Another Neurodivergent Queer Writes A Blog!

See Pt. I of my reading list in Neurodiversity here:

Meanwhile, as I always do, I’ve found so many other things to read before I’ve finished and processed the first set.

Eric Garcia, whose book I’ve been meaning to talk about and hopefully will soon, led me to M. Remi Yergeau, who happens to be at University of Michigan, where I’m working on my dissertation in Classical Studies, and who happens to have written what I suspect will turn out to have been one of the most impactful books of all: Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness (2018).

Yergeau’s writing is so visceral, their ideas so stimulating, that I had to put it down to process it all after I found myself overwhelmed in all the best ways from the first eight pages. Even from so few pages I can already tell that this is a seriously important text for which I’ll have to be able to dedicate myself fully to read this book as it deserves to be read. Here’s one little snippet from only the fourth page, where most other introductions are only beginning:

“If there is one takeaway from what I here write, it is this: what we do not know, and what we often purposively ignore, are autistic narrations of such rhetorical events, the interbodily potentials, desires, and moments that structure an autistic life, or any life. To whom do we listen? The autistic or the non-autistic? Can there ever really be an in-between? What of my shit? What of my unhuggable body? What of me? What of autos, the self that so consumes the presumably autistic? Where the fuck are we?”

Yergeau 2018.4

There is so much in this book. It’s every sentence is multiply rich in that uniquely neuroqueer way. Read it with me!

Also: Nick Walker’s Neuroqueer Heresies: Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Possibilities (2021), collecting Walker’s papers into a single volume with further commentary. “This book is essential reading for anyone seeking to understand the foundations, terminology, implications, and leading edges of the emerging neurodiversity paradigm”—says the back cover. Walker appears to be the source of the idea of neuroqueerness (for one thing, their website is neuroqueer.com).

And I’m (finally) about to dive into Temple Grandin’s corpus, starting with Animals in Translation: Using the Mysteries of Autism to Decode Animal Behavior (2005). While my eyebrow arches at ‘mysteries of autism’, I’ve been wondering for the last few months whether my amazing German Shepherd could be autistic, or whether it’s that all dogs are autistic and I’m noticing it in my doggo because he’s been through a good bit of trauma. But he’s a mirror of me, as well as the screen onto which my projections are projected, so I have reason to doubt the idea. And yet… So let’s see what The Professor has to say. [Of course, Grandin has a new book out (Visual Thinking), which I’m also especially eager to read after this segment of 1A a few weeks ago, but it came down to Visual Thinking or Animals in Translation, and here we are.]