Melanie Yergeau

Occupying Autism: Rhetoric, Involuntarity, and the Meaning of Autistic Lives

Autistic people are hardly described as having the capability to form their own community(s). This obsession with our incapability transcends scholarly discipline—it is routinely portrayed as an inseparable part of autism as a condition. Across scholarly and popular domains, autistic people are portrayed as egocentric, mindblind, and asocial. Using autie-ethnographic analysis, I argue that scholars and lay publics alike represent autism as an involuntary condition. What autistic people consider rhetorical moves—e.g., ticcing, stimming, perseverating—medical practitioners consider involuntary or aberrant behaviors. In this construction, autism represents arhetorical symptoms of a problemed body rather than a valid and underrepresented form of communication.