#m. remi yergeau

[monologuerhead]

Socializing through Silence

[I wish you wouldn’t interpret my silence as silence.

My silence is, in fact, a compliment. It means that I am being my natural self. It means that I am comfortable around you, that I trust you enough to engage my way of knowing, my way of speaking and interacting.

When I dilute my silences with words— your words, the out-of-the-mouth and off-the-cuff kind— I often do so out of fear. Fear that my rhetorical commonplaces— the commonplaces that lie on my hands, spring in my eyes, or sit nestled in empty sounds— will bring you shame. Fear that my ways of communicating will be branded as pathology, as aberrant, as not being communication at all. Fear that I will lose my job. Fear that I will lose your friendship, guidance, or interest in me. Fear that I’ll be institutionalized. Fear that I will be infantilized. Fear that I will be seen as less than human.

This isn’t to say that my use of your language is always a product of fear. There are times when I genuinely want to use it, understand it, and learn about and from it. I understand that speaking is how you prefer to communicate. I understand that speaking is how you best learn and interact. I understand that you take great joy in speaking and listening to others speak. And I do, I really do want to share in that joy.

But the burden can’t always rest on me. I have a language too, one that I take joy in, one that I want to share. And when you deny me that— when you identify my silence as a personality flaw, a detriment, a symptom, a form of selfishness, a matter in need of behavioral therapy or “scripting” lessons—  when you do these things, you hurt me. You hurt me deeply. You deny me that which I need in order to find my way through this confusing, oppressive, neurotypical world.

My silence isn’t your silence. My silence is rich and meaningful. My silence is reflection, meditation, and processing. My silence is trust and comfort. My silence is a sensory carnival. My silence is brimming with the things and people around me— and only in that silence can I really know them, appreciate them, “speak” to them, and learn from them.

Speaking is an unnatural process for me. When socializing through speech, I will almost always be awkward, and I am OK with that awkwardness. In fact, I am learning to embrace that awkwardness, learning to reclaim and redefine that awkwardness. I am sorry you’re not OK with that, sorry that you feel I need to practice, or take anti-psychotics, or frequent the university hospital’s psych ward. I’m sorry that you won’t appreciate me for who I am and how I operate in the world. I’m sorry that I can no longer consider you an ally, confidante, or friend.]

M. Remi Yergeau, Loud Hands

#autism #loud hands #m. remi yergeau

[librarycards]

do you have any favorite books/articles/etc. on asexuality and/or aromanticism?

this is great timing, anon! @stephen-deadalus and i just recently published an article/webtext rellated to ace/aro rhetorics in a neuroqueer/transMad context. below is a link to that + another piece of mine, and some other works you should check out

First and foremost: check out Carnival of Aces and Carnival of Aros. The former was one of my main sources of info back in the day when I ID'd as ace (starting in 2012ish) and they're still going. Carnival of Aros is more recent, and their posts have been really interesting to read so far.

for articles:

[sarah] Cavar, In praise of -less: transMad shouts from absent (pl)aces (hiiiiiii)

[sarah] Cavar & ulysses c. bougie, port-man-toes: the aroace - queercrip - transmad - neuroqueer erotics of digital collaboration (hiiiiii pt. deux) [also see our references in this piece for more cites]

C. Bougie, Composing Aromanticism

Carter Vance, Unwilling Consumers: A Historical Materialist Conception of Compulsory Sexuality (h/t @queertemporality)

M. Remi Yergeau, Cassandra Isn't Doing the Robot: On Risky Rhetorics and Contagious Autism (a chapter in Yergeau's first monograph, Authoring Autism, also attends to the prefix 'demi' in compelling ways, esp. for those interested in neuroqueerness)

for books:

Twoey Gray, Hypoactive Sexual Desire Disorder. See my review in Feral Feminisms here, and the whole Ace & Aro Reviews Issue here.

Milks & Ceranowski, eds. Asexualities: Feminist and Queer Perspectives (the og one is out, but the 10th anniversary ed. is forthcoming this year....with a chapter by Ulysses and I again!)

Ela Przybylo, Asexual Erotics: Intimate Readings of Compulsory Sexuality

I haven't read the Ace anthology yet, so I rec with grains of salt included. But reviewers I respect have commented favorably on it, so I'm putting it here.

This list is pretty short, mostly because I wanted to keep the citations to those actually accessible for free online (apart from books). It is also because the most radical, interesting, and generative discourse happening on ace/aro subjectivity and community, at this time, is happening on Tumblr and other blogs. Genuinely. I recommend searching the ace/aro/loveless/lovequeer tags to get a sense of what is currently happening; these are the spaces where I get a lot of my information and citations, including for the published articles above. hope this helps get you started!

#not assuming you have institutional access to anything but if you see any cites you want hmu #ask #mine #book rec #asexuality #lovequeer #aromantcism #anonymous

[autistpride]

How many of these famous autists do you recognize? And this isn't even a complete list!

So many amazing wonderful people are autistic. I will never understand why people hate us so much.

Actors/actresses/entertainment:

Chloe Hayden

Talia Grant

Rachel Barcellona

Sir Anthony Hopkins

Dan Akroyd

David Byrne

Darryl Hannah

Courtney Love

Jerry Seinfeld

Roseanne Barr

Jennifer Cook

Chuggaaconroy

Stephanie Davis

Rick Glassman

Paula Hamilton

Dan Harmon

Paige Layle

Matthew Labyorteaux

Wentworth Miller

Desi Napoles

Freddie Odom Jr

Kim Peek

Sue Ann Pien

Henry Rodriguez

Scott Steindorff

Ian Terry

Tara Palmer -Tomkinson

Albert Rutecki

Billy West

Alexis Wineman- Miss America contestant

Athletes:

Jessica- Jane Applegate

Michael Brannigan

David Campion

Brenna Clark

Ulysse Delsaux

Tommy Dis Brisay

Jim Eisenreich

Todd Hodgetts

John Howard

Anthony Ianni

Lisa Llorens

Clay Matzo

Frankie Macdonald

Jason McElwain

Chris Morgan

Max Park

Cody Ware

Amani Williams

Samuel Von Einem

Musicians:

Susan Boyle

Elizabeth Ibby Grace

David Byrne

Johnny Dean

Tony DeBlois

Christopher Dufley

Jody Dipiazza

Pertti Kurikka

James Jagow

Ladyhawke

Kodi Lee

Left at London

Red Lewis Clark

Abz Love

Thristan Mendoza

Heidi Mortenson

Hikari Oe

Matt Savage

Graham Sierota

SpaceGhostPurp

Mark Tinley

Donald Triplett

Aleksander Vinter

Comedians:

Hannah Gatsby

Robert White

Bethany Black

Scientists/inventors/mathematians/Researchers:

Damian Milton

Bram Cohen

Michelle Dawson

Carl Sagan

Writers:

Neil Gaimen

Mel Bags

Kage Baker

Amy Swequenza

M. Remi Yergeau

Sean Barron

Lydia X Z Brown

Matt Burning

Dani Bowman

Nicole Cliffe

Laura Kate Dale

Aoife Dooley

Corrine Duyvus

Marianne Eloise

Jory Flemming

Temple Grandin

John R Hall

Naomi Higashida

Helan Hoang

Liane Holliday Willey

Luke Jackson

Rosie King

Thomas A McKean

Johnathan Mitchell

Jack Monroe

Caiseal Mor

Morenike Giwa- Onaiwu

Jasmine O'Neill

Brant Page Hanson

Dawn Prince-Hughs

Sue Robin

Stephen Shore

Andreas Souvitos

Sarah Stup

Susanna Tamaro

Chuck Tingle

Donna Williams

Leaders:

Julia Bascom

Ari Ne'eman

Sarah Marie Acevedo

Sharon Davenport

Joshua Collins

Conner Cummings

Kevin Healy

Poom Jenson

Amy Knight

Jared O'Mara

David Nelson

Shaun Neumeier

Master Sgt. Shale Norwitz

Jim Sinclair

Judy Singer

Dr. Vernon Smith

Artists:

Miina Akkijjyrkka

Danny Beath

Deborah Berger

Larry John Bissonnette

Patrick Francis

Goby

Jorge Gutierrez

Lina Long

Johnathan Lerman

Julian Martin

Haley Moss

Morgan Harper Nichols

Tim Sharp

Gilles Tehin

Willem Van Genk

Richard Wawro

Poets:

David Eastham

Christopher Knowles

David Miedzianik

Henriette Seth F

#autism acceptance #autism acceptence month #autism #asd #autistic pride #autistic #actually audhd

[horsesource]

“Could there be a schizophrenic mode, an Indian mode, a Black mode, an artistic mode, just as there exists an autistic mode?

Or, on the contrary, is it precisely the point that what we need to insist on is the ‘in-between’ in order to shatter such clichés and the cartoonish and identitarian typology that sustains them?

Because this is about settling in-between modes, in-between worlds, in the passages, transitions, turns, slippages, crossings and twists in perspective, even in the negotiations between modes and worlds.”

Peter Pál Pelbart

“Are you, dear reader, autistic or nonautistic? Can there ever really be any in-between?”

M. Remi Yergeau

[werewolf-transgenderism]

i must know any and all merlin opinions please

ok this is LONG sorry I have many thoughts about this!!!!

Robert de Boron’s Merlin gives us a more in-depth look at Merlin’s odd childhood: he’s the child of a demon and a mortal woman, and the resulting magical powers that he possesses make for a childhood where he is simply out of time and out of place. He engages in a sort of “crip time” where everything collapses backwards and forwards simultaneously as he performs the tasks he needs to perform in order to fulfill his fated role, marking him as an other and not allowing him to fit neatly into the spaces he occupies in the present due to his looking toward the past and future.

Merlin as a child kind of freaks out the people around him, because he’s got all of these timelines converging in his mind and he’s got this skill for precocious speech that one wouldn’t expect from, like, a little kid. Jes Battis, reading these scenes in de Boron’s Merlin, argues, “a lot of hyper-verbal kids on the spectrum will get this portrayal of a kid who tends to unnerve adults with non-traditional language. Non-verbal kids on the spectrum run into similar problems as a result of their silence, which is never actually silence, but rather non-verbal interaction” (Thinking Queerly 35). Merlin, in de Boron’s text, is unable to connect with other kids his age due to his very apparent difference, and also finds himself often needing to withdraw from society into isolation to regulate himself, which Battis suggests we might read “as the strategy of someone who is easily overwhelmed—someone who flees to the woods in order to escape the sensory overload of court” (34).

From its medieval origins into modern medievalist adaptations, Merlins across the Arthurian tradition also experience an inherent neuroqueerness coming from the prophetic position they occupy. Merlin simply does not interact with the world in the same way that other people do—he can’t, when he’s got the anxieties of the past and the future weighing on him at all times, lifetimes of knowledge condensed into one person who is necessarily both within and outside of himself. He’s unpredictable, a bit unhinged, and often, as a result of his prophetic and magical powers, he’s seen by others as cold, unfeeling, and uncaring, but that couldn’t be further from the truth—he’s bursting with lifetimes of feeling that he simply cannot express in ways that are easy for those around him to interpret. (And here is where I go on my personal tangent about the inherent feeling of being out of time/out of place as an autistic person interacting with a neurotypical world that is simply not made to accommodate the ways we differ from the norm. I’ve been told I’m unfeeling and emotionless and that I speak weirdly and think in ways that don’t make sense to allistic people and I just!! have to scream!! I am SO full of feelings and emotions and love, etc., I just don’t express myself in the same ways as allistic people do!)

Merlin, across traditions, displays a neurodivergence where he’s always out of place, engaging in the kinds of neuroqueer rhetoric that M. Remi Yergeau describes as coming into being “through movement and the residues of movement, through creeping, sidling, ticcing, twitching, stimming, and stuttering” (Authoring Autism 76). Think of Sword in the Stone Merlin! He’s always stuttering, always having difficulty expressing his ideas verbally, always running into communication failures because he’s got so much knowledge from so many times and places bouncing around in his head that he simply interacts with the world in different ways from others who don’t share these experiences. Or even Merlin Merlin, with all his gumby awkward weirdness that he’s always getting into trouble with because of his magic and his destiny! Merlin’s a weird little guy, variously mad, always misunderstood, always living through a world that’s not made to accommodate his ways of thinking and being—which echoes, for me, the experience of being autistic SO clearly.

#sorry this is very long but you did ask lmao #I don't know how to put text in a readmore sooooooo #merlin my beloved weird wizard I could have written waaaay more about this but I figured one single-spaced page was more than enough #long post

[libraryben]

Open Access

Introduction: On Crip Authorship and Disability as Method. Mara Mills and Rebecca Sanchez

Section I: Writing

1.Writing While Adjunct. Mimi Khúc.

2. Chronic Illness, Slowness, and the Time of Writing. Mel Y. Chen.

3. Composing Perseveration / Perseverative Composing. M. Remi Yergeau.

4. Mad Black Rants. La Marr Jurelle Bruce.

5. Plain Language for Disability Culture. Kelsie Acton.

6. Peter Pan World: In-System Authorship. Isolation Nation.

7. LatDisCrit and Counterstories. Alexis Padilla.

Section II: Research

8. Virtual Ethnography. Emily Lim Rogers.

9. Learning Disability Justice Through Critical Participatory Action Research. Laura J. Wernick.

10. Decolonial Disability Studies. Xuan Thuy Nguyen.

11. On Still Reading Like a Depressed Transsexual. Cameron Awkward-Rich.

12. On Trauma in Research on Illness, Disability, and Care. Laura Mauldin.

13. Injury, Recovery, and Representation in Shikaakwa. Laurence Ralph.

14. Collaborative Research on the Möbius Strip. Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp.

15. Lessons in Yielding: Crip Refusal and Ethical Research Praxis. Zoë H. Wool.

16. Creating a Fully Accessible Digital Helen Keller Archive. Helen Selsdon.

Section III: Genre

17. Manifesting Manifestos. Alison Kafer.

18. Public Scholarship as Disability Justice. Jaipreet Virdi.

19. Crip Autotheory. Ellen Samuels.

20. Disability Life Writing in India. Mohaiminul Islam and Ujjwal Jana.

21. The History and Politics of Krip-Hop. Leroy F. Moore, Jr. and Keith Jones.

22. Verbal and Nonverbal Metaphor. Asa Ito.

Section IV: Publishing

23. Accessible Academic Publishing. Cynthia Wu.

24. #DisabilityStudiesTooWhite. Kristen Bowen, Rachel Kuo, and Mara Mills.

25. A Philosophical Analysis of ASL/English Bilingual Publishing. Teresa Blankmeyer Burke.

26. Crip World-Making. Robert McRuer.

27. Disability in the Library and Librarianship. Stephanie S. Rosen.

28. The Rebuttal: A Protactile Poem. John Lee Clark.

Section V: Media

29. Crip Making. Aimi Hamraie.

30. Fiction Podcasts Model Description by Design. Georgina Kleege.

31. Podcasting for Disability Justice. Bri M.

32. Willful Dictionaries and Crip Authorship in CART. Louise Hickman.

33. How to Model AAC. Lateef H. McLeod.

34. Digital Spaces and the Right to Information for Deaf People During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Zimbabwe. Lovemore Chidemo, Agness Chindimba, and Onai Hara.

35. Crip Indigenous Storytelling Across the Digital Divide. Jen Deerinwater.

#Disability Studies #Crip #Crip Theory #disability

[autiezon]

Autiezon Neurodiversity Resource List Pt. 5 of 8

Singer, Judy. “NeuroDiversity 2.0: What Is Neurodiversity?” NeuroDiversity 2.0, neurodiversity2.blogspot.com/p/what.html.

Sparrow Rose Jones. No You Don’t : Essays from an Unstrange Mind. 2013.

Szalavitz, Maia. “The Invisible Girls.” Scientific American Mind, vol. 27, no. 2, 11 Feb. 2016, pp. 48–55, www.scientificamerican.com/article/autism-it-s-different-in-girls/, 10.1038/scientificamericanmind0316-48.

“The Loud Hands Project.” Tumblr, www.loudhandsproject.com. Accessed 16 Sept. 2022.

“Understanding Neurodiversity in the Workplace.” HR Daily Advisor, 22 July 2019, hrdailyadvisor.blr.com/2019/07/22/understanding-neurodiversity-in-the-workplace/. Accessed 17 May 2020.

“Understanding Neurodiversity in the Workplace.” FM Magazine, 8 Oct. 2020, www.fm-magazine.com/news/2020/oct/neurodiversity-in-the-workplace.html.

Weddle, Peter. “Promoting Neurodiversity in the Workplace: What You Can Do.” TAtech, 3 Aug. 2021, tatech.org/promoting-neurodiversity-in-the-workplace-what-you-can-do/. Accessed 16 Sept. 2022.

Yergeau, M. Remi. “I Stim, Therefore I Am [Loud Hands Blogaround].” Https://Youtu.be/S2QSvPIDXwA, 27 Jan. 2012, youtu.be/s2QSvPIDXwA. Accessed 16 Sept. 2022.

Zeldovich, Lina. “The Evolution of ‘Autism’ as a Diagnosis, Explained.” Spectrum | Autism Research News, 9 May 2018, www.spectrumnews.org/news/evolution-autism-diagnosis-explained/#:~:text=When. Accessed 16 Sept. 2022.

Evans, Bonnie. “How Autism Became Autism.” History of the Human Sciences, vol. 26, no. 3, 8 May 2013, pp. 3–31, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3757918/, 10.1177/0952695113484320.

#neurodivergent #neurodiversity #actually autistic

[chthonic-cassandra]

(Very long book posts are returning! I hope that’s welcome news.)

Recent books, nonfiction -

- H.D., Tribute to Freud - This includes a few different texts in which H.D. reminisces about her deeply positive experience of going to analysis with Freud. It’s fascinating and deeply enjoyable to read, though it made me aware that I really need to read a solid biography of H.D. (anyone have recommendations?) - I’ve read a lot of her autobiographical prose now, but that hasn’t always given me the clearest grasp on the chronology of her life, as I realized when I found myself surprised at a mention of her engagement to Ezra Pound taking place when she was 19 (which does make the whole thing more understandable). My impression is that H.D.’s unambiguously positive experience of her analysis, which she seems to have experienced as deep but not entirely disruptive to the course of her life, had to do with having come to Freud as a mature adult and artist, who had a clear sense of who she was and what mattered to her but was looking to understand some things more deeply. 

I appreciated her subtle descriptions of the ways that their therapeutic relationship was able to tolerate some moments of disagreement - in particular, H.D. had several spiritual/visionary experiences over the course of her life, which Freud clearly understood as expressions from her unconscious but which she saw as having many more potential causes. It seems that they were able to explore these experiences without having to attach specific causality, which I think is an incredibly valuable and difficult thing for a course of therapy to hold.

H.D. was working with Freud during Hitler’s rise, and her awareness of the growing thread of Nazism, and her concern about what it specifically might mean for her Jewish analyst, is a quietly unsettling thread in the book; the ethnic and religious difference between the two of them also comes out interesting moments in the therapy.

- David Stuttard, ed, Looking at Antigone - Ugh, I don’t really understand what the deal is with these “Looking at...” Greek tragedy books. Are they a vanity project? Why are they being published? I read the Bacchae one a while ago, but forgot how stupid it was and picked this one up without thinking.

Stuttard is a director and an author of popular history books on classics who did a lot of translations of Greek tragedy which are, frankly, quite bad. He edited this series of essay collections about each of the plays which include his translations, and in which all the contributors have to use his translation any time they quote the text in their essays. This makes any meaningful analysis of the text pretty impossible, and so the essays are for the most part very, very surface-level, though some very reputable scholars contributed (I think because they are just nice people). Not recommended, either for introductory readings or deeper analysis.

- M. Remi (published as Melanie) Yergeau, Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness - This is a densely theoretical analysis about the rhetoric associated with autism, and the ways in which neurodivergence and queerness are rhetorically and experientially entwined. Yergeau has an incredibly playful, delighted approach to very dense theory which made a lot of this extremely enjoyable for me, and parts of it I thought were very sharp and important, but in other places (particularly anywhere that they engaged with psychoanalysis, and also the discussion of asexuality), I had areas of question and disagreement; it didn’t always feel like Yergeau was giving enough attention to what the texts they were using were actually trying to do on their own merits. In particular - and this is a longer argument that I have to think through, but - while psychoanalytic theories of autism may not be any less objectionable than behavioral ones, they are objectionable in very different - perhaps almost opposite - ways and are making very different meaning out of the communications of autistic people. I am glad I read it, but I don’t think it’s going to be one of the disability studies texts that I regularly return to.

- Jack D. Forbes, Columbus and Other Cannibals - Forbes was an incredibly important Native American scholar and activist, and I understand that this book is one of his best-known works, and a signature text for the anti-colonialist ‘anti-civilization’ movement. Forbes’ main thesis is that the urge towards colonialism and conquest (as well as all other kinds of exploitation and violence, which he defines as ‘cannibalism’) has existed for thousands of years in European civilization as a kind of psychic disease, which he calls the ‘Wétiko psychosis.’ I struggled with this book; Forbes’ kind of rhetorical style, which involves making very broad and deliberately provocative claims which leave no room for nuance or specificity, is one that doesn’t work very well for me. In particular, Forbes’ historical argument that this ‘Wétiko psychosis’ originated in ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia and spread from there (this is framed as an inversion of the western ‘cradle of civilization narratives’) seems to me to reify a bunch of other racist narratives.

And, of course, the language of mental illness and particularly psychosis to articulate the urge towards conquest/cannibalism was troubling in other ways, and I am thinking through why Forbes chose that language and what it means that he did. In an interesting way, Forbes’ argument reminded me of Resmaa Menakem’s recently published (and tremendously successful) guide to anti-racist somatic healing My Grandmother’s Hands, which makes a much, much gentler version of the same argument - racist white violence comes out of intergenerational white European trauma. There are different cultural connotations to these labels of trauma versus psychosis, and Menakem’s book is very directly aimed towards teaching and guiding white readers in a non-confrontational way - he would never say any of the things Forbes does - but both advance the thesis that white supremacy is a sickness, and one which existed in European culture long before the conquest of the Americas (both of them also have similarly fuzzy approaches to large-scale history, though Forbes has at least read lots of primary sources). There’s something interesting going on there, something I think about turning the western ideas of medical authority against western civilization itself, and I want to understand it better, but my difficulty with metaphorical uses of trauma and psychosis means it’s never going to be the way in for me.

- Aaron Bobrow-Strain, The Death and Life of Aida Hernandez - this is a scathing and tragic indictment of the harms caused by the American immigration system, told novelistically through the prism of the narrative of one young woman who got caught in its coils and fought back. In many ways, I think this book was a splendid example of how effective long-form journalistic works can be - it’s immensely engrossing, is able through its focus on individual lives to hold room for a lot of nuance and messiness, and also makes its arguments with forceful moral rigor. Bobrow-Strain also includes a very thoughtful epilogue in which he speaks about the working relationship he built with the subject of the book, Aida (the profits from the book were divided three ways between Aida, Bobrow-Strain, and a nonprofit serving immigration survivors), and what the writing of the book looked like for both of them. I appreciated that transparency a great deal. I would definitely recommend this, and I think it might be a good book to give to clueless but well-intention relatives.

- Sameena Mulla, The Violence of Care: Rape Victims, Forensic Nurses, and Sexual Assault Intervention - this is basically what it sounds like from the title, and it is a strongly, well-grounded study which I am glad someone did. Mulla looks at the sociological dimensions of the sexual assault forensic exam; how the structure of the exam shapes how concepts like time, safety, and bodily agency are constructed for both survivors and professionals in the aftermath of an experience of sexual violence. I agree with pretty much all of her thoughtful, delicately worded conclusions, and I deeply appreciated getting to see someone take this procedure as an area of serious and specific study. Interestingly, though, while Mulla was just as transparent about her methodology as Brobow-Strain, I had more ethical concerns about the way she wrote her work - in addition to interviewing forensic nurses and survivors who opted to be part of her study, Mulla volunteered as a rape crisis advocate and wrote about the specific (though anonymized) experiences of the survivors she worked with in that capacity. While she did disclose the nature of her project to the survivors she worked with, I can’t imagine, from my own experiences as an advocate, that being a really appropriate venue to get consent for someone’s participation, even anonymously. But I don’t know.

Joan Neuberger, This Thing of Darkness: Eisenstein’s Ivan the Terrible in Stalin’s Russia - this was so good! so good! such thoughtful, nuanced treatment of what we can and can’t know about Eisenstein’s intentions, such careful attention to every part of the films. This was a joy to read. I also learned (though this really deserves its own post), that Eisenstein originally wanted to cast ballerina Galina Ulanova as Anastasia Romanova in the first part of the film, which would have been incredible. I am so annoyed that we did not get this.

#long post #books #racism #colonialism #h.d. #rape #disability

[librarycards]

hi sarah, appreciate the work you do (it is so important and compelling, i virtually discovered the concept of anti-psychiatry through your blog). i was wondering whether you could recommend some texts (of any kind: books, articles, etc) specifically focused on autism and the autistic experience from a neuroqueer/transMad perspective. thanks so much

thank you so much for the kind words!!

i've written about this in a few places:

The Queer Aut of Failure: Cripistemic Openings for Postgraduate Life

Social Skills: a transdyke autie-biography

Mel Baggs Will Never Leave Us

Some other pieces and books of note:

Mel Baggs's oeuvre. (Blog) (Another blog)

M. Remi Yergeau, Wandering Rhetoric, Rhetoric Wandering and Clinically Significant Disturbance: On Theorists Who Theorize Theory of Mind and all of their work!

Jake Pyne, Autistic Disruptions, Trans Temporalities (Pyne has a bunch of excellent work on neuroqueerness and (imo) transMadness!)

J. Logan Smilges, Crip Negativity and Queer Silence (and other works!)

Jess Rauchberg, Imagining a Neuroqueer Technoscience.

*You may notice that this list is very white and TME. Yes, and that's a massive problem. If anyone has recommendations that break this mold, I am begging you to let me know, as there are so many gaps in the still-nascent theorization around autism from a critical Mad perspective.

#ask #book rec #readings #madness #mad studies #autism #critical autism studies #eleanorvancecoded

[librarycards]

do you have any reading recs for the intersection and/or similarities between the disabled & trans experiences? the community of trans, disabled, and trans disabled people working together? tysm sarah

i have many, too many to list here! below are a few links and names to get you started, but trans disability studies is a rapidly-growing field really exploding with new scholarship right now. trans studies specifically is having something of a "crip turn," particularly since the publication of Hil Malatino's long essay, "Trans Care." I don't know what's going to happen going forward, but as it stands, there is active and growing interest in the nexus of trans and disabled subjectivity, especially w/r/t social conditions that design (for) us lives deemed unlivable.

i'm going to focus in this post on scholarship that explicitly engages both with trans and disability studies thought, rather than just work from one area that happens to bring in a topic from the other. Of course, it isn't possible to fully delineate these areas, nor should we try. but trans studies and disability studies are whole academic fields with distinct genealogies and theoretical orientations, and it sounds like you're looking for work that brings these sometimes-disparate orientations together very deliberately. Mad studies also has its own disparate genealogy that is sometimes at odds with disability studies, depending on who you're reading; on the other hand, neurodiversity studies tends to follow and cite DS a little more closely. i'm not going to get into the weeds here, but i did want to provide a disclaimer about how complicated this shit is before i give a LIMITED! INCOMPLETE! list of places to start reading.

my work in transMad studies (which I made up; Trans Disability Studies and Feminist Disability Studies, and intersections therein, predate me) draws explicitly on trans, disability, and Mad studies approaches, as well as/alongside the critical digital humanities, poetics, and science & technology studies. i've written about transMadness / trans disabled digital work / Mad gender noncompliance / trans autie-biography. I also co-authored the chapter on the trans/disabled intersection in Trans Bodies, Trans Selves, 2nd ed.

Some key authors in the area of trans disability studies // transMad studies include but are not limited to:

Eli Clare

M. Remi Yergeau

Nick Walker

Mel Chen

Jake Pyne

Jess Rauchberg

Lydia X. Z. Brown

J. Logan Smilges

Justine Egner

Leah Lakshmi Piepzna Samarasinha

Alexandre Baril

Hil Malatino

Merrick Pilling

Cameron Awkward-Rich

Sky Cubacub

I have included alongside each name a link to one piece of their work that I like. Again, MANY people write about trans / disability / Mad issues in concert, or who talk about certain issues through a t/d/M lens. I listed only a small number of people for the reasons I mention at the start of the post.

Also, much of this work I have selected deliberately to trouble preexisting assumptions about trans disabled solidarity/activism/scholarship – namely, that it starts and ends at the question of pathologization. When we limit the scope of trans disabled liberation work to the boundaries of the clinic (material, discursive, or otherwise) we do ourselves a grave disservice.

i'm going to leave it there as a starting point, but encourage you to check the citations of each of the linked pieces, as they're often treasure troves of further resources.

#i hope this helps!! #antisisyphus #ask #book rec #madness #disability #critical disability studies #trans #trans studies #critical mad studies #transmad #readings

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Top 5 philosophy books to do with neuroqueerness or mad theory!

(I need help with a proposal lmao)

I have a hard time trying to decide which of the books I've read are more in the "philosophy" genre, so I'm going to give you some books mostly from rhetoric/composition/literary/cultural theory that deal with philosophical elements of nq/Mad epistmology:

For the Proper Philosophy, certainly read Foucault's History of Madness.

For works that touch on NQ/Mad philosophical concepts but which I don't think would fall under philosophy Proper:

J. Logan Smilges, Queer Silence: On Disability and Rhetorical Absence.

M. Remi Yergeau, Authoring Autism.

Nick Walker, Neuroqueer Heresies.

Phil Smith, Writhing Writing: Moving towards a Mad Poetics.

Ann McGuire, War on Autism.

For more disciplinary philosophy stuff, try Shelley Tremain's biopolitical philosophy blog for resources as well as Kathy Fritsch's body of work.

I hope this helps!!

#ask #anonymous #book rec #disability #madness #neuroqueer

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also they sort of circular reasoning i see with a lot of autism mom types where the ability to disagree with them is proof that you aren't disabled enough. like if you say anything about solidarity or social barriers, they say you only can say that because you don't have "genuine" disability

aye, good ol' demi-rhetoricity rearing its ugly head

[coined by M. Remi Yergeau, the idea of demi-rhetoricity refers to a paradox of autistic authenticity: one where the "truly autistic" are "too disabled" to speak on autistic experiences at all, and all of the autistic people who do speak on their experiences are, by virtue of speaking, "not disabled enough" to speak authoritatively as autistics. this deprives all autistics of access to 'legitimate' autistic knowledge.]

#sadhoc #ask #ableism #epistemology

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If you're still doing the book recommendations ask (pls ignore if not!): - Feminist, Queer, Crip by Alison Kafer - Soft Science by Franny Choi - Endpapers by Jennifer Savran Kelly - Deaf Republic by Ilya Kaminsky - Repo Virtual by Corey J. White this is such a cool ask idea. your recs (today and throughout the year) are always so great, thank you for sharing them!

thank you so much for all of this! <3

recs:

Vanishing Monuments, John Elizabeth Stintzi

Beasts of Burden: Animal and Disability Liberation, Sunaura Taylor

Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric & Neurological Queerness, M. Remi Yergeau

Bonus: Paul Takes the Form of a Mortal Girl, Andrea Lawlor

#book rec #ask #anonymous

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is it just me or am i seeing some really strange and regressive discussion regarding support labels within the autistic community on this site. like some of what i’m seeing is reminiscent of what i’ve seen autism parents say online about “my *real* autistic child” vs the “not really autistic people who want to take my child’s supports away” etc.

you're dead-on. i'm not convinced all these accounts *aren't* Autism Parents™ cosplaying.

these "not autistic enough" games designed to discredit advocates is a classic example of what M. Remi Yergeau calls "demi-rhetoricity," in which those who speak back against ableist narratives of autism-as-deficiency aren't "autistic enough" to truly represent autistic narratives, while others are deemed "too autistic" (in today's euphemisms, "high support needs/low functioning") to advocate for autistic interests at all.

between the above bullshit, and discursive creep back to anti-self dx rhetoric (which i've also seen recently from these same blogs), we're at risk of going back years in terms of progress re: self advocacy.

#it's frightening. you're not alone. #ask #anonymous

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I love your book recs and your antipsych writings sooo much, do you possibly have any recommendations for nonfic about autism??

thank you, and YES I do!

in terms of scholarly work, Authoring Autism by M. Remi Yergeau is the single best critical ND studies book out there imo. Period, full stop. It's dense and will take time to read - esp. if you, like me, are not trained in rhetoric, which is Yergeau's specialty - but trust it is WELL!!!! worth-it.

Yergeau was a co-coiner of the word "neuroqueer." One of the other coiners, Nick Walker, runs a small press, and recently published a book called Neuroqueer Heresies. It's fantastic.

There's an anthology called Autistic Community and the Neurodiversity Movement that has a lot of really crucial, first-person info on the development of autistic/ND digital organizing, from organizers who were there!

Lastly, The Reason I Jump by Naoki Higashida is a brilliant little book of lyric prose, written by a thirteen-year-old nonspeaking autistic person.

#book rec #disability #antipsychiatry #ask #anonymous

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Hello! Hope you are doing well! I'm just wondering if you could point me to some resources on how ABA hurts low support autistic people? I know it's not good when it's forced, but I just wanted to know if its good at all? I feel like whenever I talk to allistic people about my problem with ABA they point to high support autistic people who have benefited from it and I've just not been able to articulate the problem well enough. 

ABA is irredeemable. M. Remi Yergeau, in their book Authoring Autism, describes & cites in detail the relationship between ABA, anti-gay conversion abuse, Naziism/eugenics, etc. i.e., systems that would prefer autistic people - especially those marked as high support - not exist at all.

the violence inherent to ABA isn't a matter of individual harm, though it does plenty of that, too. the violence of ABA is rooted in its ethos: it is practiced with the express intent to eradicate particular "problem" behaviors, defined as such not because they cause uniform material harm but because they are deviant. it does this through systems of intentional neglect and punishment, up to and including starvation.

might ABA "fix" a given "problem behavior" in an autistic person? well, i don't know about you, but if i learned i'd be denied food if i flapped my hands, i'd try to stop pretty fast myself. the question is, to return to your ask, what do your allistic askers mean when they say "benefit"? what, to them, is "effective"? is it that ABA is evidence-based, meaning that the evidence points to some success in eroding a child's bodily autonomy such that they no longer move their bodies in ways that feel comfortable for them? is effectiveness = to the destruction of a child's impulse to say "no", or the ability to shut them up?

typically, the most visible benefits people refer to when they talk about ABA and high support people is the disappearance of meltdowns (or lowering in frequency), perhaps the absence of stims like head-banging or hand-waving. in the former case, the disappearance of meltdowns without material, environmental transformation is incredibly worrying, because it means that a child's only mode of reliable communication has been shut down. it is the equivalent of someone being denied words so long that they lose the will to speak. in the latter case, I ask: of all the stims in the world, most are not materially harmful to a child's well-being. why spend 40 hours a week torturing a child for flapping their hands? and, if a stim does indeed cause material harm, why are we not first looking to environmental accommodations? after all, I wear goggles when i swim underwater. they help me see without burning my eyes. you can't simply abuse my eyes into not burning in a chlorinated pool.

when in these conversations, i urge you to ask others to critically interrogate what they mean by "success," "benefit," and "effectiveness" in terms of autistic people –– and how much of it is grounded in the idea that youth, and especially neurodivergent youth, are problems to be managed and ultimately subdued, rather than persons for whom the fundamental right to autonomy & access to consent has been suspended in a project of dehumanization.

#not mad at you anon i'm speaking angrily on this bc i am simply angry #ask #anonymous #ableism #saneism #abuse #child abuse #psychiatric abuse #starvation m #eugenics