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"Are you, dear reader, autistic or nonautistic? Can there ever really be any in-between?" M. Remi Yergeau's Authoring Autism dives into this messy paradigm—indeed, the "figurative shit that contemporary autism discourse has flung upon autistic bodies"—to interrogate how autism illuminates dominant rhetoric (2). Autism is not simply an object of inquiry but rather a mode of analysis, a rhetorical invention in and of itself, so autistic people are rhetors who are always already queering rhetoric about them. With vivid imagery, personal storytelling, rhetorical theorization, and a steady undercurrent of advocacy, Yergeau argues that autism destabilizes everything we think we know about rhetoric and vice versa, and that therefore scholars of rhetoric and of autism must disrupt their assumptions about both.
The monograph is developed around six sections, each of which builds on and complicates the previous to further demonstrate autism as a mode of rhetorical queerness and instability. In the introduction, "Involution," Yergeau explores how autism is often understood as an array of symptoms that hinder one's ability to communicate. Autism is deemed unintentional, involuntary, uncoordinated, and intrusive, and therefore autistic people are considered non-rhetorical beings; in turn, dehumanizing and infantilizing autistic people is more easily justified (11). Interestingly, it is through analyzing these apparent disconnects between autism and rhetoric that the restrictive and prescriptive limits of both are revealed. Contesting those limits is precisely the project that Yergeau undertakes.
In chapter 1, "Intention," Yergeau takes to task the cultural imperative that rhetoric and autism be gauged against sociality, and therefore challenges dominant notions of theory of mind. They chiefly question Simon Baron-Cohen's "extreme male brain" theory, which posits that autistic people are obsessed with details, are overly rational, and are seriously uninterested in others. Such a theory assumes that intentional use of language is the benchmark by...