We’re a combo of freelance writers who became friends through sharing a process of late diagnosis and stumbling around the neurodivergent universe attempting to make sense of it all. Having come from fairly radical left backgrounds, one thing that struck us both quite forcibly is the extent to which the various discourses tend to locate autism inside the heads of autistic people – this makes no sense even scientifically much less experientially. Obviously we wholeheartedly endorse the struggle for disability justice but even the social model, which defines society as the cause of disability, critiques society mainly insofar as it discriminates against disabled people in various practical ways. There is some discussion of intersectionality, particularly with regard to gender and to some extent with regard to race but exploration of class is almost non-existent and the economy usually only as it relates to service provision and employment.
We wanted to explore what it means to be an autistic person in a complex and increasingly unequal world rather than ‘autism’ as a theoretical or clinical construct. Obviously, these constructs also form the world in which autistic people live but they should be treated as something we interact with, not as descriptions or definitions of who we actually are. There is very little of how we form positive cultures and social spaces, of what’s beyond the survival ‘mask’.
Most of all, a cat can look at a king! How does the world look from our vantage points? We are both diagnosed level 1 autistic and don’t claim the lived experience of level 2 & 3 autistic people and don’t presume to speak for them. We are a working-class straight white man and a first-generation professional class white gay woman – we often have very different takes on the same topic and we think it’s important to take each other seriously and to organise around the common ground we have rather than focusing on what divides us. This can get heated but is also enlightening. Rather than seeing intersectionality as a kind of venn diagram, we prefer to consider ourselves as uniquely situated in collective and collaborative action to change systemic and structural forces which affect us all as marginalised people.
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