Letters to My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism
Atlantic Books, 2021. 262 pages.
Although feminist and gender perspectives have been employed to analyse a number of disability-related topics, autism––and neurodiversity more generally––occupies a limited space in the literature. The experiences of adult autistic women, in particular, have been largely under-explored and un-theorised by feminist frameworks. In this …
As a member of NYU’s Disability Equity in the Time of COVID-19 research team during the summer of 2020[1], I had the opportunity to conduct seven virtual interviews by Zoom or phone with autistic adults living in the New York metro area about their experiences during the pandemic, what our team is calling “COVID Chronicles.” I also conducted …
Autism in Translation: An Intercultural Conversation on Autism Spectrum Conditions
Edited by Elizabeth Fein and Clarice Rios
Palgrave Macmillan, 2018. 304 pages.
Autism in Translation: An Intercultural Conversation on Autism Spectrum Conditions—an edited collection out of the Society of Psychological Anthropology’s (SPA) Culture, Mind and Society series—aims to contextualize the different social and political histories of, treatments for, and …
Des Fitzgerald writes of his book, Tracing Autism, “This is a book about scientists talking about their own practice, in tones that are beset by ambiguity, uncertainty, complexity, and even some anxiety” (9). This is true, and after reading the book one might find the description a little understated. By now the idea that neuroscience, any science, is …
Introduction
In the early years of the 21st century, Ian Hacking wrote a series of essays on the theme of autistic subjectivity. These eclectic, occasional essays were, he later told Andrew Lakoff, a final phase of his decades-long “making up people” project. As with other phases of this research, which dated back to the 1980s, and which included works …
Last September, a group of scholars gathered at the State University of Rio de Janeiro for “Autism Spectrum Disorders in Global, Local and Personal Perspective: A Cross-Cultural Workshop”. The event was organized by Clarice Rios, a postdoctoral fellow at the State University of Rio de Janeiro, and Elizabeth Fein, a professor of psychology at Duquesne University, and funded by the …