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?

—-

“Melanie,” she writes, and I imagine her doing so in an armchair, a red velvet armchair, this woman annunciating each syllable of my name, if only to make sure I comprehend her—“I hope as we go forward, Melanie, I hope you come to understand that at many levels what does and does not apply to you”—I stop reading, grind my teeth, poke my tongue in a developing cavity, if only to make my wince more wince-worthy—and continue on with her letter. “It’s not meant to personally challenge you,” she blathers, “but are the observations and ways of those with very different life experiences. Other people have different life experiences than you, Melanie, but I understand how difficult it is for you to put yourself in others’ shoes.”

I stop reading. It is difficult for me to fit into others’ shoes. My feet are incredibly narrow size nines, and I often fall out of my shoes—my shoes. And then there was toddlerhood, me walking so feverishly and insistently on tiptoes, my mother recalls, that the doctors considered cerebral palsy! (with an exclamation point) and hurriedly put my legs in casts below the knees, then braces, only to find out that it wasn’t cerebral palsy, that it wasn’t a symptom of anything with a legally recognized name, at least not anything legally recognized in the U.S. until 1995, at least not a symptom of anything other than Melanie being Melanie and what the hell is wrong with Melanie? There are empaths, and then there are dis-empaths—and as a teenager I was pegged into that escapably inescapable designation, that of the autism spectrum disorder, the one that, if you believe the charities, creeps into your child’s room at night and steals her soul, steals her ability to walk flat-footed, steals her ability to recognize, as the blathering woman in the imaginary red velvet armchair put it, that “other people have different life experiences.”

So much of my childhood was a search for an explanation—a search carried out by my parents, pastors, teachers, counselors, and the elementary school kids who liked to beat me up at recess. One day it’s selective mutism, and the next day it’s all my mother’s fault. One day it’s “let’s get a CATSCAN and make sure she doesn’t have a brain tumor,” and the next day my guidance counselor asks if my father has ever touched me. (And me, being ever the literal-minded autistic, says “yes”—is it illegal for fathers to touch their kids?) Once the Asperger’s autism designation descended from the diagnostic heavens, my capacity to empathize was suddenly eaten up by malfunctioning neurons. My capacity to engage in social relations or maintain eye contact vaporized alongside my personality. My capacity to have capacity was called into question. All these discourses, all these incapacities. Discourse about autism, I think, is far more virulent than autism.

In fact, discourse about autism has reached critical mass. Media outlets harp about the so-called epidemic, likening autism to a fate worse than pediatric AIDS, cancer, and diabetes combined. As of this past week, the autism rate has changed from 1 out of 150 people to 1% of the total population—1 out of 91. Not only this, but autism is said to affect mostly boys, the new statistics reflecting an incidence of autism in 1 out of 58 boys. These days, when I read and hear the numbers, when freshmen at my university tell the campus newspaper that these numbers are “so alarming,” alarming enough for them to fear procreation—I think to Lennard Davis’ work on disability and normalcy, specifically, when he describes the entire field of statistics as eugenics. Davis notes, “Statistics is bound up with eugenics because the central insight of statistics is the idea that a population can be normed. An important consequence of the idea of the norm is that it divides the total population into standard and non-standard subpopulations. The next step in conceiving of the population as norm and non-norm is for the state to attempt to norm the nonstandard—the aim of eugenics” (6).

When I am a number—a gendered number at that, and I mean gendered number both literally and figuratively, because I’ve synaesthetically thought of numbers as being gendered since I was a kid—but… when I am a number, I’m a number to be avoided. A number meant to instill fear and alarm. A number meant to warn parents that I could happen to them. A number that signals the dissolution of marriages and other gratuitous disability-induced horrors. A number that borrows its soundtrack from that classic, repeated knife-stab move in slasher flicks. I can see and feel the numbers as eugenics—all too visually, all too tangibly.

But the fraughtness of autism discourse neither starts nor ends with numbers—it involves our very conceptions of autism and its overlaps with gender, involves that tired misconception of autism precluding empathy, emotion, and personhood. Kidnapper imagery abounds in PSAs and billboards; popular nonprofits mourn the loss of the children that never were. And as reprehensible as these mass-mediated representations are, perhaps more concerning to me (out of my own autism-induced self-centeredness?) (I pose that question snarkily) are the professional discourses that affect me, us, you, them—any and all of us who hold some connection to the amorphous numbers. For as much as we’d like to dismiss the autism-as-thief trope as the next of the myths du jour, such myths find their realities in the various professional discourses that surround autism and the numbers and the gender and empathy issues. In medical discourse, autism is disempathy. It is, as psychologist Simon Baron-Cohen notes, a case of the “extreme male brain” (3). According to Baron-Cohen, autistic people are logicians and systematizers—characteristics in supposed contrast to femininity and empathy and social skills. Autistic neurology is so phallic as to penetrate unsuspecting female minds and make male any and every idiosyncrasy. Scholars in the mood for retro-diagnosis take delight in postulating Emily Dickinson was autistic, or that idiosyncratic fictional characters such as Jane Eyre were autistic. While certainly the autism rate remains higher for boys at a 4 to 1 ratio, the key characteristic for all autistics, per Baron-Cohen, is neurological maleness—such that autistic girls and women become doubly disabled: first by a merciless soul-stealer, and then by a chronic gender-reassigner.

I think to all the ways in which I am distinctly feminine, or distinctly unfeminine—or, conversely, more than a matter of mere is, the ways in which my supposed unfemininity is constructed as such, is rendered a symptom of my supposedly more-male-than-female neurology. The letter from the imaginary-armchair woman—the letter where she claims that I lack understanding of experiences outside my own, of minds outside my own. Or the first time I went to a school dance, where I went up to the DJ and requested the Electric Light Orchestra, to which he replied that he didn’t have any Electric Light Orchestra; so then I began requesting bands who sounded like the Electric Light Orchestra, such as Kansas or the Moody Blues, or Jefferson Starship or Styx—and I kept reciting band after band after band until he yelled at me, over the sounds of 90s grunge, to get the hell out of his face. Or, at this dance, when I grew stiff to the touch, to any touch, and while my female classmates discussed boys and shampoo tips and kitten posters, I wanted to talk about how many top-40 songs ELO had in a four-year period, or recite the list of all of their songs in alphabetical order, or rehearse the band members’ birthdates.

But, as alien as I may seem to describe myself, as rhetorically unaware as my sixth-grade self may seem—I’d posit that the disempathy here, this rhetorical construction of the autist as disempath, is ableist. That is, any assumption about lack of audience awareness by default makes an ableist assumption about who an audience comprises—an audience filled with non-autistic people, or parents, or professionals, or statisticians? Are autistic people considered to lack such capacity that they cannot form and function as their own audience?

Perhaps my delving into rhetoric, writing, and the troubling of audience seems a stark shift in tone here. But as a writer and an autistic and a woman, it doesn’t seem this way to me. The transition seems so natural, not stark, and I’m not even sure that I need a transition, that I need to create some turn-around phrase or some three-point thesis statement that outlines the whole of what I’m saying, what I’m writing. And for this, a compositionist who likes all things neon and 80s might pull out her copy of Linda Flower and start droning on about reader-based prose and cognitive immaturity, what Ann Jurecic referred to as egocentricity in her 2007 article in College English, called “Neurodiversity.” Jurecic’s piece is what I’d label the trademark autism piece in the field of rhetoric and composition, at least, it’s certainly the most well-known, is one of the first if not the first, and it’s so normatively organized, with lots of transitions and other so-called readerly cues. As Ann Jurecic labels autistic writer and scientist Temple Grandin as mindblind, I can’t help but wonder about my own signposting or lack thereof in the essay I read now, how things make so much sense to me but may very well make no sense to you, as if my words here float and crumble, a style begging for an analogy to my strained ways of making and maintaining eye contact. I think to Jurecic’s comparison of Grandin’s edited and published book versus Grandin’s unpublished essays on her web site—a comparison Jurecic uses to argue that Grandin very much lacks audience awareness, that any semblance of organization is likely attributable to heavy editing on someone else’s part. Jurecic writes, “Grandin, of course, is not a college writer; she is a professor whose job requires her to write frequently and well. Her writing is ‘autistic’ in large part because, even after she has written six books and dozens of articles, she still cannot consistently define a line of argument, guide a reader from one point to the next, or supply background for references that will otherwise be unclear” (429).

I should here note that I haven’t hired anyone to do heavy editing on this essay—as much as I may have needed it. I haven’t run this essay by an advisor or committee member. I haven’t visited the writing center, nor have I discussed potential revision strategies with a disability services counselor. I’ve only shared it with the mirror, reading off words in my own eye contact-less, male-but-not-really-male-brained way.

What strikes me about Jurecic is her reliance on Baron-Cohen, who has also researched and written quite prolifically about autism and mindblindness—that is, the supposed inability to imagine the mental states of others. Despite autism’s postulated male, logical influence, she describes the essaying of autistic writers as having an “unfamiliar logic that is challenging to follow” (43). She also notes of autistic writers that, “Clearly, an inability or limited ability to theorize other minds, as with egocentrism or limited empathy, would make communication a challenge” (426). And here I stop and revisit an earlier point, perhaps in my own desperate attempt to mimic good essay conventions, perhaps in my own frenzied manner of transitioning from point A to point Q. Such a stance, that of grounding autistic ways of knowing and expressing in terms of unfamiliarity, inability, challenges, mindblindness, disempathy, limitations, and other items mired in deficit—such a stance leads me to think that some of these autism PSAs need to be revised, to inform parents that autism steals a person’s ability, as I here unfairly quote Jurecic, to “define a line of argument, guide a reader from one point to the next, or supply background for references that will otherwise be unclear” (430). It scares me that scholars and peers in my field have taken a Baron-Cohen turn. It scares me that my peers and professors and students might perceive my ways of knowing, being, and expressing as misfiring neurons, as disempathetic illogicalities. Such deficit-laden rhetoric makes little to no room for theories of neurological difference, makes no room for disability studies, where societal barriers are more disabling than any form of bodily difference.

As Susan Wendell writes, “We need a feminist theory of disability…Disability is not a biological given; like gender, it is socially constructed from a biological reality. Our culture idealizes the body and demands that we control it” (260). I need only think to Tony Atwood to see the relevance of Wendell and other disability theorists—not to mention feminist theorists—to grasp how unquestioned matters of biology go in matters of disability because, as Simi Linton notes, disability is so often conceived of as that “atypical experience of deficit and loss” (5). Attwood, arguably the most well-known Asperger’s specialist in the world, has recently taken to writing about the under-diagnosis of autism in girls and women. He describes such girls as being able to “pass” more fluidly in day-to-day life because they possess certain positive, womanly qualities—unlike the stereotyped representations of the screaming, aggressive autistic boy, autistic girls are more likely to be quiet and “passive” (3). Attwood also contends that neurologically typical girls are more likely to be “maternal” and take autistic girls under their wings and help with social skills (5).

What I find most pertinent about Attwood to this discussion, however, is his embrace of Baron-Cohen’s concept of the extreme male brain. While discussing how autistic individuals have obsessions, or what he terms “special interests,” Attwood maintains that most autistic girls have “typical” girl interests such as kittens or unicorns—but the unrelenting intensity and rigidity of their interests (that is, the detached and weirdly logical male expression of their interests) is what sets them apart (5). A “typical” girl submits her dolls to mock social situations such as dating or going to the mall. An autistic girl lines her dolls up in alphabetical order, or by height or type, and sits in her room for seven hours while observing the flaws and curves of Barbie’s plastic figure.

Where to go with all this—this assumption that autistic people are inherently lacking something, this assumption that autistic women are somehow less than women because of their neurological wiring, this assumption that autistic writers lack audience awareness, when, in reality, autistic people are excluded from most every audience one could even think of, so what practice would we have anyway in imagining the mental states of others when everyone else so wrongly presumes to know our own mental states?

I think to autistic writer Jane Meyerding, who identifies her autistic self as genderless. She writes, “My intellect makes me a feminist. But my gut, my feelings, my self-awareness remain stubbornly and radically un-gendered—at least in the terms of the culture that surrounds me” (157). And: “When people perceive me as aloof, they are sensing an absence of emotional availability. It’s unwomanly of me, in traditional terms, to be the way I am. In feminist terms, it’s un-sisterly. I just have to accept that, for this autistic, it’s normal” (169).

I’d like to think that feminist approaches to disability—that is, any approach that considers social and cultural constructions of difference, rather than neurological imperatives—would not render the autistic woman as un-sisterly or unwomanly. I’d like to think that I could call myself autistic and not be considered unempathetic or mindblind, as lacking in some core feminine trait (as if there exists a checklist of core feminine traits). I’d like not to get letters from mothers of autistic children that patronize me and my approach to the world, and I’d like not to think of such mothers as occupying red velvet armchairs, because the kitschy image of red velvet alone makes me want to gag. I’d like to think that autism organizations at my university and in my city wouldn’t present autistic individuals as lacking humanity, as having a condition that has taken something intrinsic away. I’d like to think that, as my title suggests, autistic women and autistic writers not only exist in space and time, but also exist in categories that are not centered around deficit, loss, and mystery.

Perhaps the one thing I like most about Ohio State is that I’ve rarely had to physically stay in a library while here. I’ve been able to search for and reserve books online. I simply dart into the science and engineering library, grab the book I’ve digitally reserved, and dart out. Very little interpersonal interaction involved.

Libraries, at least at the educational institutions I’ve attended, have always involved lots of people and lots of distractions. And though reading rooms tend to be quieter than cafes or street corners, the silences are overwhelmed with noise — pages turning, clocks ticking, coughs languishing, air circulating — and the visual stillness is overwhelmed with eyes and other unreadable body parts.

Nonverbals abound in libraries. Nonverbals and I don’t always get along.

Upon learning that 1) the library was open today and 2) hardly anyone was there, I ventured out. I managed to stay for nearly three hours, probably a record of some sort for me. I went there to work on my dissertation prospectus, which is ending up a multimedia project. Instead of sifting through book-like things, I had aimed to record photos, video, and ambient noises. Eventually, I located a suitably lonely table, turned around, and found myself parked in front of several rows of the Journal of Mental Deficiency Research. (Which was right near Autism, the journal.)

I defaced some scholarly journals with post-it notes.

Journal of Mental Deficiency Research, with a post-it that says 'pathology (to the max)'

In one of the "enlightening" Autism articles from 2003, an author mused about an autistic child's "entry into the domain of symbols" (a.k.a. so-called normal speech, you know, the only kind of symbolic thing that's worthy of anyone's attention). I went notecard-happy on several cognitive studies/psychology periodicals, including the Journal of Traumatic Stress. DX that, symbol arbiters.

This collection was in dire need of some pathologically ineffectual charity. And I had no shortage of pity-laden bandaids.

Recycling that tired idea of there being one "true language." Because goodness knows that what autistic people use isn't language, isn't even symbolic.

Try harder: Advice for researchers everywhere, myself included.

Yet, I’ve used aspie here anyway. I’ll explain why.

I prefer to be called autistic, for a variety of reasons. I don’t see Asperger’s as “separate” from autism, nor do I see Asperger’s as being the next and better form of human evolution (ugh), nor do I think that people with Asperger’s DXes are superior/more intelligent/cooler than those with other autism labels (more ugh). As I’ve written previously, these diagnostic labels are, in a large way, socially constructed entities that reflect more on what we deem as normative than what we deem as autistic. How we conceive of functioning labels, for instance, is a product of social and cultural power, where “functioning” really means “the ability to act and think like all us normal and therefore superior people.” In a large way, distinguishing oneself as aspie can institute this sort of cultural power — a way to call attention to one’s position on the functioning food chain.

But I still use aspie here, despite the potential for misinterpretation, despite the potential for others to assume that I’m some sort of shiny, self-important autistic. And here’s why: I’ve been given a label in the name of pathology, and I want to reclaim that label in the name of disability studies/neurodiversity/autistic culture.

When I use aspie — and I daresay when certain other autistic people use aspie or autie — it’s not an act meant to exclude others, nor is it an act meant to create hierarchy among autistic individuals. In fact, I use aspie and autie almost interchangeably — because I personally don’t  see a difference between the two, at least not in a let’s-take-back-the-language-used-to-describe-us-and-oppress-us sense. Sort of what Simi Linton writes about.

To give further background: someone called me an aspie rhetor before I called myself an aspie rhetor. And I take issue with both words: First, the person who called me an aspie wasn’t someone who knew (or cared) much about autistic culture. And second, I take issue with being called only a rhetor — I’m also a rhetorician, dagnabbit.

The difference? Rhetors are people who make arguments or create messages (e.g., bloggers). Rhetoricians are people who study what rhetors do (e.g., study bloggers and their blogs and the people who read their blogs). Apparently, per this person, by sheer fact that I’m a so-called “aspie” — and am therefore disordered — I don’t have the ability to study the moves that other aspie rhetors make.

In fact, per this person, all of the autistic bloggers on the Autism Hub are aspie rhetors (even if they’re not, um, aspies): by sheer fact that they’re autistic, they’re incapable of being rhetoricians.

So, insert the mindblindness and Theory of Mind mantras here. I can’t escape my poor little mind prison, so I’ll always be the studied rather than the studier. Because goodness knows that autistic people are arhetorical beings who lack such audience awareness that they don’t have the capability of understanding what rhetoric is.

So, let me make something clear: I’m an autistic rhetorician, not an aspie rhetor. And Hub bloggers are rhetoricians, not just rhetors. But with what I like to think of as a final blow to this individual, I’ve called myself (or my blog) aspie rhetor. And why not? I’m an English major. I can spend the next 10 years analyzing all the crap associated with that term. And if ableist individuals are going to demand that I’m aspie (as opposed to the so-called “horribly damaged” autistic people) and that I’m a rhetor (as opposed to those people who actually know what they’re doing when they write), then I might as well make these terms my own, complicate what these terms mean, use them in ways they weren’t intended.

Moreover, because I like to think of myself as both a rhetor and a rhetorician, I’d like to think that I have some insight into making my own blogging space a rhetorically effective and accessible blogging space. For instance, aspie rhetor is not only easier to spell (e.g., aspierhetor.com), but it’s also easier (for me) to pronounce than autistic rhetorician.

Maybe someday — perhaps when the DSM-V arrives and does away with the Asperger’s stuff — I’ll remake my blog, or have two URLs leading to the same place: aspie rhetor and autistic rhetorician. But I don’t feel apologetic about referring to this space with the word aspie. I recognize that in many contexts, it certainly does create a dichotomy amongst autistic people, just like functioning labels do. But a rather large part of aspie and autie involves taking back the words that others come to know us by. And in that sense, I don’t see the dichotomy, and I don’t see the hierarchy.

Maybe I should put this stuff on my About page.

You’re too well-adjusted to be a neurotypical. You alphabetize the contents of your closet. Neurotypicals can’t even find the will to put their laundered underwear in their dresser drawers. They’re that cognitively damaged.

You sound nothing like a neurotypical. You’re succinct and honest, and not once have I ever heard you gossip. And, sure, you like to watch the occasional chick flick, but that’s a human thing, not a disability thing. If you were really, truly neurotypical, you’d blubber incessantly and inconsolably over trivial things like 10 Things I Hate about You or the entirety of the E! Channel.

You can’t read anyone’s mind. And everyone knows that neurotypicals are so afflicted that they can tune into others’ thoughts. They’ve got these savant-like cognitive powers that border ESP sometimes, yet they can’t even round off Pi to four digits. Fascinating, but so tragic.

I know you have three official diagnoses and all, but I think you need a fourth opinion here. I mean… you… neurotypical? Seriously? I read a WebMD article on neurotypicality once. These people are socially deluded. Your team of “board-certified” and “world-renowned” neurologists probably have some ins with big pharma or something.

I saw this television documentary on the neurotypical “spectrum” last week. All these poor little kids, suffering horribly. The fact that you don’t want to drive a metal stake through your skull in order to end your horrific existence means there’s absolutely no way that you’re neurotypical. Goodness knows that real neurotypicals want to be cured.

I saw you wearing an IEEE t-shirt once. Neurotypicals aren’t even sentient enough to pronounce “engineer,” never mind understand what an engineer does.

Do you really want this label? Labels have stigma. They create their own realities, and you might get trapped in the process. Do you really want to become an addled hairdresser, or worse, a politician? I mean, sure, some neurotypicals have found monetary “success” — e.g., Fran Drescher, Adam Sandler, or Dick Cheney — but they’re the exception, not the norm. Most neurotypicals end up in trailer parks, saddled with 40K in student loans, 30K in credit card debt, a closet full of “nothing to wear,” two ex-husbands, and 2.5 children to boot. I’m really afraid that this label will set you on the path to destruction.

You’re a guy.

Don’t you know that all neurotypicals speak? In fact, they don’t shut up. You and your PDA-mobile-text-machine thing just don’t fit the NT mold.

If you were really a neurotypical, you would have been diagnosed as a toddler. Such a severe cognitive handicap would be obvious, not something that would be misdiagnosed or overlooked. It doesn’t matter that neurotypicality wasn’t included in the DSM until four hours ago — people would have known. NT children are the pretty-in-pink brats running around with fake telephones, the kids who pester their poor autistic siblings to play “dress up” and “let’s go to the mall.” They bring the whole family down with them. The disease is just that bad.

Neurotypicals crave romance and affection. They have constant desires to be held, to be told how wonderful they are. You’ve only had one partner, maybe two. Really, you’re just not that “severe” when it comes to attention-seeking and sexuality.

Did you know that one NT child costs the average school district about $25,000 annually? Imagine all the non-NT kids we could be helping with that money. So, how dare you claim to be NT! I think you just want to mooch off the system. You and your excuses.

But, honestly, you can’t be NT because I, as an autistic person, say so. The sheer fact that you would risk putting yourself in a (dis)abled position endows me with the power to name and claim (dis)ability — or lack thereof — for you. Don’t you realize that (dis)abled people cannot name themselves, cannot label themselves, cannot enculturate themselves, cannot take pride in themselves? Don’t you realize that those who are deemed normative will always know more than those who are deemed non-normative?

Don’t you realize that everyone else will always know more about you than you?

I’m happy to say that my POS passed (!), and I’ve begun tackling my reading list. I’ve here posted the descriptions of my field, focus, and dissertation, if only because they deal with autism and rhetoric in a large way. Of course, things are subject to change, and my thinking will evolve, I’m sure. But nonetheless, this seems to be an accurate picture of where I’m at right now.

Field || Digital Media and Composition
During my tenure as a Master’s student, when I first began identifying as a compositionist, I was heavily under the influence of Richard Fulkerson’s “Composition at the Turn of the Twenty-First Century.” Fulkerson asserts that, in order to effectively teach a writing course, compositionists need to consider four major questions—questions of axiology, pedagogy, process of writing, and epistemology. In other words, when we, as teacher-scholars, consider and promote “good” writing, what/whose values do we promulgate? What do we assume about knowledge and meaning-making, and in what ways are our assumptions ideologically imbricated? I believe that recursively engaging Fulkerson’s questions leads to an even larger matter, one more thematically pertinent to my exam, to my ever-evolving sense of composition as a field: what does it mean to write or to compose in the twenty-first century (Selfe, Technology)?

It is with these questions that I find myself tethered to digital media studies, to the field of digital media and/or/as composition. Embedded in Fulkerson’s questions are questions of definition and being, questions of what writing itself is, of what texts are (Bolter). In what ways do we privilege alphabetic texts on a printed page—and how have these models of traditional writing been naturalized in the composition classroom? How does adherence to traditional, print-based composition diminish the importance of alternative forms of communication and meaning-making?

My own view of writing, as I approach my exam, is a multimodal one, one that considers multiple sensory channels in the making of meaning. In exploring multimodality and 21st-century writing, I look to the work of Kress and Van Leeuwen, who conceive of modes as semiotic channels through which we derive meaning—and media as the materials we use for producing multimodal texts (22). Traditional, alphabetic writing is itself a multimodal phenomenon, perhaps even a synaesthetic one, a phenomenon that might engage or mix writers’ senses of sound and/or sight (how does it sound? how does it look?), or their sense of touch (feeling the pen or the keyboard). Yet, in the academy, we privilege one medium (the printed page) for the transmission of a multimodal phenomenon, a medium that arguably excludes a large number of readers. What assumptions are made about audience when we privilege traditional texts and traditional ways of composing? And, as Fulkerson might ask, what composition processes are deemed as essential, as “right,” as “good”?

In addition to employing Fulkerson’s heuristic to composition theory, I believe we need to consider the affordances that digital media might bring to composition—the changes (or stasis) that digital mediation brings to academic genres, academic discourses, academic rhetorics, the distances bridged between composer and audience. Of course, in reconceiving traditional writing, I do not wish to naively forward multimodality and/or digital media as an accessibility savior. Yet, critical theories of media and modality, access, and audience, I would posit, undergird how we think about composition studies and digital media studies—both as distinct fields and as overlapping fields.

Although I recognize that composition studies is a broad, wide-ranging field with its own unique histories and theories¹, my own interests lie in a particular subset, that which intersects with digital media studies. Similarly, digital media studies is a field in its own right, one that stretches across disciplines in the humanities and the computer sciences and includes theories of technology, philosophy, performance, and social communication (Knievel). I believe that my defined field—digital media and composition, itself a distinct discipline with a 30-year history—both shapes and is shaped by composition studies and digital media studies as separate fields.

Because of these overlaps, I have divided my field reading list into three sections: composition studies, digital media studies, and digital media and composition. Though this categorization is somewhat contrived, I do wish to consider digital media and composition as both integrated and separate entities. My list contains texts that consider history, theory, and practice in all three categories.

Focus || Disability Studies
Though I realize that there are many overlaps, I see two major points connecting my focus to my field—issues of axiology (or, questions of value) and issues of access (or, questions of in/exclusion). Within the past two decades, many compositionists have come to understand “good” writing as a social negotiation among community members, as rhetorically catering to one’s audience (Bartholomae; Devitt, et al.; Ede and Lunsford, Singular Texts). The problem with this current configuration, I would posit, is that, even as teacher-scholars, our conceptions of audience are largely “imagined” to be a non-disabled audience, an audience filled with what Rosemarie Garland-Thomson has coined normates (Ede and Lunsford). In addition to audience, we might also examine how the other ends of the rhetorical triangle, those of writer and message, have been normalized in composition studies. Teacher-scholars still, despite much debate in the field, revert to metaphors of diagnosis and detection, of blindness and deafness in their descriptions of student writers (for examples, see Flower, “Writer-Based Prose”; Gruber; Villanueva, “Blind”). Furthermore, in academia, the printed page is the primary vehicle for intellectual activity, and writers are construed as able, literate, and/or educated in accordance with their ability to encode or decode messages via this medium.

Persisting in composition studies is the ideological belief that traditional writing and intelligence are somehow inherently linked, that traditional literacy is central to defining one’s intellectual worth (Graff). This ideological understanding of composing masks the notion that writing is simply one among many systems of making and conveying meaning, that “writers” do not necessarily privilege “writing” as their primary form of communication, that among our “readers” are those who cannot always access the messages delivered within print-based texts. If we limit our definition of writing to alphabetic text on a printed page, we need only question what medium we privilege in order to grasp which audience members we privilege—and those whom we exclude (Davis, “Deafness”).

In academia, conversation has become trope—a metaphorical exchange occurring on printed pages rather than literal, interpersonal, face-to-face communication. Embedded in composition scholarship is an assumption that students best learn, think, and write by means of alphabetic text on a printed page (Bolter). I believe that studies in digital media and disability give us reason to think otherwise (for digital media, see Anson; Miles, et al.; for disability, see Wilson). Disability studies allows us to perceive the ways in which traditional writing—and composition studies’ investment in traditional writing—normalizes and has been normalized by our understanding of “the” rhetorical triangle (Dunn, Talking 150). In some sense, as evidenced by recent discussions on the Writing Program Administrator listserv, digital media technologies such as screen-readers or social networking web sites are commonly perceived as assistive technologies, as tools that help those with disabilities better approximate normate writing and normate discourse. Yet, if we revisit the Spring 2002 issue of Kairos (titled “Disability: Demonstrated By and Mediated Through Technology”), we can begin to recognize the differences between digital media as assistive versus digital media as accessible or inclusive: the former, depending on the context, can imply that the writer is somehow lacking and is in need of a technological tool to make up for this lack, whereas the latter moves toward recognizing digital media composing as a valid and valued form of intellectual communication and exchange (Duffelmeyer; Miles, et al.).

I would offer that digital media studies, in conjunction with accessibility concerns, can aid us in unmasking these naturalized assumptions about communication and meaning-making, can aid us in moving toward a 21st-century, synaesthetic, multimediated theory of writing. As scholars in digital media and composition have argued, traditional theories and practices of writing are (and should be) shifting, especially if we diversify audience in terms of disability, race, gender, nationality, class, sexuality, and other markers of difference (Anson; Wysocki). Who does digital writing allow us to reach, and how does it let us do so? In what ways can digital media render writing and writing pedagogy more accessible, more inclusive? (And, lest I sound too optimistic about digital media and the potential for access and universal design—who might digital media exclude (Banks; Selfe & Selfe)?)

Of course, disability studies is a rich, dynamic field that, despite its overlaps, finds its roots outside of studies in digital media and composition. Borne out of activism in the 1960s, disability studies, generally speaking, is concerned with a social model of disability, where societal barriers and discrimination are more disabling than any so-called disability or form of bodily difference (Linton; Robertson and Ne’eman). A humanities approach toward disability has much in common with cultural studies and other theories of diversity (Powell). For example, comparisons have been made between the civil rights movement and the activities of the Deaf community, and parallels have been drawn between gay pride and autistic self-advocacy movements (see Robertson and Ne’eman; Autism Hub).

Through this social model, individuals have reclaimed the word disability and have embraced their identities as (dis)abled, even referring to normate populations as being “temporarily able-bodied” (Heilker, “Autism and Rhetoric”).  Memoirs and other personal, narrativistic forms of life-writing have functioned as one major lifesource for disability advocacy—and, perhaps most relevant to my areas of interest, the blogosphere has also served an important role in activist movements (Couser; Wilson). Because disability is an inherently personal and embodied identity, my disability studies reading list contains memoirs, novels, blogs, and narrative theory, in addition to scholarly texts that position disability studies within composition and/or digital media. I believe that these narrativistic texts are pertinent to the questions posed above concerning axiology and access—specifically, how (dis)ability affects our conceptions of audience and how it is we conceive of “text” and “writing.” Finally, as Paul Heilker has argued, the 1974 CCCC position statement on Students’ Right to Their Own Language has potential applications to the study of disability and composition because it invokes questions of value within the context of language and culture—and disability communities arguably occupy and form their own unique cultures (e.g., Deaf culture, autistic culture) and their own unique dialects and languages. Each of my reading lists contains texts by authors who grapple with the complexity of what writing and language are, and thus what it is that we as teacher-scholars value or privilege in/as writing and language.

Dissertation
My dissertation is directly tied to the themes touched upon in my field and focus descriptions. At this moment in time, I expect my dissertation will be divided into sections concerning 1) media and modality, 2) access, and 3) audience. Though these three topics relate to many key topics in disability studies, I plan to focus my research on autism specifically: I hope to explore certain key issues within popular autism discourse, namely, 1) representation of/for/by autistic individuals, 2) medical constructions of autism and autistics, and 3) common binaries/categories used to describe autistics (e.g., high-functioning vs. low-functioning). These issues shape our cultural conceptions of autism and autistics, which, in turn, shape our conceptions and our pedagogy in the composition classroom. Below, I briefly describe how consideration of media and modality, access, and audience might encourage different ways of talking about writing, teaching, learning, difference, and what have conventionally been considered disabilities.

Media and Modality. Digital media technologies—especially blogs and social networking sites—have enabled the autistic community to connect and to “speak back” to powerful, normate-run charities such as Autism Speaks without having to meet face-to-face, without having to worry about nonverbal nuance, without having to experience sensory overload, without having to worry about discourse conventions specific to traditional forms of writing (Clark and Van Ameron; Robertson and Ne’eman; Wilson). Many of these so-called autistic worries have been medicalized, with the sensory experiences and social communication of autistics being construed as neurological dysfunction in need of cure—an approach that many autistic individuals ardently resist (for examples, see the Autism Hub). If we as compositionists construct autistic writers as neurologically diverse rather than defective or diseased, how might we reconsider our axiological assumptions about writing and digital media?

Access. As G. Thomas Couser has commented, the affordances that digital media lend to those with disabilities are not widely available within the generic strictures of the publishing industry, which often call for “typical,” formulaic narratives—such as the triumph novel, or the sentimental/pity-me novel—when the topic involves disability. Accounts that disembark from these formulas are not as marketable—and, as a result, many autistics who advocate neurological diversity rather than cure find themselves relegated to the blogosphere while charities control popular and cultural discourses surrounding autism (Garland-Thomson). Of course, these examples of narrative perhaps lie within the realm of genre more than they do media. Yet, media are inextricably tied with our conceptions of genre, writing, and access. For instance, recent composition scholarship has painted autistic individuals as inherently, rhetorically clueless writers: acute attention to detail and lack of transition statements have been depicted as symptoms of autism in dire need of treatment (Jurecic, “Neurodiversity”; Yoder). How might we reconceive academic genres and acknowledge—or, I daresay value—autistic discourse conventions within traditional writing? How might we involve digital media as we strive to make writing more accessible?

Audience. A common medical construct in scholarship regarding autism involves empathy: autistic individuals supposedly lack what has been termed “theory of mind,” or the ability to imagine the mental states of others (Baron-Cohen). In terms of rhetoric and composition, teacher-scholars have connected this lack of empathy to lack of audience awareness, assuming that autistic writers are egocentric and self-centered because they cannot connect with a neurologically typical audience (Baron-Cohen; Jurecic, “Neurodiversity”). From a disability studies standpoint, however, I believe we need consider how the amorphous audience concept in composition studies has been normalized—that is, how audience has come to exclude those with disabilities, or, in this case, autistic individuals.

Methodology. Without prematurely committing myself to a data set, I anticipate analyzing discursive trends within the blogosphere, particularly blogs belonging to the Autism Hub, an online community that approaches autism from a positive and neurologically diverse perspective. Additionally, my research might also include interviewing a very small sample of autistic college writers who are active in these online advocacy movements. In sum, I hope to examine constructions of autistic writers both in and outside of the composition classroom, and I also wish to consider the communication affordances that digital media might offer autistic individuals. Finally, because I do not want to privilege the printed page as my sole medium of transmission, nor do I wish to assume that all of my readers are self-identified normates who prefer to read, think, and learn via traditional alphabetic text, I anticipate that my dissertation will include digitally mediated components.

–
¹ Composition studies traces its immediate history to the development of writing-specific courses in the mid-1800s, with sustained study and graduate-level programs having emerged only within the past 40 years—a stark contrast to the emerging subfield of digital media and composition, which is even more nascent (Brereton; Miller, Textual Carnivals). Michael Kneivel and others have set the birth date of digital media and composition within the mid-1970s, and the first major journal within the field, Computers and Composition, came into being in 1983.

Among other not-so-pleasant things, autism is frequently depicted as the newest “trend diagnosis,” especially within online circles. We only need look to Dennis Leary’s or Michael Savage’s tirades this past summer to get an idea of the over-the-top vitriol surrounding this assessment. Moreover, such comments about overdiagnosis appear despite autism specialists proclaiming that autism is underdiagnosed.

Autistic writers such as Thomas McKean have argued that there is an “ethos” problem within the autistic community, that adult-diagnosed or self-diagnosed individuals have little to no place in the discussions that surround autism and autistics. The folks at autistics.org penned an excellent follow-up to McKean’s assertions. Of course, in addition to the overdiagnosis brouhaha, we have the high-functioning/low-functioning division, that clever binary employed as a mechanism to diminish the ethos of those autistics who do self-advocate.

I want to explore this diagnosis issue more, however, because I think it’s an issue that really needs to be addressed. Many so-called debates in autism discourse seem to prevent autistics from self-advocating, from entering into anything resembling an autistic culture — anything to further someone else’s agenda.

My own experiences with “diagnosis” and “assessment” are mixed. I first learned that I “likely” had Asperger’s when I was a teenager, around the time I dropped out of high school. Of course, the individuals providing such an assessment were not autism specialists, nor could they document my condition “officially.” Something similar happened in college — I sought out counseling at a couple junctures, and was again told that I had Asperger’s… unofficially. In fact, I didn’t become an “official” autistic (ugh) until I began working on my MA degree. What to make of this?

I should note that my age(s) of “diagnosis,” while somewhat older, are not that uncommon (especially for women), and thus I think I’m generally afforded a fairly strong ethos when I participate in autistic communities. But, nonetheless, some people only latch onto the official designation, which occurred when I was of college age. (For example, one autistic person I know in real life, when he learned of my age at official diagnosis, commented that I must be “extremely mild.” I resisted the urge to punch him in the face.)

Contrary to the beliefs of the interwebz, I didn’t wake up one day and decide to be autistic. I was passively labeled as autistic before I ever agentively labeled myself as autistic. I suppose I could have (or my parents could have) more vigorously pursued officialness when I was a child. But, for personal reasons, we didn’t go that route — at least not at that point in my life. However, there was something clearly different about me from birth. (Yes. That early.) Nobody recognized that something as Asperger’s until I was much older — partly because Asperger’s itself wasn’t even an official diagnosis until I was a fifth grader, partly because Asperger’s wasn’t widely and publicly recognized and diagnosed until I was nearly college-aged, and partly because I’m of the female sort, and ASD has largely been seen as a “boy thing.”

This is all very personal, personal in a way I don’t quite feel comfortable writing about. However, I write this because I’d like to think that, eventually, both the autistic community and the autism community could move away from this obsession with age and diagnosis, as if somehow a 40-year-old diagnosee is either more “helpless” because she “lacked early intervention” or is less autistic because “nobody noticed it sooner.” Do we really, truly believe this nonsense?

Obviously, diagnosis can and does serve a purpose. It allows, legally, for access and accommodation. For many, diagnosis is validating and/or leads to self-understanding. Diagnosis can explain a lot. But there are some things that diagnosis just plain isn’t and just plain shouldn’t be. (For example, why must someone possess a legally binding document, a document that probably required oodles of out-of-pocket money, in order to receive an accommodation? In the words of my interwebz friends, WTF?)

I think we, as a community of autistics, need to recognize the structures embedded in diagnosis first and foremost: whether you’re examined by fourteen neurologists at age three or one clinical psychologist at age fifty-three, you can still call yourself an autistic and self-advocate with that ethos. Accordingly, even if you don’t have an official diagnosis, you should still be able to contribute to the larger autistic community, to be a part of this community.

Why are autistics making social pariahs out of other autistics? Are we not already pariahed enough on a daily basis? Autistics are individuals. Autistics are diverse. Autistics come from different places. Get over your own shiny brand of autism and get used to it.

My own reaction upon first learning about my ASD was that of fear and shame, mainly because fear and shame were the emotions I’d been programmed into feeling about ASD. I’d never come across anything remotely positive in association with autism (and these were the days before I’d become truly acquainted with the internet). I welcomed unofficialness because I didn’t desire stigma, because I didn’t comprehend the fullness and richness of ASD, because I didn’t come to ASD from a lens of difference or diversity — I only understood ASD as depressingly embedded in deficit. It took a long while for me to reshape my views of ASD and myself. Although self-diagnosis generally refers to those individuals who voraciously read and learn everything they can about ASD and then recognize themselves in the label, I tend to see self-diagnosis more along the lines of self-recognition or self-identification.

I suppose this post is the result of a pent-up reaction to snarky comments I’ve seen in autistic web forums and listservs, snarky comments made about others. But I’ve also been triggered into annoyance mode by in-person questions. Lately, I’ve been greeted with the when were you diagnosed? question more often than usual, it seems.

I don’t really know how to answer that question. In a lot of ways, it seems invasive: why the hell does it matter? It’s not as if the autism latched to my brain one day in grade 9, and, as a result, I’m not as malignantly autistic as the kid diagnosed at age two. In a lot of ways, I feel as if this question is wrapped in a medical model, or a disease model, of autism and disability. To me, it suggests the idea of a severity continuum, as if teens and adults shouldn’t be diagnosed with autism by the sheer fact that they’re adults, as if only the little helpless children matter, as if only kids are “severe” and in need of “services.”

Moreover, anyone who claims to be autistic and not suffering has to be a joke, right? Why not find every means possible to discredit them — age of diagnosis, self-diagnosis, adulthood, gender, sexuality (gasp! autistic and sexual in the same sentence?), IQ, so-called “functioning” level, speaking style, writing style, stim style, income bracket, and on and on… </sarcasm>

Amanda Baggs has felt the need to post her official documentation online, which, I’m guessing, is due to some of the horrible, doubting comments she’s received on her blog. (One of the sessions I attended at CCCC, on autism and rhetoric, commented on this. The presentation was made by April Mann.)  It’s as if people believe that personhood entirely precludes autism — forget the age or officialness debates. How long do autistics need to keep defending themselves? How long until our ethos is a legitimate one? Highly rhetorical questions, I know.

But back to that dreaded question: when were you diagnosed? I struggle with how to answer this concisely. I struggle with whether I should answer it. I struggle with writing this blog post. I feel as though I need to regurgitate the official diagnosis as my answer, even though I knew several years beforehand. But then there’s also the age at which I self-identified, the age at which I embraced my autism, which is a different matter entirely to most who ask the question — but to me, that moment is the important one, more important than the moments that involved paperwork and stacking cubes.

I suppose, as an autistic writer, concision has never really been my strong point?

For those interested, my webtext is available here:
http://www.bgsu.edu/cconline/dmac/index.html

I should also note that there are several places in this webtext where I attempt to be sardonic, or sarcastic even. Part of this is me playing with representations of the spectrum. My own perspective about autism is a very neurodiverse one, so if something in this webtext seems contrary to neurodiversity, or seems inflammatory, then it’s probably me attempting to be sarcastic. I’m hoping the points where I’m not being literal are clear in their intent, especially since so many people reviewed this and helped me with the revisions. 

Autism Speaks has launched a series of college/university chapters, a program that started at the beginning of the 2008-2009 school year. My university, Ohio State, is currently in the process of forming its own chapter. Over the past month, three people have tried to “recruit” me for it. My unabashed disgust for Autism Speaks notwithstanding, I think I’ve been tactful and rhetorically “appropriate” in my conversations with these people — conversations in which I’ve tried to communicate why Autism Speaks is a harmful organization. Unfortunately, my appeals have not been persuasive thus far.

In December, an NT grad student in the aspie group I belong to forwarded me a notice from the Autism Speaks faculty advisor. My grad student friend knows of my disdain for Autism Speaks and suggested I write the faculty advisor, or possibly consider joining the group to provide balance. I opted for letter-writing, of course, because in no way do I want to be affiliated with Autism Speaks. In my letter, I explained neurodiversity and Autism Speaks’ problematic foci on cure and prevention. The faculty advisor, in response, said that although she empathized with my position, the group would maintain the vision of Autism Speaks.

In the faculty advisor’s “defense,” I’m fairly certain that she was well-meaning in her statement and that she has nothing but so-called “good intentions” concerning her involvement with Autism Speaks. I think that many people involved with this organization, as harmfully misdirected as it is, have good intentions despite their woeful ignorance. However, the moment I saw the word empathize in her letter, something in me snapped. Obviously, she was not empathizing with me, and her remark came across as quite patronizing.

I’ve reached the point in life — in my growth as a person who has accepted and embraced being autistic — where the “good intentions” excuse just doesn’t cut it for me any more. If a bunch of autistic people are telling an organization that their group’s vision is hurtful, harmful, and unrepresentative, and they just keep chugging along obliviously, how does that make them well-intentioned? Or empathetic for that manner?

Empathy is such a charged, loaded word in autism discourse. By popular autism definitions, I am pathologically (and negatively) unempathetic. The inverse of this statement, if we herald the lovely NT/autistic binary that so many people love to herald, is that NTs are normatively (and positively) empathetic. Hence, the assumption is as follows: I can’t understand their minds or motives, but they can clearly understand mine, and, moreover, they’re so in tune with me that they understand my mind and motives better than I do. Empathy becomes the ultimate bodily displacement: the dominant discourse-wielders fit better in my shoes than I do.

In my graduate class on digital literacies, we’ve been exploring various research methods, one of which is discourse analysis. Our professor assigned us a book chapter by Thomas Huckin, “Critical Discourse Analysis and the Discourse of Condescension.” I’ve found myself employing his method of analysis on most everything I’ve read for the past five days — especially conversations concerning Autism Speaks’ role at my university. In his piece, Huckin shares correspondence between himself and a Utah state senator. Huckin wrote a letter in protest of the legislature’s plan to cut the higher education budget in order to fund highway construction (164). In response, the state senator used a sickeningly and politely patronizing tone, a tone Huckin defines as being discursively condescending:

“…the discourse of condescension has three main characteristics: First, it contains nothing overtly critical or negative, and often proffers insincere praise; second, it assumes a difference in status and worth between speaker and listener (cf. Goffman on ‘alignment’); and third, this assumed difference is disputed by the listener.” (167)

In the spirit of Huckin, I’d claim that the response I received — as well as Autism Speaks’ general behavior as an organization — is mired within a discourse of condescension. For example, in response to my embrace of a social approach toward disability, as well as the list of problems associated with Autism Speaks’ “vision,” the advisor wrote:

Thank you for your kindly worded letter.

[#1: polite praise of my original letter]

I am very familiar with this stance and I completely empathize with your perspective. However, this group will maintain the same standards and vision as that of Autism Speaks.

[#2: The power differentials are firmly rooted in an appeal to empathy. As described above, within the context of autism discourse, claims toward empathy invoke a rhetorical power play. She knows that, as an Asperger's autistic, I am supposedly "mindblind," and that, as a neurotypical, she supposedly has mental ESP. By invoking empathy, she dons discursive condescension and places her perspective regarding autism on a pedestal far above mine: she supposedly has the cognitive capacity to understand what it's like to be an autistic person who is continually told that she's an empty shell who's unworthy of existence, and, because she supposedly understands what it's like to be thought of as a mindblind, burdensome human being, she can segue into the "however" clause and uphold Autism Speaks' combative ideology.]

The letter goes on from here: she continued by saying that Autism Speaks was “moved” by the October 2008 campus walk, and she also expressed her desire for greater community involvement and “working together” with other campus autism groups. However, #3 arises in that I, as the recipient of this letter, dispute our postulated difference in “worth” as “functioning” humans — she asserts a hierarchy of empathetic worthiness; I don’t. In this letter, the writer employs rhetorical tools common to (neuro)typical autism discourse, and she employs those tools to make light of her opposition’s opinions and experiences.