Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness

Executive Summary

This groundbreaking work by Melanie Yergeau reconsiders autism not as a medical deficit but as a form of neurological queerness—a deliberate resistance to compulsory sociality and normative developmental timelines. Rather than accepting clinical frameworks that position autistic people as lacking agency, communication capacity, or self-knowledge, Yergeau argues that autistic people possess sophisticated alternative rhetorical systems operating through embodied practice, sensory engagement, and relational patterns that defy neurotypical expectations. The book traces how autism becomes a site of rhetorical control through diagnosis, behavioral intervention, and pathologization—while simultaneously documenting autistic resistance through community building, cultural production, and the refusal to be normalized.

Autism as Narrative Construction

Diagnosis as Storytelling and Control

Autism functions fundamentally as a storytelling phenomenon where diagnosis performs not neutral identification but narrative reorganization of identity. Through diagnostic criteria, autistic people are “storied into autism”—their bodyminds become knowable through neurodevelopmental disability categories in ways that affect how they understand their past, present, and future. Someone receiving a late diagnosis in adulthood will retrospectively interpret their childhood through this new lens while imagining “autistic futures.”

The critical distinction lies between “autism-as-modifier” (typically from nonautistic people through clinical and parent-advocacy narratives) and “autistic-as-modifier” (autistically created meaning-making). This reveals power dynamics: nonautistic stakeholders become authorized narrators while autistic voices are systematically delegitimized. When autistic people tell their own stories through blogs, video narratives, comics, memoirs, or more confrontational forms, they diverge dramatically from professional narratives—yet these autistic narratives are frequently dismissed as lacking coherence or reliability.

This narrative control enables concrete forms of violence including eugenics, institutionalization, forced medication, behavioral conditioning, and other systemic harms. The act of diagnosis therefore represents performative reorganization of identity, access to resources, and social positioning.

Racialized and Gendered Diagnostic Politics

Diagnosis operates differently across racialized, gendered, and classed lines. Autistic children of color receive diagnoses later and less frequently, with their traits misattributed to behavioral problems or social issues rather than neurodevelopmental difference. Autistic girls and nonbinary individuals face systematic underdiagnosis as their autism is attributed to personality traits or gender nonconformity.

For autistic people of color, diagnosis becomes a tool for racial control. The cases of Kayleb Moon-Robinson and Reginald Latson illustrate how autistic traits in children of color are criminalized rather than pathologized—leading to school disciplinary action, police involvement, and incarceration rather than support services.

The Rhetoric of Involuntarity

Clinical Construction of Non-Agency

Clinical discourse systematically constructs autism as involuntary—both neurologically and behaviorally. This involuntariness is not inherent but culturally inscribed through rhetorical strategies that contrast autism with voluntary action, intentionality, self-knowledge, and communicative capacity. The rhetoric of involuntarity functions as dehumanization, denying autistic people status as agents capable of meaningful choice.

This operates through what disability studies scholars call demi-rhetoricity—positioning autistic people as possessing only halved or residual rhetorical capacity. No matter how accomplished autistic writers become, clinical literature locates some remaining domain of autism-related deficit that “confirms” their fundamental lack of genuine communicative capacity.

Enforcement Through Behavioral Intervention

This rhetoric of involuntarity extends into treatment. Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA) and other behavioral interventions physically enforce compliance through operant conditioning—discrete trials, reinforcement, and aversive consequences—effectively inscribing involuntarity onto autistic bodies. These interventions work not to accommodate autistic difference but to suppress autistic traits and produce neurotypical-appearing performance through “shaping” (breaking behaviors into tiny components and conditioning them infinitely).

The enforcement of compliance creates the very involuntarity it claims to address. This process generates what Yergeau calls “kakoethos”—bad character—where autism functions as a marked stigmatic presence that permanently arrests one’s rhetorical credibility. Unlike temporary rhetorical failures that can be overcome through skill-building, autism’s visibility marks the entire autistic person as rhetorically deficient.

The logic of involuntarity justifies concrete violence: psychiatric hospitalization, forced medication, restraint, seclusion, and institutional confinement. Understanding involuntarity as rhetorical rather than neurological opens space for recognizing autistic resistance to compulsory sociality as agentive survival practice rather than symptom.

Theory of Mind as Circular Logic

Unfalsifiable Framework

Theory of Mind (ToM) represents one of the most influential frameworks denying autistic rhetoricity and agency. Developed primarily by Simon Baron-Cohen, ToM claims autistic people lack the cognitive module enabling understanding that others have unique mental states—a capacity termed “mindblindness.” However, Yergeau reveals ToM’s circular, unfalsifiable logic: ToM modules are claimed to exist because autistic people seem to lack them, yet the evidence for this lack is precisely the behavioral differences that ToM purports to explain.

This circularity creates a logical impossibility where autistic self-advocacy is foreclosed. Autistic people speaking about autism can be simultaneously dismissed as “not really autistic” (because they communicate effectively) and “too autistic to understand the real burden” (because their autism “residues” permanently). This creates an infinity problem: autistic people perpetually approach neurotypical rhetorical standards without ever arriving.

Modularization and Perpetual Intervention

ToM encompasses mentalizing, metacognition, self-awareness, imaginative play, and empathy. To “lack” ToM is theoretically to lack awareness of one’s own mind and others’ minds simultaneously—a totalizing cognitive absence that, while never empirically demonstrated in autistic people, becomes foundational to clinical understanding.

This modularization enables perpetual intervention: even when autistic people demonstrate competence in one area, clinicians locate some remaining domain of autism-related deficit that requires treatment. The phrase “that’s not real autism” or “too autistic/not autistic enough” maintains the framework that true autistic people cannot narrate their own conditions.

Demi-rhetoricity operates alongside racism, transmisogyny, and other systems of oppression. The case of Reginald Latson—a Black autistic teenager stimming in public targeted by law enforcement—illustrates how stimming was interpreted through both ableist and racist frames as involuntary dangerousness rather than self-regulation.

Applied Behavior Analysis as Control System

Origins in Gender Normalization

Despite claims to scientific objectivity, ABA operates through three key rhetorical strategies—environmentalism, recovery, and surveillance—that systematically pathologize and attempt to erase neuroqueer ways of being. Understanding ABA requires recognizing it not as neutral science but as a deliberately rhetorical system designed to enforce compliance and erase difference.

Crucially, ABA’s methods were first developed not on autistic children but on gender-nonconforming boys in the 1960s-70s UCLA Feminine Boy Project. George Rekers and Ole Ivar Lovaas received federal funding to intervene in “sissy boys” and prevent “transvestism, transsexualism, and some forms of homosexuality.” The identical methodology was subsequently applied to autistic children, suggesting that autism and queerness have been clinically conflated as disorders requiring identical “correction.”

Environmentalism and Total Environment

ABA appropriates disability rights discourse about accessible environments but inverts its meaning. While social model disability theory argues that inaccessible spaces create disability, ABA argues that the environment must be modified to make neuroqueer children neurotypical-appearing. The “total environment” becomes therapeutic prosthesis—every moment, every space, every person becomes a teaching opportunity. Parents are trained as co-therapists responsible for capitalizing on “teachable moments” continuously.

Lovaas’s innovation was realizing that because children need 20-60 hours weekly of intensive therapy, the clinic must expand into the home, making the entire domestic landscape a surveillance and intervention space.

Recovery as Masking

ABA doesn’t claim to cure autism but rather to achieve “optimal outcomes”—making autistic children indistinguishable from nonautistic peers. The rhetoric of recovery gained power through parent advocacy comparing autism to cancer and ABA to chemotherapy. Aversive punishments were justified as lifesaving interventions.

Recovery means masking, passing, and closeting neuroqueer identity beneath normative behavioral performance. The book details Kirk Murphy from the Feminine Boy Project, where a gender-nonconforming child underwent decade-long ABA treatment involving physical punishment, withdrawal of parental affection, and behavioral monitoring. Despite this “successful” behavioral modification, Kirk identified as gay and eventually died by suicide at age 38. Recovery is framed as an “insurance-funded masquerade” where neural structures and autistic impulses remain but are behaviorally covered by allistic-appearing performance.

Surveillance and Mastery

ABA requires constant monitoring through two-way mirrors, video recording, written logs, and detailed behavioral charting. Functional Assessment—recording antecedents, behaviors, and consequences—creates a panoptic environment where neuroqueer subjects internalize surveillance and self-regulate preemptively. This surveillance inculcates self-governance; once subjects appear capable of compliance, their refusal to perform normalcy is reframed as willful misconduct deserving punishment.

Surveillance in ABA is not merely observation but “complete and total mastery”—systematic cataloguing and expanding technologies to know and control neuroqueer bodies intimately. This surveillance extends beyond formal ABA into informal therapeutic spaces, rendering autistic sociality perpetually subject to correction.

Neuroqueer as Refusal of Compulsory Sociality

Neuroqueer Identity as Practice

Yergeau proposes that autism itself constitutes a form of neurological queerness—a refusal of compulsory sociality and normative developmental trajectories. Drawing on José Esteban Muñoz’s conception of queerness as futurity and potentiality, she argues that autistic people embody queerly asocial relationality that defies normative social orders. Unlike antirelational queer theory, Yergeau positions autistic queerness as relational in its defiance—“inherently relational in that it defies, reclaims, and embraces the expansiveness that countersocialities can potentially embody.”

The term “neuroqueer,” developed collaboratively by autistic bloggers, describes individuals whose identities have been shaped by engagement in practices of neuroqueering—actively resisting and reclaiming neuroqueer difference. Neuroqueer is a verb, a movement, not a fixed neurological state. To neuroqueer is to refuse compulsory neurotypicality, to “stim into autistic futures” through resistance to normalization.

Intersection With Gender and Sexual Queerness

Neuroqueer encompasses the intersection of autism and other neurodivergences with gender nonconformity, queerness, and asexuality. Rachel Groner articulates the paradox: “all people with ASD are queer and, simultaneously, there are no people with ASD who are queer.” Autism queers people by making them asocial and violating social norms, yet because this queerness is neurologically determined, autistic people supposedly lack the agency to identify as queer.

Yergeau reframes this through autistic culture as a mode of being-becoming characterized by persistent failure to arrive at normality, refusal to be contained by social categories, and embodied practices that frustrate dominant norms. Neuroqueer operates in “crip time” or “queer time”—temporal landscapes diverging from “straight time” (linear development from dependent childhood to independent adulthood). In crip time, identities are “always yet-to-be” rather than static or chronologically contained.

Neuroqueer asexualities and demisexualities exemplify this resistance to normative categorization. Attractions may be secondary, fluctuating, context-dependent, or existing alongside multiple forms of intimacy. Many autistic asexuals face microaggressions within both disability rights communities (which historically fought desexualization) and queer communities (which may view asexuality as assimilationist), yet asexuality itself queers “already-queer ideas of the queer by exploding the variance of queer variance.”

Autism as Alternative Signification System

Entelechy and Embodied Invention

Rather than accepting autism as the destruction of symbolism, Yergeau proposes autism as an alternative symbolic and signification system operating through perceptual signification, embodied communication, and material relationality rather than cognitive symbolism. She invokes the concept of entelechy—a striving or motion toward realization that generates multiple divergences as residual effects—to theorize autistic movements not as symptoms but as inventional resources.

Autistic movements including tics, stimming, perseveration, echolalia, and echopraxia are not merely involuntary behaviors but constitute rhetorical acts. A tic is not a symptom to be eliminated but a precondition for rhetoricity. Yergeau asks provocatively: “What if childhood shit smearing were read as autistic communication instead of autistic behavior?” She proposes that autistic rhetoricity lies in embracing partiality, residuality, and deminess as inventional resources rather than deficits to be remedied.

Motor Schemas and Distributed Embodiment

Invention in rhetorical terms is “the process of making connections, rearranging materials in unexpected ways” through embodied, multimodal practice. Drawing on Bergson and Merleau-Ponty, Yergeau theorizes motor schemas as “moving patterns immanent within movement” that play across differential zones of the body. These sensorimotor patterns are distributed across interbodily sites rather than localized to the brain.

Motor schemas constitute embodied rhetoric not reducible to intentional action or symbolic communication. Meltdowns and other forms of dysregulation also constitute sensorimotoric schemes revealing power dynamics and discursive circulation.

Echophenomenology: Echoing as Invention

Multiple Meanings Without Conscious Intent

Echophenomena—including echolalia (word repetition), echopraxia (movement repetition), echomimia (facial expression reproduction), echographia (written repetition), and echoplasia (shape repetition)—are typically pathologized as “automatic, non-intentional behavior.” However, Yergeau reframes echoing as inventional and deeply meaningful communication that doesn’t require conscious selection or symbolic intent to carry multiple, context-dependent meanings.

Echoes embody complex meanings that shift contextually and can signify entirely different things simultaneously. The author illustrates this through examples: Emma’s echolalic scripts initially seemed meaningless but conveyed affect, anxiety, and complex desires; Yergeau’s own echoing of movie lines functioned as metonym for anxiety, pleasure, ritual, and complex emotional states—not through conscious selection but through embodied, semi-voluntary repetition that differently “worked” across rhetorical situations.

Importantly, echoes need not seek human interlocutors or achieve social success to be rhetorical. They may be purely self-directed, as Mel Baggs’s video demonstrates through hand-flapping under running water—synesthetic resonance with the water’s motion without requiring interpretation or social meaning-making. The resonance itself is invention. Echoes create “corporeal neologisms”—new meanings generated through repetition that reshape language’s possibilities.

Stimming, Meltdowns, and Embodied Rhetoric

Stimming as Self-Exploratory Practice

Stimming (self-stimulatory behavior) is clinically differentiated from tics on the basis of perceived voluntariness, though both are “semivoluntary.” Yergeau describes holding back a stim as “holding off on scratching an itch” that never disappears but perpetually intensifies.

Historically, self-stimulation terminology emerged alongside sexualization of disabled people; masturbation was conflated with stimming. Rather than pathologizing this, Yergeau reclaims stimming as play, focused engagement, and self-exploratory practice—“desirous and self-fulfilling.” Stims serve sensory processing regulation, provide focused engagement, facilitate learning, and create embodied culture within autistic communities.

Meltdowns and other forms of dysregulation constitute sensorimotoric schemes revealing power dynamics and discursive circulation. Rather than pathologizing meltdowns as dysregulation, recognizing them as communication about sensory overload, unmet needs, or profound affect opens possibilities for different kinds of support.

Stimming is rhetorically significant not because it achieves neurotypical communicative goals but because it circulates affect, creates meaning, modulates environment, and performs the perversity of neuroqueer being. Autistic culture centers stimming as valued practice rather than pathology.

Autistic Life Writing and Resistance

Autie-Ethnography and Activist Resistance

Autistic people have produced substantial life writing and activism resisting pathologization across three decades. Yergeau distinguishes autie-ethnography from autie-biography: the former emphasizes intertextuality, testimony, witnessing, and activist resistance to oppression; the latter centers individual life narrative.

Autistic blogs, vlogs, self-published texts, and embodied practices (hand flapping, screeching, body twirling) constitute a vibrant autistic culture. Archives preserve this work. Notable autistic-authored texts include Temple Grandin’s Emergence, Donna Williams’s Nobody Nowhere, and contemporary works like Julia Bascom’s Just Stimming and Amy Sequenzia’s Non-Speaking Autistic Speaking.

Many autistic activists do not speak or write in conventional ways—their rhetoric exists in ephemeral, embodied forms often unrecorded and dismissed as non-rhetorical. Despite clinical attempts to dismiss autistic writing as lacking narrative coherence and audience awareness, autistic people continue producing work that queers diagnostic frameworks and theorizes their own conditions.

Counter-Diagnosis and Self-Diagnosis

Margaret Price’s concept of “counter-diagnosis” describes how neurodivergent people queer diagnostic frameworks by accepting, rejecting, mimicking, and contesting diagnostic categories simultaneously. Diagnosis is temporally contingent, affecting how people retrospectively understand their past and imagine their future. The book explores multiple diagnostic categories: official diagnosis, unofficial diagnosis, and self-diagnosis.

Self-diagnosis is particularly significant as anti-authoritarian resistance. By rejecting medical gatekeeping and claiming autism through self-identification, autistic people exercise agency over their own narratives and escape the permanence of official diagnostic categorization. Many autistics have multiple diagnostic histories, having been previously classified as intellectually disabled, having apraxia, schizophrenia, ADHD, borderline personality disorder, or other conditions before receiving autism diagnosis.

Allism and Inverting the Clinical Gaze

Autistic activists created the term “allism” to describe non-autism, mirroring how “autism” describes autistic neurology. This counter-diagnostic move inverts the clinical gaze: instead of treating autism as pathology and neurotypicality as default, allism becomes a diagnosable condition worthy of clinical scrutiny.

Websites like the Institute for the Study of the Neurologically Typical satirize clinical language by applying it to neurotypical people, diagnosing traits like “preoccupation with social concerns, delusions of superiority, and obsession with conformity” as symptoms. This rhetorical move demonstrates how autistic people queer pathologizing frameworks by turning them outward.

Disclosure as Charged Practice

Ellipsis and Hidden Curriculum

Autism disclosure—stating “I am Autistic”—is inherently charged and paradoxical. That statement becomes subject to immediate scrutiny, doubt, and attempted correction by neurotypical others. The text introduces “ellipsis”—rhetorical omission—as central to how autistic disclosures are interpreted. Listeners presume something is missing from autistic statements and feel invited to fill in gaps, often with pathologizing assumptions.

The “hidden curriculum” refers to unwritten social rules that autistic people are expected to follow but allistic people violate without consequence. Importantly, autistic people pointing out hidden curriculum violations is deemed socially unacceptable, while allistic people pointing out autistic violations is normalized. This asymmetry reveals how rhetoric itself operates as a tool systematically delegitimizing autistic communication.

Diplomatic Rhetoric and the Closed Fist

Disclosure also involves navigating what Yergeau calls “diplomatic rhetoric”—tactfulness, deference, complex forms of social deception—which operates as an inherently neurotypical construction used to exclude autistic people from rhetorical participation. Autistic people are stereotyped as blunt, literal, and tactless, lacking the diplomatic skills valued in communication.

However, Yergeau reframes this through Edward Corbett’s concept of the “closed fist” versus the “open hand” of rhetoric. While traditionally the open hand represented rhetorical inclusivity, Corbett reconfigured this during civil rights activism to show how the closed fist—direct, uncompromising, provocative—can serve marginalized communities excluded from traditional channels. Yergeau embraces this alternative: “I am not a good diplomat. I am, in the words of Cheryl Marie Wade, ‘the sock in the eye with a gnarled fist.’”

Intersectionality and Structural Violence

Autism and Race: Criminalization vs. Support

Autism does not exist in isolation—it intersects with race, gender, sexuality, and class. Autistic people of color face heightened diagnosis barriers, police violence, and incarceration. Black and Latinx children receive autism diagnoses much later than white children and in smaller proportions, often misdiagnosed with ADHD, OCD, or Oppositional Defiant Disorder. This creates “eugenic criminology,” where disabled children of color are pathologized as dangerous products of bad biology rather than as vulnerable subjects needing care.

The case of Kayleb Moon-Robinson illustrates how diagnosis becomes a tool for racial control and the school-to-prison pipeline. Reginald Latson’s case reveals how rhetorical constructions of autistic involuntariness and dangerousness become justifications for racialized state violence.

Gender and Sexual Nonconformity

Autism diagnosis also skews heavily toward cisgender boys, with girls’ autism frequently overlooked or attributed to personality traits or gender nonconformity. Gender-nonconforming and LGBTQ+ autistic people have been targeted by conversion-therapy-style interventions that treat autism and queerness as interchangeable disorders requiring identical “correction.”

Contemporary practices continue this dequeering: children are given 40+ hours weekly of ABA to become “indistinguishable from their peers.” Medications like Lupron (chemical castration) have been used to control “aggression and sexual expression” in autistic teens. This history reveals ABA as fundamentally homophobic and transphobic, operating as a back door for enforcing compulsory heterosexuality and cisgender normativity under the cover of autism treatment.

Practical Strategies for Reclaiming Autistic Agency

Reclaiming Narrativity Through Personal Storytelling

Rather than accepting clinical narratives about autism, Yergeau encourages autistic people to author their own stories through whatever modality works—writing, blogging, video, art, embodied practice, or combinations thereof. This reclamation of narrative authority constitutes a fundamental act of resistance and self-determination.

Implementation includes rejecting medical gatekeeping (self-diagnosis and counter-diagnosis are valid), experimenting with non-traditional narrative forms, connecting with autistic community to create archives of autistic knowledge, and developing language that captures your actual experience rather than adopting clinical terminology.

Recognizing and Valuing Neuroqueer Embodiment

Rather than seeking to eliminate or “treat” autistic embodiment, Yergeau encourages recognizing stimming, echolalia, motor schemas, and other autistic practices as inventional resources and sites of meaning-making.

Implementation includes stimming without shame as self-exploratory practice, embracing echoing as meaningful communication, using meltdowns as information about sensory overwhelm and unmet needs, and developing awareness of embodied movement patterns as motor schemas constituting embodied rhetoric.

Refusing Compulsory Compliance and Masking

The book emphasizes that autistic resistance to compulsory sociality and enforced normalization constitutes a form of agency and survival, not pathology.

Implementation includes recognizing masking as labor requiring energy and vigilance, practicing selective unmasking in safe spaces, questioning “social skills” training that demands you erase yourself, and resisting “indistinguishability” goals in favor of cultivating visibility and community with other neuroqueer people.

Strategic Disclosure and Self-Advocacy

Yergeau frames disclosure as a choice involving risk assessment and strategy, not an obligation.

Implementation includes assessing disclosure contexts for safety and potential outcomes, developing disclosure scripts that feel authentic, noticing ellipsis and filling gaps yourself rather than letting others pathologize, and creating disclosure support networks with people who reciprocate with affirmation rather than pathologization.

Building Autistic Community and Culture

Rather than seeking integration into neurotypical spaces, Yergeau emphasizes building and honoring autistic culture, which exists through embodied practices, digital spaces, and intergenerational transmission.

Implementation includes participating in autistic spaces and communities as cultural participation and political act, practicing crip/queer kinship through shared refusal of compulsory normativity, documenting and archiving autistic experience to resist erasure, and honoring ephemeral communication and embodied performances as cultural practice even when not permanently recorded.

Critical Analysis and Contemporary Relevance

Impact on Autism Understanding and Activism

Yergeau’s work has profoundly influenced contemporary autism understanding by centering autistic voices and self-determination over clinical authority, theorizing neuroqueerness as resistance to compulsory normativity, documenting ABA’s harmful origins in gender conversion therapy, expanding rhetorical theory beyond neurotypical assumptions, and demonstrating intersectional analysis of how autism intersects with race, gender, sexuality, and class.

The book contributes to broader scholarly conversations by connecting disability and queer theory, challenging medical authority, expanding concepts of disabled culture through embodied practices, theorizing resistance to pathologization, and centering multiply marginalized autistic people in analysis.

Limitations and Areas for Further Development

While groundbreaking, the book has limitations including primarily English-language focus centering Anglophone discourse, substantial emphasis on written and digital autistic culture, limited engagement with other neurodivergences beyond autism, dense theoretical language that may be less accessible to newly diagnosed autistic people or those without academic background, and limited discussion of how class and economic barriers affect autism experience.