blog rants – Page 10

Lindt Chocolate partners with Autism Speaks

I’m a little bit late in posting this (PhD life has caught up to me, it seems), but the issue is still ongoing: Lindt Chocolates has partnered with Autism Speaks for a fundraising campaign. Lindt plans to donate funds from the sales of its gold chocolate bunnies and bunny ears to Autism Speaks.

One of the things I love about the newly vamped change.org is its actions feature: there’s a growing community of neurodiversity advocates there, mostly due to the blogging efforts of Kristina Chew and Dora Raymaker, and the Autistic Self-Advocacy Network has been able to create form letters/petitions via the change.org interface. In short, it is now incredibly easy to send protest letters to various organizations and companies. ASAN provides you with a stock letter for the controversy du jour, which you can edit, and ASAN sends the letter as an email to the desired parties. It’s pretty cool. You can view the Lindt action here.

Back to Lindt…

Apparently, their support of of Autism Speaks has been going on for a while now. And, I’ve just learned that Toys R Us has additionally been partnering with Autism Speaks. Starbucks began printing blurbs about Autism Speaks on its coffee cups two years ago, and Hulu receives some of its sponsorship from Autism Speaks.The list of Autism Speaks’ BFFs seems never-ending.

Autism Speaks has a tremendous amount of corporate and media support. It’s little wonder that the autism controversy isn’t even rendered as a controversy in popular discourse. When I try to explain the concept of neurodiversity, for instance, to someone new to the autism fold, a typical remark resembles the following: “That’s stupid. Why wouldn’t someone want a cure?”

Autism Speaks’ toehold on autism discourse in popular media de-de-de-controversializes autism, de-de-de-ideologizes autism, re-re-re-pathologizes autism, and re-re-re-silences autistics. (And yes, I tripled the prefixes on purpose — something, anything, to effectively represent my emphatic tone here.)

Additionally, because of cure-minded groups like Autism Speaks (they aren’t the only one with media clout), neurodiversity comes across as some sort of fringe group of fame-seekers. Last year’s New York Magazine feature on the movement sported the following byline: “A new wave of activists wants to celebrate atypical brain function as a positive identity, not a disability. Opponents call them dangerously deluded [emphasis mine].” Moreover, a fairly recent Good Morning America segment on neurodiversity — which featured wonderful spots with Ari Ne’eman and Kristina Chew — ended with an incredulous Diane Sawyer showcasing both her doubt and her journalistic ethos.

I think the frustrating thing here is that, to the public masses, neurodiversity seems so new, so “out there,” so contained and so rare. Neurodiverse advocates are either painted as too disabled or too autistic to understand how badly they’re “suffering,” or as too high-functioning to know what “real” autism is. It’s a frustrating catch-22, to cite the novel that my book club recently finished.

New webtext

Last year, I took a seminar in disability studies with Brenda Brueggemann and created a webtext for my final project — a webtext on autism and embodied authorship. This past summer, while attending the Digital Media and Composition Institute (DMAC), I did a complete overhaul on my webtext and received lots of good advice from Cindy Selfe and Cheryl Ball. This webtext has been published in the Spring 2009 issue of Computers and Composition Online, an online, refereed scholarly journal. I’m quite excited, but also quite nervous. In a way, this functions as an Asperger’s sort of “coming out.”

For those interested, my webtext is available here:
http://www.bgsu.edu/cconline/dmac/index.html

I should also note that there are several places in this webtext where I attempt to be sardonic, or sarcastic even. Part of this is me playing with representations of the spectrum. My own perspective about autism is a very neurodiverse one, so if something in this webtext seems contrary to neurodiversity, or seems inflammatory, then it’s probably me attempting to be sarcastic. I’m hoping the points where I’m not being literal are clear in their intent, especially since so many people reviewed this and helped me with the revisions. 🙂

Before we go…

Kelly Groucutt, bass guitarist and co-vocalist for the Electric Light Orchestra, died Thursday afternoon from a heart attack. He was only 63.

This news came as a crushing blow. Kelly joined the band in 1974, right after Eldorado, and stayed until 1983. He was a large part of the well-known, popular, successful ELO line-up — my favorite line-up. Kelly’s voice perfectly complemented Jeff Lynne’s.

ELO was a large part of my childhood, and still occupies a rather sizable portion of my adult life. I’ve been hooked since about the third grade. Kids often teased me for obsessing over ELO, for claiming Jeff Lynne as my so-called “crush.” I was a child of the 80s and 90s. ELO broke up when I was two. Being autistic probably predisposed me to seek out adults more than my peers, and I frequently wished that I’d been born in the 60s — because people my parents’ age were the only ones willing to tolerate my monologues about Roy Wood’s hairstyles or the metaphorical significance of “Livin Thing.”

During my adolescence, I would only listen to music that I could somehow connect back to ELO. (e.g., The Moody Blues were acceptable because Bev Bevan, ELO’s drummer, played with Denny Laine and the Diplomats for a bit, and Denny Laine eventually sang lead for the Moody Blues. Likewise, Denny Laine’s connection to Wings made Paul McCartney acceptable, though McCartney was also acceptable because Jeff Lynne produced his album Flaming Pie and also worked on the Beatles Anthology.) When I dropped out of school in ninth grade, Jeff and Kelly’s harmonies — and the histories and trivia surrounding those harmonies — carried me through some emotional rough patches. My perseveration helped to keep me grounded in a lot of ways.

In eighth and ninth grade, I grew desperate to have ELO posters, to amass anything and everything related to ELO, no matter how tangential. I collected LPs from flea markets and proudly displayed the duplicates as if they were posters. I also began drawing ELO members and affixing their cartoonish likenesses to my walls:

Richard Tandy & Kelly Groucutt. Drawn when I was 15.

My drawings make me laugh when I consider the amount of detail I pored into sketching the band members’ hairstyles. Such detail presents a stark contrast with their penciled faces, which are amazingly blank and bare.

Jeff Lynne drawing Jeff Lynne. Drawn at age 15. I mailed this to him with a birthday card. He never responded.

I’m still reeling from the shock of it all — of Kelly Groucutt not being here. It’s hard to fathom. My weekend consisted of me listening to Kelly-heavy tunes such as Sweet Is the Night and live versions of 10538 Overture. I’ve pulled out his 1981 solo album, his OrKestra songs, his work with ELO Part II/Orchestra. All such lovely, lovely songs.