"Authoring Autism provides many thought-provoking insights for disability scholars. . . . Melanie Yergeau’s double perspective as a rhetorician and autistic activist that makes Authoring Autism valuable to a larger audience." — Marion Schmidt, H-Disability
"A new exploration—a work that defines, defies, and defiles the boundaries of rhetorical regimes of neurological oppression. . . . An intervention, a disruption, an eruption." — Anna Williams, Disability & Society
"Deftly integrates rich theoretical analysis with moments of humor, irony, autoethnography (autie-ethnography), and poetic insight. Authoring Autism will be appropriate for graduate courses in rhetorical theory, whether feminist, queer, disability, posthuman, material, or embodied. It is essential reading for anyone who does rhetorical theory, and it will transform not only how we think about who a rhetor can be, but also what rhetoric should be." — Jordynn Jack, Rhetoric Review
"A closely argued, elegantly performed, and even joyfully humorous work of critical emancipatory scholarship. Yergeau carefully intertwines lived experience, autistic memoir, clinical discourse, and humanities theory (particularly rhetorical studies, narrative theory, disability studies, and queer theory) to achieve a highly insightful hybrid discourse. In the process, she breaks down binaries and opens new possibilities of form for scholarly invention and cultural creation. . . . An excellent book and a major contribution." — Bradley Lewis, Journal of Medical Humanities
"To oppose a medicalized flattening of autism to a passive embodiment of seemingly autonomic dysfunction, Yergeau makes a powerful case for 'autism’s rhetorical potentials' grounded in the resilient ways that autistic people self-consciously 'story' their desires for better, more inclusive futures. . . . Autistic people, Yergeau reminds us, have always been rhetorical beings. Only by redefining the very definitions and conventions of rhetoric can we begin to attend to these autistic narratives on their own terms." — Travis Chi Wing Lau, Los Angeles Review of Books
"With philosophical and rhetorical acuity and a large dose of humor, Melanie Yergeau interweaves autism research into other areas of thought, providing new ways of thinking about rhetoric, queerness, and neurology. This is without doubt the most thoroughgoing, rigorous, and creative work on authoring autism I have read. As a reader I have been changed, my attention drawn to the necessity to attend not only to the style, and to writing, but to the terms according to which some of us are given access to these voices we too often take for granted." — Erin Manning, author of The Minor Gesture
"With incandescent wit and defiant exuberance, Melanie Yergeau employs her rhetorical scalpel to dismantle the clinical assumptions and cultural stereotypes that have been used to deny, dismiss, and obscure the basic humanity of autistic people for generations. This is not just a landmark book; it's a book that opens up a whole terrain of discourse informed by the insights of queer theory and the disability rights movement." — Steve Silberman, author of NeuroTribes: The Legacy of Autism and the Future of Neurodiversity