Zeno of Elea,

It follows, then, that in being nonactors, autistic people’s wills are merely the wills of neurobiology,

To be autistic is to live and to lie in a between space. The autistic symbolic is always a reduction, a motion rather than a rhetorical repertoire.

First, I argue that, in its past and present clinical formations, autism is contextually situated within societal responses to and of gay panic. We can locate queerness in nineteenth-century fears about the feeble-minded and sexual deviance; we can locate queerness in the mainstreaming of ABA, which is used to eliminate “feminine sex-typed

But, more importantly, I contend that, even if the reverse were true (e.g., autistic people lack or have impaired capacity for symbolic exchange), autistic people are still, nonetheless, rhetorical.

Put alternatively, fractionated autism draws its rhetorical power through the partialization of other god theories.

as something happening to them, as though their entire family had been struck by lightning.

Toward what ends do neurons strive?

For my part, I want a rhetoric that tics, a rhetoric that stims, a rhetoric that faux pas, a rhetoric that averts eye contact, a rhetoric that lobs theories about ToM against the wall.