8 Quotes by Melanie Yergeau

What ABA has come to signal for autistics is an in-made rhetorical paradox from which escape is difficult: the laughable presumption that autistics can only communicate their feelings about ABA because they've endured ABA.

Part of the autistic experience is not being believed.

Autistic traits, taken together, represent everything that allistics devalue in an audience or social exchange.

...the default assumption is that it's better to be nonautistic than it is to be autistic, always. And this assumption has done great damage to autistic and nonautistic people alike.

Echophenomena, such as autistic echoing of phrases, are largely considered involuntary, even if such echoing is done voluntarily. (Such are the paradoxes of compliance.) Conversely, imitation, such as complying with a behavioral analyst's demand to mirror her jumping body, is regarded as voluntary, even if it is coerced or scripted.

...ABA doesn't aim to offer neuroqueer children new repertoires of meaning. To smile isn't to signify one's contentment; it's to comply with a behavioral and prosocial demand.

The rhetorical training of ABA might be best understood as a kind of "we are always watching you.

Clinical rhetorics present serious challenges to disability disclosure. To claim autism is to claim rudeness, silence, tactlessness, nonpersonhood; it is to invite doubting others to lay-diagnose or question one's rhetorical competence. And yet it is precisely these claims and challenges that buttress much of the autistic culture movement's embrace of public disclosure, of uncloseting one's autism.