Authoring Autism

The methods that ABA promotes are many, but the three circulating topics I find most endemic to pathologizing neuroqueer rhetorics are recovery, environmentalism, and surveillance.

What unites the strands of the chapter—environmentalism, recovery, and surveillance—is the always-return to the social.

autism and queerness are implicated in one another, are mutually sustaining—even if at times radically diverging—conceptions of what it means to demi-rhetorically move and defy. Both are conditions of and conditioned on countersocialities; both are modes of being-becoming characterized by a persistent failure to arrive.

These multiple paths of flight, to channel Hawk, are not equivalent or stationary, but are rather always-unfoldings of rhetoricities that frustrate norms.

many state recommendations advocate for an amount of therapy equivalent to that of an adult work week, refashioning autistic childhood into a full-time job.

If you come to this book with knowledge of queer theory or queer identity, however, it is less likely that you will have encountered ABA under its current name: the ABA you are more likely to know has religiously morphed, present-day, into what is popularly called reparative therapy. It is for these reasons that I believe ABA requires rhetorical re

ABA has maintained its legitimacy through clever rhetorical maneuvering, claiming to recover subjects whose condition is culturally figured as “the worst thing that can happen to a family.”

And yet, the experience of many families suggests that ABA feeds on this length, intensity, and mind-numbing repetition, wherein a child’s entire day, as Beth Ryan puts it, might revolve only around, “Touch nose. Gummi bear.”

But the logics of harm that structure ABA are, again, concerned less with the child and more with the repercussions for larger social bodies, social bodies that ground their staying power on cisnormative and ableist ideals.