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Thanks to the work of LGBT activists and historians, LGBT histories are being identified
How can we identify autistic histories? Normally we look at documentation and material culture. But how can you look for something that is invisible? #DisHist #ActuallyAutistic
How can we identify autistic histories? Normally we look at documentation and material culture. But how can you look for something that is invisible? #DisHist #ActuallyAutistic
I love this article about poet Patience Agbabi, who was writer-in-residence at The Brontë Parsonage Museum in Yorkshire.
https://theartssociety.org/arts-news-features/%E2%80%98nowadays-we-would-classify-emily-bront%C3%AB-autistic%E2%80%99
https://theartssociety.org/arts-news-features/%E2%80%98nowadays-we-would-classify-emily-bront%C3%AB-autistic%E2%80%99
She says “Nowadays, we would classify her (Emily Brontë) as autistic. She had an extreme aversion to the public, she was obsessive, she was very into her routine”
Agbabi knows autism. In addition to her poetry she wrote The Infinite, a book for children... about an autistic protagonist that can travel time. Here she is talking about the autism in her own family: https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2020/mar/28/autism-son-diagnosed-at-five-did-he-inherit-it-from-my-mother
We’ve just finished reading The Infinite with our youngest BadgerCub, and I can’t really express how grateful I am for this book that so vividly and brilliantly portrays autistic characters https://canongate.co.uk/books/3193-the-infinite/
Understanding autistic histories and how we build autistic futures are connected, and I feel that this is so beautifully interwoven around Agbabi, her writing in The Infinite, her residency at The Parsonage, and her assertion that one of Britain’s best loved authors, was autistic
It’s interesting to me that in general, there is often resistance to identifying autistic characters in stories, let alone scrutinising history for evidence of divergent minds https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2007/apr/04/dontdiagnosefictionalcharac
And yet we know that representation in all the stories we tell each other, is meaningful and significant, and a fundamental part of acceptance. Fictional and non-fictional stories are both constructed to reveal and conceal, to incite and suppress
Another thing to add to this very loose rambling on uncovering autistic histories, and telling autistic stories, is a quote by poet Fiona Sampson, in her biography of Mary Shelley:
“There’s something about her emotional literal mindedness that we might call geeky, rather than girly... Like Frankenstein’s creature, she’s an observer of the connected social world, learning by conscious imitation what others seem to know by instinct...”
This took my breath away when I first read it. In fact, I was listening to the audiobook. I rewound and listened to that phrase again, and again
“You can’t retroactively diagnose historical figures!”
Why not? Why can’t we even entertain these notions out loud, to each other?
We can dream. We can play. We can imagine. We can look closely, reread, and reveal. And you can’t stop us
Why not? Why can’t we even entertain these notions out loud, to each other?
We can dream. We can play. We can imagine. We can look closely, reread, and reveal. And you can’t stop us
The resistance to self-diagnosis, is directly related to this resistance to reread history and stories through a neurodivergent lense. It is about power, gatekeeping, and control. They don’t want us to identify ourselves, and become visible in a landscape they perceive as theirs
It’s helpful to unpack what we are doing and what it means when an autistic person head canons a character as autistic, based on close reading. Or when an autistic reader, writer, historian, scholar identifies autistic traits revealed in documentation
Are we actually forming a diagnosis? Or are we simply speculating? Allowing our thoughts to “go there”?
I think it means we are resisting normative, reductive, suppressive, default thinking
I think it means we are allowing ourselves to dream, imagine and play. Is that so bad?
I think it means we are resisting normative, reductive, suppressive, default thinking
I think it means we are allowing ourselves to dream, imagine and play. Is that so bad?
What does it mean when people of minority and marginalised neurotypes play and dream? It opens portals to other worlds, realms of possibility. This is still seen as so radical and unthinkable that many don’t even want to hear it. But I think we need to do it.
I think about this because I’m autistic and because I studied art history. You look at the ways people are represented. You look at the works themselves, for evidence, you look at the documentation, for evidence. You look at what is revealed. You look at what is concealed.
Visible disabilities are much easier to identify. But like I said at the beginning of the thread: how do you identify the invisible?
Now I wish I paid more attention and been able to decipher the theoretical texts that dealt with ontology, subjectivity, gestalt...
Now I wish I paid more attention and been able to decipher the theoretical texts that dealt with ontology, subjectivity, gestalt...
Also, I recently learned that Cognitive Archaeology is a thing. The study of the evolution of human thought. Archaeologists are thinking about thinking and looking at evidence to find out what it can tell them about thinking 
And this paper exists. And it is THRILLING: https://www.degruyter.com/view/journals/opar/4/1/article-p262.xml?language=en
Lead author of the paper, Dr Penny Spikins, Uni of York: “Detail focus is what determines whether you can draw realistically; you need it in order to be a talented realistic artist. This trait is found very commonly in people with autism and rarely occurs in people without it.”
She argues that individuals with “detail focus”, a trait linked to autism, kicked off an artistic movement that led to the proliferation of realistic cave drawings across Europe
WHAT???
WHAT???
Neuronormativity is only a paradigm. It’s just a model. There are other models. Emergent models. Whether you’re an academic or not, your ideas about representation, characters, identifying traits in historical figures, are valid and important and part of this emergent model
By the way, it’s called Neurodiversity 
