Surveys have found that the majority of autistic people now prefer the identity-first term ‘(is) autistic’, while the general public, and family and friends tend to prefer the person-first term ‘with/has autism’ (Rhiannon, 2020, p23), Rhiannon prefers ‘(is) autistic’, and explains that because autistic people are ‘born wired differently’, ‘there is no separation of the person and the autism’ (2020, p25). So I will use the term ‘autistic writers’ and even ‘autistic writing’ to reflect this identity throughout the post. Strengths and differences in neurodivergence

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 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 McAnultyGiven these misconceptions, perhaps the most important thing about Rodas’s Autistic Disturbancesis what it doesn’tdo, what it would prefer not to do, what it repeatedly refuses to do. It is not about diagnosing characters. (Yes, we’re looking at you, Bartleby the Scrivener.) Rodas has so little patience with ‘the surprisingly unself-critical conduct of academically trained literary and culture scholars in “diagnosing” unwitting students or fictional figures’ that she devotes a half chapter – no, really, it is numbered chapter 4 ½ (think Harry Potter or Being John Malkovich) – to explaining why Bartleby is not under discussion here. Rodas writes, Authoring Autism will be a book of keen interest to disability studies scholars and activists who are engaged in intersec Opal Whiteley (1976). The Story of Opal: The Journal of an Understanding Heart. Adapted by Jane Boulton. Tioga Publishing Company. Recommended reading and listening from other neurodivergent writers and artists 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). The setting apart of character from narrative … encourages readers to consider autism as a purely clinical classification, a diagnostic label keyed to particular human individuals. Such a move obscures the potential for reading autism as an aesthetic, cultural, literary, linguistic, or rhetorical category, a form of being and expression that might emerge not only in personhood but also in art and fashion, in music and architecture, in circuit design or literary poetics.

Together, Yergeau’s and Rodas’s books upend your entire English department: Yergeau takes rhetoric and composition, Rodas literature and theory. Yergeau’s ‘neuroqueer’(1) project provides much of the scaffolding for Rodas (for whom Yergeau wrote a foreword). Where Yergeau envisions rhetoric such that ‘autistic conventions can be more capaciously read as a neuroqueer mode of engaging, resisting, claiming, and contrasting the interstices of sociality,’ Rodas wants to envision autism ‘as an aesthetic, a way of seeing and interpreting, a vantage, a mode, a set of expressive practices.’ Autism is a lifelong neurodevelopmental disability that affects every aspect of a person’s life, most notably our cognition, how we communicate and relate to other people, and how we experience and process the world’ (2020, p3). Overall there was good stuff here. I agree we should be MUCH more accepting of differences in our society. We tout a love and acceptance of individuality but when we see something truly individualistic we yell and scream.Krumins notes that others viewed her communion with an among things as a young girl being unladylike rather than a young girl being autistic. Cisnormativity governs autism's diagnostic constructions. ... ABA is more aptly termed a sociosexual intervention than a mere social intervention, seeking as it does to make neuroqueer subjects virtually indistinguishable from their neurotypical, heterosexual, and cisgender peers. Becoming nonautistic is likewise becoming nonqueer-for anything that registers as socially deviant may fall under autism's purview." (p. 159) The Oscillations by Kate Fox was released in 2021. This is a wonderful book of poems, many of which deal with the experience of being autistic, including differences in communication between autistic and neurotypical people. As we have seen, autistic artist Megan Rhiannon’s definition of autism includes differences in how people communicate. 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). w)riting like t/his is pun-ishing to the reader(s?) and nearly always less smartifying and (un)queer than the writer (demirhetorically) "thinks" it will be