ERIC Number: EJ1188976
Record Type: Journal
Publication Date: 2018
Pages: 7
Abstractor: As Provided
ISBN: N/A
ISSN: ISSN-1522-7502
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Available Date: N/A
Storying Autism
Thomas, Heather
Composition Forum, v39 Sum 2018
In this essay, I review three recent monographs: Jordynn Jack's "Autism and Gender," Anne McGuire's "War on Autism," and Melanie Yergeau's "Authoring Autism." Each of these texts centers disability--autism in particular--and in doing so, they highlight the insidious ways in which our cultural, institutional, and personal autism narratives support extant social hierarchies that sideline autistic lives in scholarship and beyond. Central to these three books are issues of rhetorical play, textual narrative, and storying in contemporary autism discourse, so in this essay I aim to tie together these fundamental themes, placing them in conversation with one another. I begin the discussion with a brief overview of the history of autism before drawing from Yergeau, Jack, and McGuire's texts to explore the lay of the discursive field of autism and forms of rhetorical (and physical) violence that are normalized in autism discourse. Finally, before concluding, I explore what the authors of these texts explicate about the rhetors who take part in a shifting discursive field.
Descriptors: Autism, Social Influences, Rhetoric, Story Telling, Violence, Social Attitudes, Pervasive Developmental Disorders, Gender Issues, Classification, Symptoms (Individual Disorders), Social Values, Mass Media Effects, Language Usage, Stereotypes, Social Theories, Neoliberalism
Association of Teachers of Advanced Composition. e-mail: cf@compositionforum.com; Web site: http://compositionforum.com
Publication Type: Journal Articles; Reports - Evaluative
Education Level: N/A
Audience: N/A
Language: English
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Authoring Institution: N/A
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