Christie Byers and Anna Gonzalez
We are tempted to share with you just how difficult it is overwhelming
To do an academic work, an academic performance
When you’re a
When you’re a
When you’re a
When you think-move-act differently
That when you are autstic and prone to wandering
–either in body, or in dialogue, or both–
writing a coherent critique becomes a titanic endeavor.
And when you are one of those people who tend to think literally,
“Staying with the trouble” is not a concept “to think with.”
It is a permission/ invitation to interact autistically in meetings (or class discussions)
Because to stay with the trouble
sometimes (neuro)typical dialogues are often too quick
and/or unpredictable,
and you cannot “just move on” or “go along.”
And yet, when you literally “stay with the trouble,”
they think you’re “stuck,”
And they look at you…that look…
Would it be helpful to describe to you (them?)
How deadlines are when your timing is
…what it is like to be perpetually out of sync with the world?
Yes, we are tempted to share
that talking excitedly about things you find interesting
Is predictably overshadowed by having to But monitoring the room for yawns.
It is very confusing and exhausting.
…to explain to you about Masking is not just for costume parties.
It is for survival. Because being your autistic self is unrealistic, unwelcomed,
even dangerous.
It would be fun to tell you about how every time i
Ended up collaborating ina group of my own accord
Was similar to jumping on the bandwagon
You have no idea what’s happening,
but you’re so happy to have been invited.
And then you when the article is printed you’re the last author,
but at least you’re there.
Well-rehearsed masking helps cover up intensities of feeling.
And cover you must
Because meltdowns are unacceptable in public,
and you must express yourself in socially acceptable ways.
Otherwise, it may dis-qualify you from participation…from _________
And you are not allowed to retreat run away and hide.
You are expected to take a stand,
To show up, and to speak in particular way be articulate, legible.
Yes, it is tempting to complain about being in academia while autistic…
But we won’t
lest we open ourselves vulnerable this is not that
To Pity And Patronizing remarks
cloaked as words of affirmation.
…Or lest we resign to being perceived as “fragile,” and “attention seeking”
and take defend advice to grow “thicker skin.”
Or “filter.”
Because life, after all, is “hard for everyone,” and “we all struggle.”
This is Not about claiming brokenness,
Or documenting damage (to echo Eve Tuck),
Or inclusion, or learning to “cope…”
Because, to echo Bettina Love,
We want to do more than survive!
Being caught between contradicting theories of change
Is overwhelming…confusing
Instead, we will talk about echolalia,
Echolalia is a common frequently observed autistic behavio
When words and phrases heard or read
are echoed, repeated, played with over and over by the autistic interlocutor.
According to the DSM 5:
Echolalia is “The pathological, parrotlike, and apparently senseless repetition (echoing) of a word or phrase just spoken by another person” (American Psychiatric Association, 2022, p. 821).
Clinicians distinguish between immediate echolalia and delayed (i.e., when the echoing happens after a period of time). But either way, echolalia is a symptom, a sign of needing to be fixed. Through therapy.
In academia, a form of such therapy occurs naturally:
Consider that most academic writing manuals, like APA, prescribe paraphrasing
And discourage you from using direct quotes.
To paraphrase is to show your comprehension of a text.
And to exhibit mastery of academic communication.
With your own thinking, in your own words.
In this regard, we are well-trained, and yet,
When we’re feeling conflicted, or overwhelmed, or happy
Echolalia persists. Sometimes, it re-appears to help us
Work through and participate (albeit
differently), in the dialogue.
We contend that echolalic utterances
Are playful, artful, joyful,
and spark powerful a/effects,
They are
Not senseless
Not pathological;
They invite,
Propose something new
Suggest an other-wise potential to dance with
new rhythms, new pathways,
to perform other-wise activisms.
So today, we invite you into our echolalic play with echoes of
two other-wise activist authors we’ve befriended in our academic journeys…
Bayo Akomolafe (bayoakomolafe.net) – noted in blue
Vanessa Machado de Oliviera (Andreotti) decolonialfutures.net – noted in violet
The words in green are emergent becomings-with these echoes.
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What if the way we respond to the crisis is part of the crisis?
What if the way we respond to the crisis is part of the crisis?
Get involved! Stop the violence!
Get involved! Stop the violence!
But we are already involved
We are already implicated
Modernity cannot exist without violence
Modernity cannot exist without violence.
The benefits we associate with modernity
are created and maintained by
ongoing processes that are
inherently violent
Modernity cannot exist without violence
Modernity cannot exist without
Expropriation extraction exploitation
Militarization dispossession destitution
Genocides and ecocides
It’s one hell of a trick
It’s one hell of a trick
The way modernity makes itself appear benevolent, omnipresent
While rendering its violence and unsustainability invisible.
Modernity has infused everything
And colonized our collective unconscious
And as such we all end up complicit
We all end up complicit
We are all inescapably enlisted
We are all inescapably enlisted
What does it mean to be affectively enlisted in the production of suffering?
There comes a point where we need to stop
just pulling people out of the river.
We need to go upstream and
find out where and why they’re falling in.
For example,
In what ways do our strivings for recognition,
for innocence, for legitimacy,
For tenure and promotion
through publication productivity efficiency
even in critical circles
reinscribe the legitimacy of statehood
and its undercurrents of violence?
And how might we conceive of, and practice, a ‘weird politics’?
A weird politics
An autistic politics!
An autistic politics reframes disability
as the dis/human signals of dis-assembly and incapacitation
streaming through culture.
Instead of being something to fix, to get rid of,
the dis/human becomes a zig-zagging cartography
disrupting the colonial linearity of progress,
Disrupting the colonial linearity of progress
Like a crab scuttling sideways
Making weird movements,
Making weird sounds,
Making weird sounds,
Making weird art,
Carving weird scratch-scratches
on the earth, in the sand
strange ripples
in the sea
Calling into question the assumptions we make
about the human body
human exceptionalism
and human subjectivity
Uneven value
Uneven worth
Individuality, separability
Individuality, separability
Or what Erin Manning calls
the genocide of relation
We all know the familiar warmth of the traditional,
the conventional, the already-travelled-path.
Write an article, publish a book!
Hey! We can even create a special issue!
That’ll teach ‘em, that’ll change things,
(and, well, yeah, sure, it might look good on my CV too)
But we also keep sensing the whispering call of the unexplored,
the open maw of the monstrous.
The weird sounds of emergence
virus-climate convergence
The crab-side-scuttling away
scratch, scratch, scratch
Inviting lures, new rhythms…
While ABA (and APA!) teach us
train us
compel us
require us
To conform to some normopathological mode
To reinscribe the status quo
To stay on that well-worn path
paved by more hallowed ‘others’
But what if autism does not belong to one particular body, one particular brain?
‘What if autism is better thought of as an intensity within a field
instead of as a property of a specific individual?
A glowing seductive place with an easily obscured invitation to crawl,
to get down on one’s fours,
to do something weird and –
And as such – to come alive.
An opening, an invitation
A zig-zag path gesturing somewhere new
But the ‘new’ needs courage.
And courage is not the knight rushing headlong into the flames;
courage is not a choice we make.
Courage is the disability,
Courage is a lisp. A crack. A break.
Courage is an autistic tendency
To sense the world at its edges
where it is still being made.
And one does not “have” courage;
one is summoned by it.
Anointed by it.
Touched by it.
One thing you might do is to
activate your vital compass:
Reactivate your body as a knowing entity
that receives and experiences the world
as continuous with itself
A porous dynamic body that affects and is affected
By the forces of the world,
lean into the intensity of that
buzzing background field in-forming
other-wise movements,
Felt elsewheres
And keep in mind…
Modernity is not a corrupt project of the West
That needs to be defeated and replaced
With a more righteous and virtuous non-Western alternative
But rather something that is now (unevenly)
Part of all of us,
Part of all of us,
Conditioning the ways we experience reality.
Maybe we can learn to sit with our complicity in harm
Shedding arrogance
Accepting accountability
Without seeking recognition, redemption, innocence, or purity
Without blaming, pointing fingers, or fighting with one another at the margins.
Maybe we can learn to hospice modernity together
To disinvest from its cruel promises
To wait for the snap, the last gasps of breath,
Learning from it, without striving to keep it alive
What other-wise re-orientating opportunities?
What autistic possibility fugitivity?
How might we scuttle awkwardly, weirdly,
Together, but differently,
and move together toward a future
without guarantees?
How might we make sanctuary, sit together,
share stories, share laughter, share tears
waiting for something to happen?
