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Melanie Yergeau. Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness

. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. 302 pages. $26.95 paperback.

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DOI: 10.1080/07350198.2019.1549415

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Melanie Yergeau. Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric

and Neurological Queerness. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2018. 302 pages. $26.95
paperback.

Jordynn Jack

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and�Neurological�Queerness. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018. 302 pages. $26.95
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Review Essays 111

a phenomenon becomes rhetorical” (237). Drawing from Barad, they suggest that feminist new
materialist rhetorical practices might be understood as “inventive intra-actions,” through which
“inventing change emerges as both a political possibility and an ethical obligation” (242).
The book responds to a strong exigence for deeper, more sustained feminist engagement with
different strands of new materialisms. It has much to offer scholars interested in learning about and
understanding the methodological implications of new materialisms. Additionally, many of the
book’s essays provide useful case studies in exploring the power dynamics of biomedical
discourse—the ways in which patients and community members speak back to, and might better
inform, decisions about drugs and diseases. Though at times the book’s intensive engagement with
new materialisms risks overlooking other ways of being a feminist researcher in the rhetoric of
science, its concluding call for engagement with “inventive intra-actions” offers a promising
avenue for future research within as well as beyond rhetorical studies.
Feminist Rhetorical Science Studies emerges from the awareness that our scholarly, pedago-
gical, political, and everyday embodied choices matter—that “the selections we make today help
bring into being some worlds to the exclusion of others” (8)—and that by constituting
a community of feminist scholars who engage with posthumanism on their own terms, we can
intervene in the worlds that come into being tomorrow.

SARAH HALLENBECK
University of North Carolina, Wilmington

Melanie Yergeau. Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness. Durham, NC:
Duke University Press, 2018. 302 pages. $26.95 paperback.

“Autism is typically characterized as that which contrasts—as that which contrasts with language,
humanness, empathy, self-knowledge, understanding, and rhetoricity,” Melanie Yergeau writes in Author-
ing Autism (2). Autistic people are positioned as “unknowable, as utterly abject and isolated and tragic”
(3). They have been denied rhetoricity on the basis of clinical criteria and popular assumptions about what
autism is and what it means. In most cases, no one asks autistic people themselves what autism is, what it
means, or what it means for rhetoric. In Authoring Autism, Melanie Yergeau contests these assumptions
about autism. She does so not simply by arguing that autistic people can act rhetorically, but also by
showing how autism is itself a rhetoric that queers what we understand about rhetoric in the first place.
Does rhetoric have to be voluntary? Does it have to aim toward diplomacy? Does it have to involve
linguistic symbols in order to count as rhetoric? By asking these questions, Yergeau pushes readers to
think about rhetoric in new ways.
In the introduction, Yergeau explains how dominant clinical approaches to autism largely
assume involuntarity as autism’s central feature. The so-called “symptoms” of autism, such as
“flapping fingers and facial tics” are presumed to be involuntary, meaningless acts (8). Autistic
people are said to lack theory of mind, an understanding of other people. Many autistic people do
not communicate verbally. Moreover, many of these so-called “deficits” are also fundamental to
traditional theories of rhetoric: rhetoric traditionally involves voluntary, coordinated verbal acts
that presume the ability to understand what others are thinking. Excluding autistic people from
rhetoricity often disqualifies them from humanity itself, insofar as we take rhetoricity as
112 Rhetoric Review

a fundamental human capacity (11). Both theories of autism and theories of rhetoric, Yergeau
points out, “privilege restrictive notions of what it means to interact and interrelate” (12). The
solution, then, is not just to pick out a few autistic people to single out as effective rhetors, but to
disrupt, to queer, what we mean by rhetoric (and by autism) in the first place. Instead of excluding
autistic people from rhetoric, Yergeau asks, what if we consider the generative potential of
a rhetoric that embraces the nonsymbolic, bodily, material? What if we consider the rhetorical
potential of “awkward gestures, crip time, dysfluency, obsession and perseveration” (68)? The
remaining chapters do just that.
Chapters one and two examine “god theories” of autism, showing how they connect to
assumptions shared by rhetorical theory. In chapter one, Yergeau questions the value of sociality
that underlies theories of autism and of rhetoric. She focuses in particular on the Theory of Mind
view of autism, promulgated by Simon Baron-Cohen. Baron-Cohen’s hypothesis is that autism
represents a form of the “Extreme Male Brain”—an obsession with detail, technical interests, and
hyperrationality and an extreme lack of interest in the minds of others. This theory, Yergeau notes,
is ableist and hetero/cis/sexist, as many scholars have pointed out. More deeply, though, Yergeau
shows how this theory and others assume sociality as an unmitigated good. In doing so, Theory of
Mind occludes the possibility of asking why sociality is so important and what is at stake in
making it central to theories of the human (and of rhetoric). For one, Yergeau argues, a theory of
rhetoric premised on sociality conveniently glosses over rhetoric’s violent history, its “imperialist
impulses” of “whitening, converting, persuading, assimilating” (81). Such a theory also ignores
the fact that demands to act socially or civilly can do serious harm—often to already marginalized
people. Theories that privilege verbal communication, similarly, exclude multiple asymbolic forms
of communication: “To claim that someone without meaningful language . . . is thereby non-
rhetorical is to suggest that much of the material world exists outside the bounds of style,
arrangement, invention, memory, epistemology” (86). In short, Yergeau writes, “I want to suggest
that rhetoric can be meaningless and that meaninglessness is a potentiality that rhetoric should
(and can, and does) embrace” (87). Scholars interested in questions about the posthuman, the
asymbolic, and asignification will find this chapter especially provocative.
In chapter two, Yergeau examines Applied Behavioral Analysis (ABA), a therapeutic techni-
que that clinicians, parents, and many other “experts” praise for its ability to remediate autistic
people, to make them (at least close to) “normal.” Yergeau shows how ABA’s history highlights
the mutual imbrication of autism and heteronormativity; in fact, ABA’s originator, Ivor Lovaas,
developed his techniques based on a study of boys deemed “effeminate.” ABA aims to eliminate
that which is considered queer; for Yergeau, it maintains its reputation as the “gold-standard
autism therapy because it pathologizes (and thereby devalues) neuroqueer commonplaces” of
gesture, orientation, style, and so on (100). It does so by enforcing changes to the environment
meant to reward desired (normative) behavior, surveilling individuals nearly completely, and
selling such techniques as a form of “recovery” from autism. This chapter establishes how autism
has been closely aligned in clinical discourse with queerness and sets out the concept of the
neuroqueer as a framework for disrupting dominant ways of acting and doing rhetoric.
Chapter three examines how autism disclosures are often taken as an invitation on the part of
nonautistic, or allistic, others to diagnose, interrogate, scrutinize, criticize, or threaten autistic people.
While invitational rhetoric has been embraced by some feminist scholars as an alternative to theories of
persuasion, which they deem violent and oppressive, Yergeau challenges us to consider how invitation
can also oppress, how it assumes interlocutors who are on equal footing economically, politically, and
 Review Essays 113

socially. For marginalized individuals, an invitation can be a threat. Invitational rhetoric, Yergeau writes,
assumes interlocutors who are “white, able, cisgender, and/or straight, agilely drawing upon inventional
resources available only to those most rhetorically mobile” (149). Yergeau suggests that self-diagnosis
can productively queer concepts of invitational rhetoric; autistic disclosures, especially within and among
autistic people, can generate a “crip-queer ethos,” or a kakoethos that “entails opposing, countering, and
neuroqueering that which is typically framed as authoritative and credible” (163). Autistic kakoethos
“refuses fixity” (167). It also has led to novel constructions, such as the idea of allism, a concept used in
autistic communities to describe the pathologies of the nonautistic person—their verbosity, susceptibility
to the “mob mentality,” manipulativeness, and tendency toward over-generalization. Pathologizing allism
in this way draws attention to how the so-called “normal” human mind can also be understood as
pathological. Even more so, it calls into question, for us as rhetoricians, how traditional rhetorical values
need not be the only grounding for rhetoric.
Chapter four delves more deeply into the potential for autistic theories to queer autism and
rhetoric. Yergeau argues forcefully that autism should be recognized as a rhetoric, that autistic
people should be recognized as rhetorical. Yet she also wants to leave open the possibility of
“stepping out of rhetoricity altogether, and questioning the desirability (and at times tyranny) that
rhetoricity imparts” (178). Rhetoricity is especially troublesome because, in dominant theories,
one cannot do rhetoric as a non-normative individual: “Rhetoric not only socializes, but it genders
and sexes, enables and invites prosocial bodies” (186). Yergeau calls this conception the “rhet-
orsexual” and seeks to disrupt it using the neuroqueer framework established earlier.
In particular, Yergeau examines ecophenomena, autistic commonplaces that include repe-
titions of words (echolalia), movements (echopraxia), and facial expressions (echomimia).
Yergeau asks us to consider these commonplaces as “a/volitional motions that queer the
between spaces of bodies, objects, environs” (179). In this way, Yergeau challenges readers
to extend rhetoricity to motor schemes, understanding them as “rhetorical figures that are
embodied, echoed, and cripped” (179). These rhetorical figures may or may not function
representationally or symbolically; they may function metonymically, affectively, through
juxtaposition or association. As Yergeau puts it, “Ecophenomena queer our perceptions of
referentiality, in part because even repetitions of the same phrase, gesture, or complex body
movement can reference or signify entirely different things” (196). Further, for Yergeau,
autistic communication does not assume only human-to-human exchanges. It can include
exchanges with nonhumans on a range of registers—emotional, tactile, sonic, and so on.
Together, this range of ecophenomena, across media, materials, and bodies, is inventive and
disruptive. Unlike a clinical view that positions ecophenomena as symptoms of a disorder,
Yergeau encourages readers to understand them as resources for a/rhetorical invention.
I commend Yergeau for the originality of her argument and the ways she challenges funda-
mental assumptions of rhetoric. The book deftly integrates rich theoretical analysis with moments of
humor, irony, autoethnography (autie-ethnography), and poetic insight. Authoring Autism will be
appropriate for graduate courses in rhetorical theory, whether feminist, queer, disability, posthuman,
material, or embodied. It is essential reading for anyone who does rhetorical theory, and it will
transform not only how we think about who a rhetor can be, but also what rhetoric should be.

JORDYNN JACK
University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

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