It's one of the most intellectually stimulating and inspiring books that I've read in a very long time. To oppose a medicalized flattening of autism to a passive embodiment of seemingly autonomic dysfunction, Yergeau makes a powerful case for 'autism’s rhetorical potentials' grounded in the resilient ways that autistic people self-consciously 'story' their desires for better, more inclusive futures. Autistic people have long identified with or as the queer - whether by means of sexuality or gender identity, or by means of a queer asociality that fucks norms. I filled up about 38 pages of my notebook with quotes while reading this over the course of a few weeks. That adults can receive autism diagnoses often comes as a shock to those outside the autistic community, including the very professionals who conduct diagnostic assessments - because isn't autism a childhood thing?

So saying that one "identifies as AFAB and nothing more" makes about as much sense as saying one "identifies as having been born in Cleveland. Unless you're reading this on a computer, it gets tiring having to look up everything, and I gave up on doing that only a few pages in. Many of the gains made in disability rights and community participation have arguably come into being because of the social model. If you don't understand rhetoric, if you don't know queer theory, and even if you know nothing about disability studies - read it.While initially a challenge to break into (at least for me, as a non-rhetorician), Yergeau's writing is intimate and entertaining, and their application of rhetorical concepts to autistic experience was a great help to my understanding. some interesting questions about the relations between autism and queerness are forestalled by yergeau's rather annoying tendency to fall back upon the academic appropriation of "queerness" as signifying something akin to différance that can be completely divorced from the realms of sexuality and gender.

Autistics don't tell us what we want to hear, nor do they tell it to us in the manner in which we wish to hear it. If you're just beginning to learn about neurodivergence, there are many other, more accessible books to start with, like Divergent Mind: Thriving in a World That Wasn't Designed for You or NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity. If autism is a rhetoric unto itself, then we must confront the idea that being autistic confers ways of being, thinking, moving, and making meaning that are not in and of themselves lesser - and may at times be advantageous. Through her many invitational gestures Yergeau provocatively intervenes in the readings of the rhetoric of normalcy while also evoking new possibilities for distinctly different autistic rhetorics.The author switches so easily from academic prose to a highly accessible style as she moves from theory to practice and back again. yergeau argues that, regardless of whether they literally speak or not, autistics *do* possess rhetorical capacities in their embodied intentionality, which is socially oriented to a more-than-human world. I am delighted to have learned so much about autism and behavioral development--two subjects I would not normally seek out.

Personally, I do not find the academization of "queer" appropriate, as I think it takes away from the suffering associated with the word. she eviscerates ABA and baron-cohen's cisheterosexualizing tendencies and suggests an ambiguous affinity between being autistic and being queer. Functioning is the corporal gone capitalistic-it is an assumption that one's body and being can be quantitatively measured, that one's bodily outputs and bodily actions are neither outputs nor actions unless commodifiable. In my opinion, if every permutation of the word "rhetoric" were cut from this book, it would be immeasurably improved.I would consider myself educated; I'm in the first year of my masters degree at the time of writing this. Also, as a person who uses a screen reader (because of autism-related visual processing issues), I found it bitterly ironic how poorly formatted this book was for those who use assistive technologies. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. I read it in a rush over the course of two days, skimming past the more horrific descriptions of medical abuse (in the name of curing autism), making my best guess at the meaning of some words and refusing to be troubled that I didn't understand others, taking away what I could.