Elle McNicoll (2021) Show Us Who You Are. Knights Of. Her first book, A Kind of Spark (also from Knights Of) is going to be made into a BBC series. There is a fascinating book to be written on the overlap between queerness and autism, both in terms of how the two concepts have been framed throughout history, and how people labeled as "queer" and/or "autistic" have been (and continue to be) mistreated by society.

Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017. (Recipient of the 2017 MLA First Book Prize, the 2019 CCCC Lavender Rhetorics Book Award for Excellence in Queer Scholarship, and the 2019 Rhetoric Society of America Book Award) Journal articles Kate Fox in her collection The Oscillations says that many of her poems in the collection ‘touch on neurodiversity – the idea that, as in biodiversity, there is a strength in the differences of people with conditions such as autism and ADHD who think and experience the world differently’. (2020, p69). In this post, I write with a similar emphasis on some of the perceived strengths and differences of neurodivergent writers. ‘Diagnosing’ autistic writers? As for the ‘Alice’ of the Alice books, she could be seen (as some have) as an autistic child with a logical approach to life and a tenacious insistence on what is right and appropriate, who must navigate an unpredictable and capricious neurotypical world. This evokes, of course, the histories of other disabilities, where therapy claims a civilizing effect, and it would have been useful had Yergeau drawn from these histories of psychology, psychiatry, education, and disability, and, perhaps more generally, of society and civilization. Tapping into this larger scholarship also would have been relevant to her exploration of the overlapping history of ABA as a treatment for autistic and for non-gender-conforming children or, as she puts it, queer, and neuroqueer people. In the 1960s, clinical psychologist Ole Ivar Lovaas, a pioneer of ABA, ran both a Young Autism Project and Feminine Boy Project, both with the goal to normalize deviant behavior. Yergeau makes some valid and thought-provoking points about the overlap in therapy directed at those two groups. Yet her admitted collapsing of the “finer categories of autism or gender or sexuality under the broader banner of neuroqueer” evokes as many questions as it answers (p. 100). Not least—and this goes to my main point of criticism (and confusion) with Yergeau’s approach—the reduction of all kinds of difference and deviance to “neuro,” which is particularly problematic if applied to the past as in Yergeau's exploration of the history of eugenics and stimming. Neurological identities certainly have become increasingly fashionable, yet to me their use brings up the question of the value of simultaneously deconstructing and constructing neurological difference. I did not read this like academic literature is meant to be read, studiously, looking up words I did not understand. I read it in a rush over the course of two days, skimming past the more horrific descriptions of medical abuse (in the name of curing autism), making my best guess at the meaning of some words and refusing to be troubled that I didn't understand others, taking away what I could.Joanne Limburg said her autism diagnosis came as a relief. Photograph: Christian Sinibaldi/The Guardian The illogic runs as follows: if rhetoric is understood to be the social, public form of language, and if autism entails (among its many possible manifestations) the inability to read or perform “proper” social behavior, then there can be no such thing as a rhetorically skilled autistic speaker, an autistic rhetoric, an autistic literature.

aut(hored)ism. Computers and Composition Online. Spring 2009. (Received Honorable Mention for the 2010 Kairos Best Webtext Award) What autism provided was a discursive framework, a lens through which others could story my life. ... My very being became a story, a text in dire need of professional analysis. This, my body, this was autism - and suddenly, with the neuropsychologist's signature on my diagnostic papers, I was no longer my body's author." (p. 1) Opening an Invitation to Remix: Interviews with Kairos Best Webtext Winners. Delagrange, Reider, Sorapure, and Yergeau. Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy, 20.2. 2016. Behaviorist discourse employs the language of recovery ... While behaviorism makes no claim of cure, it does make claims of optimal outcomes, lessened severity, and residual (as opposed to full blown) disability, Recoverym then, is not the process of becoming straight or cisgender or nondisabled, but is rather the process of faking the becoming of normativity." p 105 Both Fitzgerald and Brown describe ‘an affinity with animals’ as a characteristic of autistic writers (Fitzgerald, 2005, p72; Brown, 2010). This is evident in Dara McAnulty’s work:

Publications

My other publications can be found in Rhetoric Society Quarterly, Pedagogy, Journal of Social Philosophy, Kairos, Disability Studies Quarterly, and College English, among other places. Trawling through the Internet in search of autistic writers, I found it really hard to come across people I didn’t know already, especially autistic poets. So, after the wonderful interview with Karl Knights ( here) and the thought-provoking mini-interviews from six neurodivergent artists, writers and performers ( here), this is the third and final post in the series about neurodivergent writers. In this post, I write about some of my favourite writers, in the context of some of the strengths and differences in their writing, which I associate with their neurodivergence. Dog violets push through first, just as the sparrows dig the moss from the guttering and the air is as puffed out as the robin’s chest. Dandelions and buttercups emerge like sunbeams, signalling to bees that it’s safe to come out now, finally’ (p14). That has led to misunderstanding. “The fact that I can articulate masks my need for a lot of care. Someone will say to me, ‘Oh you must be very mild’ or ‘we’re all a bit autistic’. It’s very dismissive. There isn’t such a thing as being a bit autistic – you either are or you aren’t.” This post comes from a position of curiosity, interest, and respect, together with affinity and allyship, and I hope this comes through. All views are my own unless attributed to someone else. Affinity with nature and animals: Dara McAnulty

To oppose a medicalized flattening of autism to a passive embodiment of seemingly autonomic dysfunction, Yergeau makes a powerful case for 'autism’s rhetorical potentials' grounded in the resilient ways that autistic people self-consciously 'story' their desires for better, more inclusive futures. . . . Autistic people, Yergeau reminds us, have always been rhetorical beings. Only by redefining the very definitions and conventions of rhetoric can we begin to attend to these autistic narratives on their own terms." — Travis Chi Wing Lau, Los Angeles Review of Books

On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness

researchers must confront the idea that being autistic confers ways of being, thinking, and making meaning that are not in and of themselves lesser - and may at times be advantageous" (p. 34). With candidness and humour, Gibbs describes her unconventional childhood, struggles to be accepted by her peers at school, difficulties in romantic or sexual relationships, challenges at work, and caring for her father in his last months.