people, I would suggest, as rhetorically broken, assuming that autistic writers are inherently self-centered because they cannot connect with a non-autistic (and, by implication, superior) audience (p. 429). And Adriana Schuler (2003) has argued that there is autistic language, and then there is “true language,” which autistic language is decidedly not (p. 464). Finally, psychologist Franscesca Happe (1991) has suggested that even when autistic people do write and communicate (and use "normal" language), their manner of writing and speaking and reading is "odd," and they have little of value to share with non-autistic audiences -- because they are too autistic to know how to tell us what is relevant (pp. 207, 223).

Because autism is medically defined as a literal turning inward of the self (autos), as an inability to gauge an audience’s needs, non-autistic people have become the saviors, autism has become the villain, and autistic people have become the hapless deer stuck in the headlights. (This last sentence might be a mixed metaphor -- but I suppose that, since I'm autistic, I have an excuse.)

The impact of these theories is phenomenal. Indeed, as Davis has commented, we’ve just begun to “form” the idea that a disability identity can and does exist. The very notion of Autistic identity seems paradoxical, as antithetical to the condition itself. How can a bunch of personality-less, emotionless, cognitively broken people even understand identity politics, never mind practice it? It would seem that autistic people are the ultimate arhetorical beings. The communication practices in which autistic people engage are more often than not conceived of as misfiring neurons, not as purposeful, not as cultural, not as rhetorical, not as rich and engaging.

The most egregious part in all this is that autistic audiences -- or, the ways in which autistic individuals routinely create messages for their own audiences -- are entirely overlooked, supposed to not exist, or to be only the workings of a high-functioning few. And so now I turn to the neurodiversity movement, also referred to by some as our unfortunate reality.

III. Respect for neurological diversity (or lack thereof)

Our unfortunate reality is this: autism as core deficit, as soul-stealing entity, has permeated the most popular of popular autism rhetorics. Nowhere is this realer for me than on my campus, at Ohio State University.

During my second year at Ohio State, a student chapter of Autism Speaks spearheaded an autism walk. Autism Speaks, at both the national and local levels, is well known for its "learn the signs" ad campaign, which compares autism incidence to a series of potentially fatal situations -- hypothermia, car crashes, and, my personal favorite, pediatric cancer, AIDS, and diabetes combined. In the Autistic community, Autism Speaks is highly reviled for these and any other number of reasons, perhaps the two biggest reasons being 1) Autism Speaks' insistence that autism is a "disease" that needs to be eradicated, and 2) a shocking lack of autistic representation within the organization -- none of the leadership is, in fact, autistic.

So, when the Autism Speaks walk came to Columbus and was chaired by the president of our university, an autistic colleague and I voiced our upset. We each wrote to the faculty advisor of the organization, and we both, in response, received the following: the advisor stated that while she could empathize with our positions, we couldn't empathize with hers or Autism Speaks', the implication being that we're too autistic to realize how bad autism is. The advisor also CCed two social workers on her response, a therapy referral of sorts.

Since that exchange over two years ago, a lot has happened. Myself and several other autistic people formed a local chapter of the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network (ASAN), and we've protested Autism Speaks twice -- during their October 2009 walk and during Autism Awareness Month this past April. Though holding protests is only a small component of what our disability rights group actually does, we're often perceived as a group of "shiny aspies" that's "at war" with a kind-hearted, well-meaning charity (see comments on our blog or YouTube videos for examples). When I met with an Autism Speaks representative several weeks back, she informed me, "But... we're here to help people like you."

The competing autism discourses that have emerged on my campus -- and I imagine at many other campuses -- are, as Paul Heilker notes, "begging for rhetorical analysis" (personal communication, 2010). And yet, the autist as an arhetorical, unaware, pitiable being is the discourse that dominates -- is the one that is promulgated by my university and other institutions. Ohio State's president continues to make proclamations about utopian worlds in which autism "does not exist"; the College of Education and Human Ecology continues to post fact sheets that describe autism as an alarming epidemic that could grip anyone at any time. And College English (Jurecic, 2007) and the Writing Lab Newsletter (Collins, 2008) feature articles that describe autistic people as "egocentric" a la Flower and Hayes, as having "brain dysfunction" that impacts rhetorical development.

What I want to end on here is this, on one more unfortunate reality: However it is we understand or define rhetoric, I think that one thing can be clearly intuited from these conversations about autism -- that a one-dimensional understanding of rhetoric has become the understanding of rhetoric. If autistic people are arhetorical, then there is a the rhetorical, a normal/normative understanding of what it means to be rhetorical, of what it means to engage in rhetorical work. This, to put it as simply as I know how, is egregious. How we represent autism and autistic people indicates our respect (or lack thereof) for neurological difference -- and these representations also indicate our understanding (or lack thereof) of the work of rhetoric..

 

IV. Autistic people protest Autism Speaks