“I was interested in the liberatory, activist aspects of it – to do for neurologically different people what feminism and gay rights had done for their constituencies.”
This is a quote from an Australian woman, Judy Singer, who first put forward the term neurodiversity as a way of presenting autism as an alternative way of being, rather than a disorder.
The movement is gaining strength, according to a long article in New York Magazine.
Singer (and others), voices in the wilderness in the nineties, are now part of a thriving culture: There are Websites and T-shirts, and slang like NT, or “neurotypical” (a playful slur for the non-autistic), Aspies, and auties. The neurodiverse present regularly at autism conferences. Some of the first wave of activists are parents of autistic children, but more recently, autistic adults have been advocating on their own behalf. The Internet has made the climate even more hospitable to an autism-rights position, allowing activists to locate one another and communicate at their own pace. The Web, Singer said, “is a prosthetic device for people who can’t socialize without it.”
About Greg Baxter
Loading ...
Disorders are surely, equivalently, alternative ways of being …
The neurodiversity perspective has – generally speaking – not been that autism is not a disability, only that it is not a disease to be cured. Disability is a function of society. It’s the interaction our objective characteristics have with the society around us that is geared only to a specific kind of person. The proper response to this is to work to adapt society to be more inclusive, as we have in reference to other forms of diversity, by developing more accessible educational programs, services and supports and a society more tolerant towards difference. In short, the objectives of the neurodiversity movement are to encourage autism advocacy to focus on goals like quality of life, communication and civil rights rather than what we perceive to be a dangerous and insulting focus on normalization.
It is essential to the emotional health of the Aspie that we see ourselves in a neuro-diverse way. We poseess a syndrome which means we have charatersistics which become conditions of disorder under the right conditions. I wholeheartedly believe we have an alternative cognitive consciousness to provide to the general population.
There is no way we can accept the constant misperception of Neurotypicals in a NT world and not have a disorder. Therefore it is up to us to establish an alternative way of accepting our way of being. We are tired of being considered disabled and suffering in our differences,
this is completely counter to who we are!
I thought alternatives were freely chosen. The rest looks like psycho babble.