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It’s […] important to realize that charting antecedents, behaviors, and consequences is not the same thing as listening to someone.
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Taking data is not the same as listening.
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[…] the figure of the hug-avoidant autistic child is a remarkably acontextualized figure; a figure with whom a receiving audience is not supposed to identify
in the case of autistics whose languages aren’t spoken or voiced, especially, framing a child’s bodily comportment as refusal attributes (non)intentions […]
When nonautistic publics mourn and inquire about the why – why would a child refuse a hug? – the why recedes from the rhetorical and moves into the neurological
The hug-avoidant autistic child is reduced to terms of neuronal motion, of synaptic plasticity and mindblindness and sensory disintegration and gut flora. There is something contrary here…
something neurologically askew.
If there is one takeaway from what I write here, it is this […] what we do not know, and what we often purposively ignore, are autistic narrations of such events – the interbodily potentials, desires, and moments that structure an autistic life
To whom do we listen? The autistic or the non-autistic? […] What of my unhuggable body? What of me? What of autos, the self that so consumes the presumably autistic? Where the fuck are we?
Autism: Explorations 