Neurodiversity
The Birth of an Idea
Judy Singer
Having read it
★★★★☆
A decent thesis that has clearly added to and helped the neurodiversity conversations and helped the author with her own perspectives and experiences; the book of Judy Singer’s original, humanities and social sciences thesis of 1998 is a good read and it is also well wrapped in some familial context and contemporary perspectives.
Also, as much as biodiversity is important for all on planet Earth, for the human race to better get out of its (mostly self-made) plights, neurodiversity as well is a rather important factor to its existence, methinks, not the continued dualism (and late-stage capitalism) that seems to equate progress.
A good passage
The word ‘disability’ itself is problematic. It just doesn’t fit. This is not a case of the internalised disability oppression that makes newly disabled people deny that they have a disability. The word ‘disability’ comes from the pre-quantum era, with its discrete boundaried polar opposition between ‘able’ and ‘disabled’, and fails to encapsulate the situation of people on the spectrum. It has too many connotations of physical and intellectual impairment, and conversely, no association to impairments of social communication for people who are neither physically nor intellectually disabled. The word has too much stigma attached despite the efforts of the disability rights movement to reclaim it,5 too much looking from the line of sight of a debatable normalcy, and too close an association with the modernist paradigm.