But lately, I am resisting passing. When I teach, I talk through and about my stims. I fire my rubber bands across the room, trip over classroom furniture, flap and wrench my fingers, rock back and forth as my elbows grate against the whiteboard. This is me, I say. My body is narrating.

When I first read about The Loud Hands Project, I flashbacked to kindergarten and flashforwarded to my future as a teacher. I imagine a world where my hands roam free, where stimming is simply a part of being — and I created the video below as part of that imagining. I hesitate to call this video a poem (because a poet I ain’t). So, I’ll simply call it a stimfest. A captioned stimfest.

From the Loud Hands website:

The Loud Hands Project is a transmedia publishing and creative effort by the Autistic Self Advocacy Network, spearheaded by Julia Bascom. Currently, we are raising money towards the creation of our first and foundational anthology (Loud Hands: Autistic People, Speaking) and accompanying website.

Loud Hands: Autistic People, Speaking features submissions by Autistic authors speaking about neurodiversity, Autistic pride and culture, disability rights and resistance, and resilience (known collectively by the community as having loud hands)

I’m excited about this project, to say the least, and encourage you to read through the project’s website [preferably while hand-flapping]! Stim hard, people. Let your bodies be lively.

My commitment had a slow-motion feel to it. As it was happening, I couldn’t believe that it was happening — I was daydreaming, or I was watching a poorly written Lifetime biopic, or I had eaten moldy leftovers that triggered hallucinations, or something, anything but reality. But, no. This was my reality, and my reality soon spiraled into the progressive tense, into something like this:

– They were strapping me down on a gurney.

– They were wheeling me out of an academic building and into the parking lot, onlookers gawking.

– They were forcing me into an ambulance.

– They were dragging me, still on the gurney, into the psych ER, which resembled a TV prison — brisk security guards, cheap wall paint, steel-enforced doors, cameras that aren’t supposed to look like cameras but inevitably do look like cameras. They were dragging me in there. There.

– Soon, they were vigorously frisking me, and they were dumping out the contents of my backpack, and they were treating me like I was a criminal because I carried a bottle of Tylenol and a 3-inch autistic pride button, and they were shoving me, now shoeless and sweaterless, into a doorless room with hard-backed chairs, and they were prohibiting me from making any phone calls unless I did so via speakerphone, and they were threatening me with overnight and multiple-day stays and refusing to let me wear my headphones, and they were mixing up my diagnoses while periodically asking, How are you doing, sweetie? — As if they really cared. As if I were a sweetie.

Before the EMTs bundled me, pig-in-a-blanket style, into the ambulance, my former therapist asked me why being committed was such a “bad” thing. “If you have to ask that question,” I fumed, “then you really don’t have a clue.”

That pre-ambulance moment, to the best of my memory, is when their ventriloquism started. Suddenly, the experts claimed, I wasn’t talking. God, no. That’s your depression talking, they explained. That’s your autism talking. That’s your anxiety talking. Really, it’s anything but you talking.

Hours later, I sat in the psych ward, shaking, rocking, stimming, ticcing — anything to prevent epic meltdown mode.  I was disembodied. Objectified. Powerless. I was freezing, hunkered up against the wall in my new doorless home, watching an eight-year-old kid being forcibly removed from his parents. How do I not headbang? How do I not bite myself? How do they not see our humanity?

–

I have gotten used to not existing, rhetorically speaking. I study rhetoric for a living. I teach it. I have a PhD in it. I breathe it. Rhetoric is everything and everywhere, many of my colleagues say. The exception to rhetoric’s everythingness and everywhereness is, of course, autism.

I’ve reached a point in my adult life where articles on autism and perspective-taking inspire me — inspire me to commit self-injury, that is. Rhetoric is about audience and autism isn’t, these articles say. Autistic people are mindblind; autistic people are masked by a cloud of social solitude; autistic people are self-centered and shrouded by their neurological misery. I grossly paraphrase here, but not really.

And so, I have gotten used to not existing, rhetorically speaking. I will say something about autism, and someone will assert that nothing I’ve said matters or applies to anything. Because I’m self-centered. Because I don’t have the capacity to intuit other minds or understand others’ life experiences. Because it’s just my autism talking.

How can one have autism and have something to say? Autistic voice is the ultimate oxymoron. If they don’t want to hear it, then we haven’t spoken. We don’t matter because we don’t exist. We’re just a bunch of absent sweeties waiting to be strapped onto their gurneys.

That’s just your autism talking, they respond.

–

It is weeks later. I’ve been working, shaky and paranoid, scraping by in an already rough semester, a semester made rougher by male orderlies who find sensory overload amusing.

I am teaching a disability studies course, and it’s now November. We’re reading Dawn Prince-Hughes’ Songs of the Gorilla Nation, an autiebiography. I’ve never had a full class read it before, and I approach the class discussion with an excitement that I haven’t felt since my pre-commitment days.

Something transpires in this discussion, a something that jars me. Some of the students don’t think there’s a plot to Prince-Hughes’ book, that it’s too bogged down in details. Some of them wonder whether her autism made her write this way — some of them doubt her intentionality, her rhetoricity, her capacity to understand writing and audience and perspective-taking. In short, they wonder who’s really talking: Is it her or her autism?

I offer this moment not to reflect poorly on my students — my students are students, people who are kind, receptive, bright, and willing to learn. Rather, I offer this moment because it is iconic and pervasive, because students (and faculty, and parents, and clinicians, and, shit, most people) have learned this response from those who came before them. I offer this moment because I’m pissed off at those who taught them this. I offer this moment because, after it transpired, I flashbacked to my commitment and my forced disembodiment. I offer this moment because I am me, because I am an autistic me, because my autism is not a synonym for demon possession. I offer this moment because I locked myself in a bathroom stall and began cutting my leg with my 3-inch autistic pride button.

–

I recently dreamed that I was forced into a special education class for assistant professors, my 3-inch button affixed to my backpack, bloodstained and visible. This was a waking dream, an unrestful dream, a dream filled with groans and body twitches. The button was how I knew I had a body; the wakefulness was how I knew I had a voice.

But that’s probably just my autism talking.

My parents made the mistake of not aborting me. And ABA, CBT, talk therapy, support groups, anti-depressants — none of these things have exorcised my autism. Sometimes, when I go to conferences, self-important parents like to pretend that I’m not really, truly autistic, that I have, in fact, outgrown my autism in the most spiritual and inspirational of ways. Because, honestly, haven’t I heard? The good and faithful autistics all recognize the depravity that is autism and work hard, so tear-inducingly hard, to make their disordered brains and disordered bodies disappear. That my disordered self could still exist… that I even want my disordered self to exist… such a pity. I’m so autistic that I cannot fathom how soul-sucking autism really is.

If I will not make my autistic self invisible, then they must. And if “evidence-based practices” won’t do the trick, ableism just might. So, I’m here providing a few suggestions for further infantilizing me, for facilitating a neurotypical brand of the Second Coming:

1. Remember that, while I may exist physically, I do not exist semantically. Pairing autistic and adult in the same sentence, for example, is a no-no. Other off-limits words include woman, citizen, activist, colleague, and anything with a –sex affix.

2. Although I might be an adult in the chronological sense of the word, stress that I will never be an adult in the developmental sense of the word. There are many ways to assert neurotypical dominance in this regard. You might, for example, correct my use of the words depression and anxiety and replace them with sad feelings and worried feelings. When I present at conferences and seem a bit too comfortable in my empowered adult status, you might knock me down a few rungs and ask me at what age I was toilet-trained. And, every time I remember to bathe, you might write me a 1,000-word email, CC four or five of my family members and/or former employers, and tell me how proud you are of me.

Other infantilizing measures might include, if you’re a soprano or alto, using a sing-songy voice and speaking only in rhyming couplets. But, hey, don’t take advice from little ol’ me. You’re the neurotypical — you’re the adult here.

3. Remind me that I am incapable of empathy and perspective-taking. If I disagree with you, tell me how self-centered I am. Emotionally speaking, I’m forever lodged in the terrible twos, and I’ll just never understand how bad you have it.

4. Emphasize that, unlike real adults, I cannot maintain mutually beneficial friendships and will always fail to meet your emotional needs. Condemn my black-and-white thinking and preach to me about shades of gray. If I pick up on your sadness and attempt to console you — make it clear that you’re not sad, you’re lachrymose. You’re not depressed, you’re bummed out. You’re not upset, you’re very upset. There’s a difference, and I damned well need to learn it. To facilitate this process, draw cartoon faces on the back of your business card and instruct me to keep it handy in my wallet.

This is important shit.

5. Never give up on the messy, imperfectible project that is me. No matter how many times I tell you how cruel you are, no matter how many times I tell you how patronizing you are, no matter how many times I tell you how proud I am to be autistic — keep working on that disappearing act. Remember how glad you are that you’re not some bitter, twisted, ungrateful, disordered half-person like me. Remind yourself that I’m so lucky to have such a wonderful, personal savior like you in my life.

–

This post brought to you by a big a move, a new job, and my lack of existence.

In the past few months, I’ve had run-ins with folks from Unpleasant Autism Organizations That Want to “Save the World” with Fear, Pity, Eugenics, and Chocolate Bunnies in Gold Wrappers. Inevitably, we engage in some sort of debate — debates that usually involve me proclaiming the necessity of rights and self-representation and them proclaiming, “The children! The children!”

As The Unpleasants extol the virtues of cures and 600K salaries, they often feel the need to put down the organization that I represent. They blink several times, as though rapid eyelid movement might somehow compel me to make eye contact, and then exclaim,

“Well, what does your organization actually do, other than, you know, that self-advocacy thing?”

This is a question that triggers my gag reflex. What do we do, other than self-advocacy? Other than self-advocacy? Are you kidding me?

What does your organization do, other than self-advocacy?

The implication of this question is simple: Self-advocacy isn’t important or necessary. Self-advocacy is what poor little disabled people do to feel better about themselves. Self-advocacy may be cute and sweet and all fluffy like little newborn bunny rabbits, but it’s not nearly as important as, you know, developing prenatal screening tools or training the autism out of six month olds or inventing fraudulent divorce statistics or selling paper puzzles in the checkout lane. Self-advocacy relies on the existence of autism, and thereby autistic people — and to Unpleasant Autism Organizations, that’s the equivalent of Saw XXIII meets Stephen King’s The Stand (and perhaps with a little Xanadu to boot).

So what do we do, other than self-advocacy? To begin with, I’d assert that if someone even asks that question, they don’t fully comprehend what self-advocacy is. (Ignorance is the nicer interpretation, actually. Some of The Unpleasants do comprehend what self-advocacy is. And it scares them.)

I’d like to proceed, then, with some definitions.

What self-advocacy is not

1. Self-advocacy is not about pizza.
Self-advocacy is not about an able-bodied someone who is so heroic that, once or twice monthly, she orders Little Caesar’s for a bunch of crips. Self-advocacy is not about a neurotypical undergraduate who is, by definition, virtuous and self-sacrificing because he took 45 minutes of his life to teach a few autistic teens the rules of Monopoly. This is not self-advocacy. I repeat: This is not self-advocacy.

Delicious? Yes. Self-advocacy? No.

To recap: self-advocacy isn’t a code word that justifies the infantilization of disabled adults, nor is it about canonizing a new cohort of able-bodied saints.

2. Self-advocacy is not cute.
Hypothetical scenario: You’re making your way down the street and you come across a cardboard box full of puppies. What is this? you wonder. Answer: This is not self-advocacy.

Adorable? Yes. Self-advocacy? No.

I’m not going to say that self-advocates aren’t cuddly (because, you know, many of us freaking are). But, in general, self-advocacy isn’t about making able-bodied folks feel all warm and fuzzy inside. Self-advocacy isn’t about keeping disabled people on a leash, giving them their shots, patting them on the head, and then dropping them off at a kennel when you get sick of them.

3. Self-advocacy is not about one singular self.
In this regard, self-advocacy is somewhat a misnomer. Self-advocacy is not just about individual people — it’s really about, as my dissertation committee puts it, the collective advocacy of selves.

Self-advocacy is too often construed as unreasonable individuals asking for unreasonable and idiosyncratic handouts, when, instead, it’s about self-determination and knowing how one best learns, communicates, interacts, moves, works, lives, and so on. And — this is important — any singular act of self-advocacy brings with it larger implications for other self-advocates. The disability rights movement takes as its mantra the phrase nothing about us without us, a mantra that emphasizes the importance of self-advocacy within the context of a larger disability community.

For example: When I advocated for accommodations for my PhD candidacy exams, I advocated for others’ rights to accommodations as well. My ADA request was not limited to my individual, “idiosyncratic” autistic self — it set the stage (at least, that is my hope) for others to assert their right to equitable testing conditions.

Badass? Yes. Self-advocacy? Hell yes.

It’s easy to dismiss self-advocacy as “that annoying thing that disabled people do” when self-advocacy is thought to be just about that one cute little disabled person who will eat my cold, cheap pizza and who doesn’t really matter anyway.

4. Self-advocacy is not antithetical to disability.
I’m subscribed to a few parent listservs**, which has necessitated my overuse and borderline abuse of cherry-flavored antacids. There seems to be a recurrent, stereotypical theme to many of their discussions regarding their (adult) children: Developmentally disabled people lack the ability to self-advocate. In fact, it’s not uncommon for these parents to portray an inability to self-advocate as a prerequisite for being developmentally disabled.

Such thinking is, to put it mildly, grossly egregious. Whether your disabled child screams in the grocery checkout line or testifies in front of congress, he is self-advocating. Whether your disabled child throws peas in your face or writes a snarky blog post or falls asleep during board game nights or says NO in all capital letters, she’s self-advocating. And none of these things is less noble or gutsy than the other. Disabled people and allies alike would benefit from regarding self-advocacy in this manner.

Blocking traffic? Yes. Self-advocacy? Hell yes.

There is some truth behind the statement that disabled people, generally speaking, don’t know how to self-advocate. But that half-truth doesn’t stem from one’s dis/ability — rather, this perceived inability to self-advocate is the result of a society that doesn’t want to listen to us. We are not trained to self-advocate; we are trained to be passive. What able-bodied people are taught is a right, disabled people are taught is a burden. Able-bodied people*** have a right to education, gainful employment, romance, offspring, friendship, and independent living. Conversely, when disabled people pursue these things, we are told and retold of the burdens we impose — on our families, teachers, doctors, taxpayers. My education was not a right — it was a burden. These are the messages we receive, both implicitly and explicitly, on a daily basis. We are taught to be eternally grateful, to never raise a stink, because everything we do, need, or request is at someone else’s expense. And we are not as worthy as those able-bodied someone elses.

What self-advocacy is

It is here that I’d like to stop. I could write a million blog posts on what self-advocacy is, and why it’s so important, and why The Unpleasants should not represent it within an other than construction. But I think this is a good place to ask something of my readers. I’d really like to know what self-advocacy means to you.

Happy Autistic Pride Day.

–
* Puppy photo by sheeshoo

** I’m not insinuating that all parents believe this about their disabled children, nor am I trying to make a blanket statement about parents. I am, however, incredibly frustrated with the pervasiveness of this line of thinking.

*** I would be remiss if I didn’t acknowledge that this rights/burden framework goes way, way beyond disability — race, class, gender, sexual orientation, nationality, and so on, not to mention their intersectionalities.

I hear this a lot lately, primarily from undergraduate students who find autistic self-advocacy reprehensible and/or incomprehensible. In fact, at our protest this fall, someone actually came up to us and said, “If you can self-advocate, then you’re not autistic.” Way to disempower much?

Here is the wonderfully circular logic that has come to constitute much of my advocacy life lately:

Me: What you’re doing is hurtful.
Them: But we just want to help people like you.
Me: You’re not helping. Please stop.
Them: But we just want to help people like you.
Me: But you’re not helping.
Them: BUT WE JUST WANT TO HELP PEOPLE LIKE YOU!!

I’ve spent the past few months trying to devise smart-ass responses to this statement.

• But I just want to torture people like you.
• Oh! Yes! Of course! I’m sorry! I forgot that this was all about you!
• *cuing echolalia* BUT WE JUST WANT TO HELP PEOPLE LIKE YOU!!

And herein lies the frustration: Advocacy isn’t advocacy if it’s merely a synonym for self-interest. If the people you’re claiming to serve are objecting to your help, are telling you that you’re being hurtful… shouldn’t that give you pause?

I have no reason to be grateful for your hurtfulness. I shouldn’t have to grovel because you’re wearing a t-shirt with a puzzle piece on it, or because you’re raising funds to prevent people like me from existing. I shouldn’t have to look you in the eye, tear up, and utter an inflected “thanks” because it makes you feel good about yourself.

My lack of gratefulness isn’t an ASD symptom. My lack of gratefulness doesn’t mean that I’m not disabled. My lack of gratefulness isn’t impoliteness, smugness, self-centeredness, theory of mindlessness, or some other bad-sounding, mega-autism, amorphous blob thing. I shouldn’t have to wake up feeling grateful every morning, as though gratefulness is some sort of requisite pre-condition for being developmentally disabled.

Would you feel grateful for people who want to “eradicate” people like you?

Would you feel grateful for people who refer to you and your loved ones as an “epidemic,” as a “global public health crisis,” as a “disease” more prevalent than “pediatric AIDS, cancer, and diabetes combined”? Would you feel grateful for people who make a career out of representing you and others like you as creatures of pity, contagion, and fear?

Would you feel grateful for people who ask you, in front of large crowds, how old you were when you were toilet-trained? How you manage to have sex? How you wake up every morning knowing that you are you?

Would you feel grateful for people who call your parents “heroes” because they didn’t put you up for adoption?

Would you feel grateful for people who start up college groups that patronize you? Groups that claim to be your “voice,” yet never even consult you? Groups that devise activities meant “for” you or your “benefit,” yet in their very design exclude you and people like you? Make-up parties, gala balls, sorority cookouts, sensory unfriendly films, massive and crowded walks — boisterous, clamorous, noisy events, events advertised to help you, all the while raising funds to get rid of you?

Would you feel grateful for people who claim you don’t exist, merely because you’re over 21? Because you’re a woman? Because you claim to have a sexual orientation?

Would you feel grateful for people who disprove of, and ardently protest, your decision to have children? Would you feel grateful for people who work to revise custody laws so that people like you can’t single-parent or adopt?

Would you feel grateful for people who call you mysterious, puzzling, special, and heroic — because you’re you? (And, of course, being you isn’t something they’d wish on anyone.)

Would you feel grateful for people who regularly describe your body language, ways of gesturing, and ways of interacting as disturbing, inappropriate, deviant, clinical, and abnormal? Would you feel grateful for people who tell you that the way you think, act, know, and sense are all wrong?

Would you feel grateful for people who segregate you from your classmates, people who claim that who you are as a person will have detrimental effects on your peers’ intellectual development?

Would you feel grateful for people who tell you that you’re an “exception” and therefore nothing you say even matters? Would you feel grateful for people who question your diagnosis simply because you disagree with them?

Would you — should you — feel grateful for people who constantly tell you how ungrateful you are?

Would you feel grateful for these people? Seriously? Truly? Because, if that’s the case, perhaps I can teach you how to flex your ungrateful mind muscles.

**

In other news: I’m back, after a small hiatus. Academic life has been a bit hectic (understatement) these past few months.

Me holding a sign: "People not puzzles!"

I managed to maintain my composure throughout the protest, regardless of the insults thrown our way, regardless of the noise and clamor and overt hostility of the event. But then I came home and started sifting through an hour’s worth of video footage — and I broke down. Sobbing, shaking, rocking. It was so intense, all so intense.

I don’t want the next generation of autistic people to face this crap. I want it to be different for them. I want them to take pride in who they are as autistic people, and I want those who love them to take pride in who they are as autistic people. I want autistic ways of thinking, being, and knowing to be valued and validated. I want autistic people to have a say in the decisions that concern them.

And most importantly, I want there to be autistic people.

Video recaps of the protest:

Our protest attracted media attention from 10TV, ABC 6, and independent journalists. Even today — Wednesday, four days later — random strangers notice the Autistic Pride button on my backpack and exclaim, “Hey! I saw you on the news! You talked about where the money goes for that autism walk.” These things help — knowing that our four-hour ordeal has had some tangible effect, has furthered our cause.

We were featured on the ABC 6 news, and I provided a brief soundbite:

We also created our own video of the protest. Nick J. was our cameraman extraordinaire, and I did the editing. The video is still painful for me to watch — especially toward the end, while we’re chanting Autism Speaks needs to listen, and, in an alarming touch of irony, the walkers drown us out by collectively screaming O-H-I-O!

As I replay the clip, I have to cover my ears, tuck my chin down into my chest, breathe heavy. It is hard to watch, but it is a poignant example of Autism Speaks’ attempts to silence us, to refuse to listen to us, to never let autistics speak.

This post wouldn’t be complete without a thank you. Thank you. An incredible number of people, local and distant, helped us through this protest. And despite the protest’s emotional toll, perhaps even because of the protest’s emotional toll, I’m glad we did it. And I know that we need to continue doing it. Change is long and hard. But it’s happening.

Protesters face the crowd of walkers

]]> http://aspierhetor.com/2010/10/13/columbus-protest-against-autism-speaks/feed/ 10 http://aspierhetor.com/2010/08/10/sometimes-passing-feels-like-passivity/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=sometimes-passing-feels-like-passivity http://aspierhetor.com/2010/08/10/sometimes-passing-feels-like-passivity/#comments Tue, 10 Aug 2010 16:36:11 +0000 Melanie http://aspierhetor.com/?p=828 I’ve been thinking a lot about what Savannah wrote on passing a week back, especially this line: “We deny essential parts of ourselves in order to resemble ideals and stereotypes of our cultures [when we pass].”

I am wondering what a day without passing would look like for me.

It would likely be a day where I, quite literally, wouldn’t have to sit on my hands.

I’m imagining a Stim City. Or a stim-in, on a campus lawn. Rubber bands, tin foil, spinning tops, hands free to roam.

How to tell whether it’s an anxiety attack, whether it’s an asthma attack, whether it’s a spiritual attack:

Lesson one: It is always a spiritual attack. This is what a pastor tells me when I’m seven. We live in Lawrenceville, near a shallow creek that I cannot visit, and we’re always church-hopping — until now. It’s a large church, the kind that broadcasts its sermons on television, and my mother worries that a camera will immortalize her while she’s blowing her nose. After service, my parents force me onstage during an altar call. I carry a beanbag doll that I rescued from the Salvation Army. Frightened, I hover behind the pulpit, choking on excess mucus, the pastor’s words escaping with the air.

It’s always a spiritual attack, repeats the pastor, who is now my pastor.

One day turns into many days missed from school. I can’t go there, I tell my parents. I’m sick.

It’s a lactose attack, says my doctor. My father thinks she’s a quack. He takes me home and has me drink milk and eat cheese, conjures a self-congratulatory smile. See? he says. And then he calls the pastor, or a pastor, or my pastor. I’m never quite sure which, or whom.

It’s a spiritual attack, says my father. We pray, and later I vomit.

I am hardly in school when I’m seven. When at recess, I try to follow a girl named Brittany because she wears hair ribbons, ribbons dense and packed as a poodle’s coat. I find them fascinating.

Brittany does not find me fascinating, nor does she find my orphan baby doll fascinating.

It’s got beans inside, I tell her.

Your head’s got beans inside, she tells me. She runs away.

Later, the shoves and punches come, my body wriggling beneath the violent hands of older boys that I do not recognize. I come home from school, crying, upset that I’ve been spiritually attacked. My mother lends me her bible and her kaopectate. My father lends me his albuterol and his collection of wheat pennies. Coins line the bathroom floor. I breathe, then not breathe, and my mother runs the shower at full temperature, my father gently nudging my face toward the steam. I wheeze in, wheeze out, long gasps, tired gasps, spiritual gasps. The air doesn’t like to come. Satan makes air distant.

There are hospital visits, but never school. I won’t allow school. Satan won’t allow school. Jesus won’t allow school. It’s almost as though we have a pact. I stay home, puke green stuff, struggle to breathe, press in the stomach of my beanbag doll, spin pennies across my dresser. These are my days, and I’ve come to accept them.

Lesson two: It is never in your head, unless you are possessed by a demon. This is the news my father brings home from a pastor. He applies the spiritual logic to me, a bittersweet syllogism. Later, there are people. Later still, there are hands, on me. Later still, I am on the floor, pressed down, surrounded by the elbowing sound of tongues. I am sobbing, not from Jesus, not from Satan, but from hands.

Lesson three: You are not praying hard enough. We are back north, and our new pastor tells us this from the podium of a high school auditorium. Church bulletins crinkle in the hands of the parishioners, hands that grate against the hum of the spiritually dead microphone. The air is never still in this place, and I struggle to catch it.

I am seven. I am gasping. I am sinking. I am fighting the hands, the godly hands, the demonic hands, the hands that pry and shriek and grieve against my face. I am dead, but I am not dead.

I should start off by saying that I’m glad, very glad, that they invited me to attend. Moreover, if they host another institute next year, I hope I’m re-invited. In fact, I hope they they invite a heck of a lot more self-advocates. While there, I was told that the attendance tally was somewhere around 110 people and that only three attendees were autistic. This seems to be par for the course with the autism-centric conferences I’ve attended, unfortunately. It’s not a happy sort of feeling.

Not only were the autistic people missing — so too were the parents. The only parents there, generally speaking, doubled as service providers or professional advocates (e.g., teacher’s aides, psychologists, ASA officers). The sad irony? All of the presenters, to the point of redundancy, stressed how important it is to include family members and self-advocates in “the conversation” — yet there were hardly any family members or self-advocates in this particular conversation.

The highlights of the conference, for me, were Pat Cloppert’s presentation on middle school, as well as the presentation on adulthood by Tom Fish, Benzion Chinn, and Patrick Meehan (the latter two being autistic self-advocates).

What I really, really have been itching to write about, though, was the keynote speaker — Sally Rogers of UC Davis. I knew things would be rocky when, at the start of her talk, she made a shout out to Geri Dawson, Autism Speaks’ Chief Science Officer. (One of our protest signs during last year’s AutSpks walk was: Congratulations, Columbus! You’ve just paid Geri Dawson’s salary. Heh.)

In essence, Rogers stressed the now common refrain about the importance of early intervention. And the neuro-normative biases of this presentation smacked me in the face, minute after minute. Rogers described “deviant” behaviors and “language delays deviance,” and then talked about eliminating “atypicalities” through therapy. More than once, she described autism as having “isolating effects” (you know, rather than mention anything about how a neuro-normative society isolates autistic people because they’re “deviant”), and she also posited that she wants to see “less disability and more function.”

Some of the assumptions undergirding her talk, assumptions that make my skin crawl:

• It is better to be non-autistic than autistic.
• All autistic behaviors (including, but not limited to, stimming, repetition, prosody, ways of communicating or expressing) need to be eliminated.
• Autistic people’s challenges primarily arise from being autistic — this, as opposed to autists dwelling within a one-size-fits-all world. (I’m not saying that autism doesn’t cause challenges. I am saying, however, that representing autism/autistic people as a big bad problem to be eradicated is 1) flagrantly ableist and entrenched in a medical model of disability, and 2) deflects attention away from that ableism. I’m sure I’m saying other things, too. I just haven’t decided what else yet.)
• One can train away autism.
• We need to take as gospel all of the common, dehumanizing ideologies associated with functioning labels, or what it means to be a “functioning” (and thereby more human and desirable) person.

Toward the end of her talk, Rogers showcased several video clips: autistic babies vs. NT babies. And something really disturbing (I think) happened: when she prefaced a video with here’s a typically developing baby, the audience cooed, laughed, reacted happily. When she prefaced a video with here’s an autistic baby, the room grew silent, solemn, non-responsive.

Pop quiz! Which one is disturbing, and which one is TEH CUTENESS OMGBBQ? </humanity fail>

I don’t laugh at babies. Unlike the pope, I don’t kiss babies that are thrown my way. I admit it — babies and I don’t jibe. In that moment, though, I wished I were a baby-liking sort of person — that at least I would have been reacting, laughing, or goo-gooing over the many cute autistic babies.

I don’t think that cute and autistic are mutually exclusive entities. And it’s disturbing to me that service professionals do not find (or behave as though they do not find) those whom they serve to be adorable, cute, beautiful, intelligent, or funny. Unless those whom they serve were to become “more typical,” that is.

At only one point did the audience react positively toward an autistic baby: when Rogers claimed that this baby, because of intensive therapy, was “virtually asymptomatic” and “as cute as can be.” Then the audience laughed.

*headdesk*

I figure that a good post-hiatus post might involve what I’ve been up to lately that is non-dissertation — that is, teaching. This past quarter, I taught an undergraduate section of Intro to Disability Studies, the second time I’ve taught this course. And in the fall I’m teaching a special topics in literature course called Authoring Autism. I kind of figure that folks who read my blog will have a lot to say about the autism class in particular.

Above is an image of my course flyer — I’ve been posting these across campus. I decided on going the “famous people who might have been autistic” route not because I like to retrodiagnose dead people (I loathe doing that, actually), but because 1) retrodiagnosis is one among many topics I’d like my students to critically engage this fall, and 2) I was hoping to attract students, especially from the humanities, to my class. Class enrollment is up to 18 people, which is pretty good for a special topics course. < /explanation>

I’ve drafted a syllabus for the course, which you can find here in PDF format. I’d like to emphasize that it’s a rough draft, and I’m already making changes in the assignments, schedule, and readings (i.e., I’m adding in materials from the neurodiversity special issue of DSQ, giving students more memoirs to choose from, figuring out potential guest speakers, etc.). I’ve also included my course description behind the cut — at root, this is a course that considers how autism and autistic people are represented across media.

I am, however, open to suggestions. Ohio State terms run 10 weeks in length, so we’re limited with our time. But I’d very much like to find out what others in the blogosphere would like to see in a class like this.

Course description: Public discourse on autism has reached critical mass. It’s hard to open a newspaper, change a TV channel, or browse a Facebook profile without catching something about autism—the epidemic, the puzzles, the children, the charities, the discrimination. The CDC currently touts a 1 in 110 autism incidence rate; former Playboy bunnies claim that our government is poisoning children with heavy metals and dairy products; popular TV shows feature unemotional autistic characters with savant-like super powers; and college programs are molding the most autism-centric cohort of disability service professionals our country has seen to date. If we’re to believe anything we encounter in the media or popular literature, we can certainly believe that autism is everywhere and has the potential to touch anyone at any time.

With this supposed increase in autism has come an increase in texts about autism (across media, across genre), much of it volatile and emotionally charged. Our main objective in this class, then, is to consider the rhetorical import of these texts, to develop an understanding of autism as a complex and crucial part of the human experience, to examine the ways in which able-bodiedness (or neurotypicality) has become an invisible default. We’ll work together in exploring how the authors of these various texts aim to persuade an audience that their view is the most emotionally, ethically, or logically sound view. To that end, we’ll also investigate the many important issues—legal, social, cultural, medical, political—currently at stake in the autism world. Throughout the term, we’ll continually engage popular, literary, and scholarly representations of autism in print, film, and the blogosphere in light of the following questions: What does it mean to be an autistic person? What does it mean to be an autism parent, professional, or advocate? What does it mean to author autism?