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Nipple play

Content: psychiatric abuse

I am thinking about a field. This field is filled with pinwheels. I stim in this field. Hands wrenching, full and swaying body movements, words that are cool and crisp, words like pulchritudinous, all echo-localized, parallelism is repetition but repetition isn’t always parallel, pinwheels, pinwheels, pinwheels.

I am lately working on a book project, a book project about the neurologically queer and how we crip rhetorical traditions. In support of my book project, I’ve had to read a great deal of psychiatric literature. By psychiatric literature, I mean the kind of literature that beholds the mentally disabled as though we are animal crackers. The gaze, the psychoanalytic gaze: Autistics are anthropomorphic cookies, and doctors will probe and digest our body parts, piece by piece.

Somewhere in the field, a pinwheel crumbles under the weight of painful metaphor.

Daily reading, part one. Ivar Lovaas constructs his shock room in the late 1950s. He lines the floor with electrodes. He sends in a child patient, a child patient with a flappy, swaying, stimming body. He flips a switch. The child convulses. She learns a lesson, until she stims again, until she finds her neuroqueer self wiggling and spinning in clinical spaces with shocking gazes.

Pamela, an autistic child, writhes from being shocked — Photo from Screams, Slaps, & Love, 1965, Life magazine

Daily reading, part two. Frances Tustin in 1972 declares that the nipple is an autistic object. I first read Tustin while in the field, my hands roaming, fingers tangled in rubber bands. “The nipple is an autistic object,” she writes. Several years earlier, Bruno Bettelheim analyzed drawings from his “feeble-minded” child patients, in search of nipples. Nipples he found. Nipples, and breasts, black breasts and white breasts, racialized interpretations of autistic drawings, nipples, finger paintings plentiful in nipples, oh, the rhetoricity of the nipple.

A child's drawing. The whole page is covered in dense, thatched black lines, except for an empty spot of white toward the top of the page -- what Bettelheim presumed was a nipple. — From The Empty Fortress. Bettelheim captioned the drawing with the following text: “Drawing probably symbolic of the ‘white’ breast — that is, the good one.”

I am stimming as I read of these things, clinicians and their autistic objects. Tustin suggests that stimming, that autistic gesture writ large, is a kind of psychogenic nipple play. Autistics are always searching for breasts, for that which we supposedly lost. While I ponder Tustin in the field, I channel SAT prep books. Breasts are to autistics as car keys are to neurotypicals. Analogies abound. I imagine Tustin rummaging through a pocketful of breasts, a fruitless search. I look at the dust jacket on my book, where a reviewer in 1995 notes that Tustin’s work is still relevant “today.” How long must we dwell in “today”?

Part three, 1967. Bertram Ruttenberg and Enid Wolf declare that echolalia — the repetition of words and phrases — is a kind of autistic autoeroticism. (Or, is autistic autoeroticism redundant?) Nipple, I mutter to myself. Nipple, nipple, nipple. I think about arousal and the so-called prison that is autism, a prison so-called by breast-obsessed shrinks and the proteges of B.F. Skinner. I think about rhetorical arousal, erotic rhetorics, autistic eros, the electric current that narrates our history and our present. I wonder about the nipple as an autistic placeholder: the meaning in movement, the queering of pinwheels in a field, where autistic objects of all sorts commune.

A field of pinwheels — Sexy pinwheels spin in a field. But maybe these pinwheels symbolize breasts. If they were taller breasts — erm, pinwheels — they might even make electricity.

The Aut Rapture

Something transcendent happens to autistic people when we turn 21: We disappear. Unfortunately for me, however, I’m 27, still autistic, and still living and breathing on this planet. Yes, my friends: I have been left behind.

My parents made the mistake of not aborting me. And ABA, CBT, talk therapy, support groups, anti-depressants — none of these things have exorcised my autism. Sometimes, when I go to conferences, self-important parents like to pretend that I’m not really, truly autistic, that I have, in fact, outgrown my autism in the most spiritual and inspirational of ways. Because, honestly, haven’t I heard? The good and faithful autistics all recognize the depravity that is autism and work hard, so tear-inducingly hard, to make their disordered brains and disordered bodies disappear. That my disordered self could still exist… that I even want my disordered self to exist… such a pity. I’m so autistic that I cannot fathom how soul-sucking autism really is.

If I will not make my autistic self invisible, then they must. And if “evidence-based practices” won’t do the trick, ableism just might. So, I’m here providing a few suggestions for further infantilizing me, for facilitating a neurotypical brand of the Second Coming:

1. Remember that, while I may exist physically, I do not exist semantically. Pairing autistic and adult in the same sentence, for example, is a no-no. Other off-limits words include woman, citizen, activist, colleague, and anything with a —sex affix.

2. Although I might be an adult in the chronological sense of the word, stress that I will never be an adult in the developmental sense of the word. There are many ways to assert neurotypical dominance in this regard. You might, for example, correct my use of the words depression and anxiety and replace them with sad feelings and worried feelings. When I present at conferences and seem a bit too comfortable in my empowered adult status, you might knock me down a few rungs and ask me at what age I was toilet-trained. And, every time I remember to bathe, you might write me a 1,000-word email, CC four or five of my family members and/or former employers, and tell me how proud you are of me.

From: Dr. NT Knowsbest To: Token Autie CC: Your Mom ; Your Boss ; Your Math Professor ; Your Old Babysitter ; Your State Representative Subject: Go you! Hi, Token!!!! I heard the big news. I think we ALL need to congratulate you on your hard work!

Other infantilizing measures might include, if you’re a soprano or alto, using a sing-songy voice and speaking only in rhyming couplets. But, hey, don’t take advice from little ol’ me. You’re the neurotypical — you’re the adult here.

3. Remind me that I am incapable of empathy and perspective-taking. If I disagree with you, tell me how self-centered I am. Emotionally speaking, I’m forever lodged in the terrible twos, and I’ll just never understand how bad you have it.

4. Emphasize that, unlike real adults, I cannot maintain mutually beneficial friendships and will always fail to meet your emotional needs. Condemn my black-and-white thinking and preach to me about shades of gray. If I pick up on your sadness and attempt to console you — make it clear that you’re not sad, you’re lachrymose. You’re not depressed, you’re bummed out. You’re not upset, you’re very upset. There’s a difference, and I damned well need to learn it. To facilitate this process, draw cartoon faces on the back of your business card and instruct me to keep it handy in my wallet.

The back of a business card. There are three handdrawn faces with expressions of distress, and there are only minor differences in the drawing. The first is labeled UPSET; the second VERY UPSET; the third INCREDIBLY UPSET. There are lines radiating from the third face, and a handwritten caption says NOTE: THIS IS NOT A LIGHTBULB. At the bottom of the card a scrawled note reads XOXO I HAVE FAITH IN YOU! — This is important shit.

5. Never give up on the messy, imperfectible project that is me. No matter how many times I tell you how cruel you are, no matter how many times I tell you how patronizing you are, no matter how many times I tell you how proud I am to be autistic — keep working on that disappearing act. Remember how glad you are that you’re not some bitter, twisted, ungrateful, disordered half-person like me. Remind yourself that I’m so lucky to have such a wonderful, personal savior like you in my life.

—

This post brought to you by a big a move, a new job, and my lack of existence.

How to train your baby to be neurotypical

On June 23, I attended the Nisonger Autism Institute, a day-long, invitation-only conference that focused on transition across the lifespan. I’ve been wanting to write on my experience there for some time now, but needed a month in order to cohere my thoughts (and to lower my, um, blood pressure).

I should start off by saying that I’m glad, very glad, that they invited me to attend. Moreover, if they host another institute next year, I hope I’m re-invited. In fact, I hope they they invite a heck of a lot more self-advocates. While there, I was told that the attendance tally was somewhere around 110 people and that only three attendees were autistic. This seems to be par for the course with the autism-centric conferences I’ve attended, unfortunately. It’s not a happy sort of feeling.

Not only were the autistic people missing — so too were the parents. The only parents there, generally speaking, doubled as service providers or professional advocates (e.g., teacher’s aides, psychologists, ASA officers). The sad irony? All of the presenters, to the point of redundancy, stressed how important it is to include family members and self-advocates in “the conversation” — yet there were hardly any family members or self-advocates in this particular conversation.

The highlights of the conference, for me, were Pat Cloppert’s presentation on middle school, as well as the presentation on adulthood by Tom Fish, Benzion Chinn, and Patrick Meehan (the latter two being autistic self-advocates).

What I really, really have been itching to write about, though, was the keynote speaker — Sally Rogers of UC Davis. I knew things would be rocky when, at the start of her talk, she made a shout out to Geri Dawson, Autism Speaks’ Chief Science Officer. (One of our protest signs during last year’s AutSpks walk was: Congratulations, Columbus! You’ve just paid Geri Dawson’s salary. Heh.)

In essence, Rogers stressed the now common refrain about the importance of early intervention. And the neuro-normative biases of this presentation smacked me in the face, minute after minute. Rogers described “deviant” behaviors and “language delays deviance,” and then talked about eliminating “atypicalities” through therapy. More than once, she described autism as having “isolating effects” (you know, rather than mention anything about how a neuro-normative society isolates autistic people because they’re “deviant”), and she also posited that she wants to see “less disability and more function.”

Some of the assumptions undergirding her talk, assumptions that make my skin crawl:

It is better to be non-autistic than autistic.
All autistic behaviors (including, but not limited to, stimming, repetition, prosody, ways of communicating or expressing) need to be eliminated.
Autistic people’s challenges primarily arise from being autistic — this, as opposed to autists dwelling within a one-size-fits-all world. (I’m not saying that autism doesn’t cause challenges. I am saying, however, that representing autism/autistic people as a big bad problem to be eradicated is 1) flagrantly ableist and entrenched in a medical model of disability, and 2) deflects attention away from that ableism. I’m sure I’m saying other things, too. I just haven’t decided what else yet.)
One can train away autism.
We need to take as gospel all of the common, dehumanizing ideologies associated with functioning labels, or what it means to be a “functioning” (and thereby more human and desirable) person.

Toward the end of her talk, Rogers showcased several video clips: autistic babies vs. NT babies. And something really disturbing (I think) happened: when she prefaced a video with here’s a typically developing baby, the audience cooed, laughed, reacted happily. When she prefaced a video with here’s an autistic baby, the room grew silent, solemn, non-responsive.

A girl toddler with a book is being hugged by a boy toddler. The girl is younger and is looking away from the camera, while the boy is smiling, looking toward the camera, and pushing the girl's face toward the camera. — Pop quiz! Which one is teh cuteness omgbbq?

I don’t laugh at babies. Unlike the pope, I don’t kiss babies that are thrown my way. I admit it — babies and I don’t jibe. In that moment, though, I wished I were a baby-liking sort of person — that at least I would have been reacting, laughing, or goo-gooing over the many cute autistic babies.

I don’t think that cute and autistic are mutually exclusive entities. And it’s disturbing to me that service professionals do not find (or behave as though they do not find) those whom they serve to be adorable, cute, beautiful, intelligent, or funny. Unless those whom they serve were to become “more typical,” that is.

At only one point did the audience react positively toward an autistic baby: when Rogers claimed that this baby, because of intensive therapy, was “virtually asymptomatic” and “as cute as can be.” Then the audience laughed.

*headdesk*