Neurelitism and Aspergian Liberation

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Okay, folks. I am still working on it. Neurelitism seems better to me than my previous idea. I got the idea of neurelitism from the sociological concept of power elitism:

My lifetime, especially during my junior years, has overflowed with manifold contradictions. As a child, and then on into adulthood, I was continually being told by others, especially my mother, that I was egotistical and did not care for anyone except myself. I suppose I came, in this and other areas, to internalize my mother's abuse. Taking into account Rabiner's diagnosis of childhood schizophrenia, a disorder which included autism, I am often perplexed as to her justification for saying, "How could I have given birth to such a selfish person like you?" They are words embedded in my consciousness. With the occasional exception, she seemed to be perpetually annoyed with me.

Now, admittedly, I was generally excluded from the conversations between Rabiner and my mother. (My father was rarely present.) That being the case, I am still unaware of the information given her on the specifics my diagnosis. I vividly recall, at around the age of 13, standing in the hall of the main floor in our house while screaming repeatedly to my mother, "Am I a schizophrenic?" Finally, and vociferously, she acknowledged it. "Yes! Is that what you wanted to hear?" I sighed in exhaustion and walked away.

At my insistence, the clinical apartheid of my mother and myself was reluctantly abrogated. I recall that I was, in one of our sessions, disturbed at some comment made by Rabiner to my mother regardng my behavior. When I attempted to interrupt, he snapped back, "See, that's the schizophrenia." I was, after all, just a young boy, welcomed only in silence and subjection, and could have no say in statements made about me. After being informed by Rabiner that, absent improvement, I might be returned to the psychiatric hospital, I began to hide things from him. Even as a child, I recognized his threat to be counterproductive.

I have attempted to be understanding. Living with persons on the autistic spectrum can be trying, and, if I am correct, my mother had to contend with, not only myself, but also my aspie father and his virtually incessant emotional, and occasionally physical, abuse of me. In truth, the yelling in our home was unremitting and revolved, typically, around my difficulties with my father. On many occasions, my mother alternately threatened to put me up for adoption or to leave my father. As she acknowledged to me over the years, she remained with him for financial reasons but never entirely forgave him.

Outside of my family, I was bullied almost daily as a child and younger teen, but, as an adult, any ill-treatment has become more sporadic. Needless to say, the ceaseless terrorism of my childhood was profoundly painful and, I would suggest, instances a rubric of oppression. Consider that one day, in the seventh grade, as I waited to be served in the cafetaria line, a boy my age, and one of my inveterate tormenters, pushed me into the wall and broke my sternum. In succeeding years, I palpably missed the cues altogether when two of my erstwhile best friends, one in the late 1980s and the other in the early 2000s, unexpectedly engaged in conduct which appeared premeditated to drive me away.

It is, in my view, largely irrelevant that the countless perpetrators were ignorant concerning my high-functioning autism. I myself had a clouded and distorted view of the issues I faced. Indeed, an existential haze surrounded me until I was 51 year old. Clarity was then introduced only through the diagnosis. A fog light had been switched on, and the brume dissipated.

Moreover, ignorance was decidedly extraneous to the regular beltings of children by all the attendants in my ward of the psychiatric hospital. Mercifully, I was beaten only once. After I told my parents, my father threatened the woman. Subsequent to the reprimand, I received only the occasional dirty look. If the criminal battery by those attendants occurred today, and not in the psychiatric dark ages (1967 to be precise), I am fairly confident that the majority of them would be serving time.

Although I was fundamentally a well-behaved student, Mrs. Lundine, my fourth-grade teacher and someone who must have been acquainted with my psychiatric record, was manifestly bothered by my eccentricities. Once, I asked her to repeat herself. She pulled back my earlobe, and screamed into my ear. I am grateful that my mother complained to someone at the school. Still and all, the following year, Lundine was promoted to assistant principal.

More globally, ableism might be defined as a social structure, or system of behavioral rules, which justifies or enables actions detrimental to the differently abled. Notwithstanding that oppression has been among my academic interests for many years, I have only recently initiated a reflexive sociology of my own life history as a text for ableism. While categories, such as neurotypical (NT) and Asperger's syndrome (AS), are merely linguistic conveniences, and devoid of essence, they can often function as helpful tools for personal reflection and development.

I considered several designations for neurological ableism. Neurism, neuroism, neuronism, neuralism, and neurologism have each been employed to delineate particular subject matter. Neurotypicalism characterizes a relative status, not the broader social construction. One candidate was neurologicism, but it was, I concluded, simply too cumbersome. Another contender, neuricism, reads more like a neurological trait. Ultimately, I settled on neurelitism.

Recalling C. Wright Mills' American power elite of the presidency, the Defense Department, and the corporatocracy, we observe a neurological power elitism, or neurelitism, in which standards of neurological normality are constructed by the neurological majority. An illustrative comparison might, perhaps, be situated in the ableist species of audism with the sanctioning of the disentitlement of the deaf and hearing impaired.

The fact is that I and many other aspies, whether diagnosed or self-defined, have, as a consequence of our neurodiversities, been subjected to traumatic and sustained abuse. This oppression of a neurological minority, as revealed in the stories we tell each other, expresses an ideology of neurelitism. Like sexism and heterosexism, two additional large-scale constructions focused significantly around performance, neurelitism, which identifies that which is good with the neurologically normative, cannot be explained away as mere individual victimization.

Last edited by nominalist on 02 Nov 2007, 10:22 am, edited 4 times in total.

Interesting and poignant article, thank you.

I think neurelitism is a good word, as it serves a reminder to both, or all, sides of the spectrum, to avoid judgement of that which is different.

My concern is that it is perceived as a minority elitism in favour of AS that becomes the reverse of the minority oppression that we previously endured.

The word isn't clear enough to indicate whether the elitism is coming from NT or AS. Hopefully, it will be understood as meaning either of the two, regardless, but I suspect it may be used against us.

Yes, but that also is true of ageism, sexism, racism, classism, etc.

The point of constructing words in this fashion is to focus on the system of oppression, not on any particular status. I originally came up with neurotypicalism, but, after some comments here, I rejected it for that very reason.

I don't like the term ; I think it's not easy enough to say. That's just my immediate gut reaction.

But I too find your article very moving. Thank you for sharing it.
And I understand that you are seeking a label to express in a sociological analysis what you experienced.

I also understand your seeing it as a particular oppression.
I had agreed with Lostinspaces post, on your recent thread "Neurotypicalism", about discrimination requiring that the abuser know which group you are in and attacking you for that, BUT.......
I have remembered how straight/heterosexual, but delicate or "feminine" boys and young men are sometimes bullied because they are believed to be homosexual ( or at least "latent"!). And girls who don't shave armpits/legs or something are accused of being lesbians and often suffer exclusion on that basis.The abuse/bullying functions almost like a kind of policing to enforce "correct" behaviour. I remember it worked on me ; I spent a tragic amount of my energy and intelligence from 12-25 years in learning the rules and mostly keeping to them.
Interestingly many AS sufferers are mistaken for gay/queer , which means that in fact part of the abuse they may experience is actually homophobia.
This also leads me to think that another part of the bullying may be a strange kind of sexism/genderism, because it is provoked by the AS persons not conforming to the "correct" gender behaviours. My father for instance experienced this , and was well aware for most of his life of not "fitting" the correct picture of a man, being thin, and sensitive , and bookish.

I wonder whether already established "isms" might between them explain a lot of the discrimination and bullying suffered by AS people.
What might make AS extraordinarily interesting in that case would be to see how the various "isms" function as a cocktail to more thoroughly exclude people with AS. To examine the components of the abuse from that angle. As if AS makes the discriminations visible in a way usually increasingly disguised in attitudes towards women, gays, old, and fat, etc.

The particular sadness of the AS situation would then be that may waste most of available energy and intelligence on trying to fit, IF are able to , OR find oneself simply unable to DO it, in which case it will look like intransigence , and doubly threatening to the status quo. In which case it should be the case that people with a public diagnosis of AS would be less bullied. Or is discrimination so rooted in automatic reactions by the time are 10 or 11 that even knowing someone can't help it doesn't let them off.
It may be that the abuse/bullying suffered by AS is a "simple " side-effect" of all the well known "isms"! !

Last edited by ouinon on 01 Nov 2007, 3:01 am, edited 1 time in total.

Almost all words beginning with "neuro" or "neur" sound a bit awkward to me. Perhaps neuroelitism sounds a bit better than neurelitism, but neuroelitism is not good English. (It is neuro- before a consonent, and neur- before a vowel.)



You're welcome.



Precisely.



I am a superadmin in a room on the Paltalk chat service, and we have a (junior) who keeps on calling this one aspie "gay." (The room's topic has nothing to do with autism or AS.) Her behavior is very inappropriate for an administrator, and she heterosexist (homophobic), so her comments are intended as an attack. Last night, I told the owner of the room, in no uncertain terms, that either she stops this woman from attacking the guy, or I will leave the room and complain to Paltalk administration. She finally relented. I cannot stand by and watch oppression of any kind.

Although I can't say that I haven't sometimes stood by while oppression /abuse has happened ,(through ignorance or fear), nor haven't myself on several ( many ! ?) occasions actively made life miserable for someone,( most of it some time ago now *) , I hope you don't think that I intended to EXCUSE bullying of people with ASD by suggesting it might be made up of several already established "isms". That is most DEFINITELY NOT what I think, nor what I was arguing.
I just wanted to make that clear as your post finished with what sounded like the implication that I was letting bullying off the hook. Not at all; I take sexism, homophobia and other discriminations very seriously, and just think that they might amongst others account for some or much of the oppression that people with ASD experience.

*Realise that the continuing example of me making life miserable for someone is as a mother with my son , and realise at same moment that the times I am most unpleasant to him are when I experience him as being intolerably ("unnecessarily") stupid, and it drives me nuts. It presses some of my own most raw and sensitive buttons. When my son blocks on something, can't understand more than one mini instruction at a time etc ; I very quickly lose it. Near meltdown can ensue.
I am absolutely freaked out by someone quite definitely intelligent not managing something "patently simple"!
And I remember countless "Stupids!" filled with contempt and disdain and disappointment and dismissal, on the part of my father mainly,( another aspie like me and my son), to me as a child.

"Stupidism" ( Negative reaction to stupidity in someone supposedly NOT stupid).
Is that the sort of neurological element which you see as the subject of particular oppression ? Not an evolutionary advantage, and confusing. "Expensive" for the tribe in time and energy for explanations. And dangerous in that is not homogenous stupidity OR intelligence. Unreliable, which reminds me that that was another complaint about me in childhood ( no longer applies, well not about times and stuff, but maybe still about levels of intelligence) " can't be relied on".

In fact it's another example of the inconsistency of signals which Butler draws attention to as so threatening in our society. Stupidity in someone intelligent ; it's not allowed.( just like femininity isn't "allowed" in men.) IQism !
Okay.I'm beginning to see that there might be something in it. Thanks for the thought provoke!

Also thinking that it is certain aspies who have most trouble with inconsistency, with things not being black or white.

( And now that I've read Judy Singer's Neurodiversity page, that you've linked to your www, about the "dark and the light" of aspergers/ASD, i am even more aware of this. Especially as I'm the awful AS mother. I already knew perfectly well that I was; I knew I wanted to have my son adopted within 48 hours of his birth, but papa said no. I would not have even had a child if a Personal Development Programme hadn't encouraged me to think lots of evangelical rubbish about myself and throw up old survival routines).
So is it people on the AS who are indeed the most intolerant of ASD in others less powerful than them?

SORRY SORRY SORRY , really gone on a long time but this thread just got me thinking more and more.

It is something I promise my Social Problems students each semester. My class encourages activism, I try as best I can to model that activism.



No, no. I didn't get that impression at all from what you wrote.



I do, too.



I don't know, but I run into all the time. In my experience, it is usually a result of procrastination.

In fact it's another example of the inconsistency of signals which Butler draws attention to as so



I used to be that way myself. I had an awful problem with "gray areas." However, since I have become a poststructuralist and social constructionist, I have gone in virtually the opposite direction. Now, I have a tough time with fixed categories. I seem to have done a 180.



Singer makes an interesting read. She says that she is not quite an aspie herself (though with some aspie characteristics). However, quite a few people in her family do are autists or aspies. Of course, she is the one who apparently coined the term neurodiversity.



I don't know. I suppose I am a fast learner, but all of this stuff is very new to me. I was not diagnosed until April of this year. I then realized that my child psychiatrist did believe I had some kind of autism. (There was no word for Asperger's in the 1960s.) Therefore, he diagnosed me with childhood schizophrenia which, at that time, included autism.



No problem at all. Journaling can be helpful

Big aspect of aspie difficulty is with formal dress, and uniform , = hugely discriminating and excluding re workplace/certain professions, steps on career ladders etc . Real cause for aspie rage ; assumption that can dress smart/formally ! Can't ; clothing like skin and personality for many aspies. Fed up of this idea that what you wear is just a polite gesture to match environment , for me and many aspies is invasion of self because clothing is extra skin ( to make up for the first lot being so "fragile"/uncertain/unfelt) ; protection and presence and identity . Dresscodes are oppression, for a significant minority of people.
( The sad and funny thing is that it was quite possibly an aspie who first thought of dressing people identically , to tell one group from another ! ! Sins of the fathers etc etc! )

Unexpected stupidity in someone intelligent provokes different kind of hostility to unexpected intelligence in someone usually stupid. Like femininity in boys is still seen as more "worrying" than tomboy behav in girls. The slownesses , literalness, naivety, paralysis, spaced out ness etc childlikeness of aspie is an affront to the dominance in our society of IQ intelligence. ( ironically perhaps a result of powerful aspies in the past!)

Title of thread not so exaggerated.
If AS is genuine genetic subgroup of humanity need changes in many things to respect our rights.

Still don't like term ; but perhaps "racism" and "socialism" seemed as clumsy and awkward in beginning!

Last edited by ouinon on 01 Nov 2007, 12:42 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I used to dress like an uncoordinated slob. Then, one day, when I was finishing my Ph.D. (early 1980s), one of the professors took me aside and gave me some advice on my wardrobe. It was very helpful to me when applying for professorships.

I don't get the impression that it's only a question of "know how" ; yes, many Aspergers may not know how to "do" the dress thing , and like me at 16/18 years of age , and you at Ph.D level , find advice from peers or sympathetic mentors very useful , like a key.
BUT that is not the whole story; once have discovered a "set" of clothing that feels good it becomes like a "home", a part of self, a crucial part of feeling secure in ones identity , so that a job which requires "skirts or fitted trousers, blouse/shirt tucked in, no socks, and "smart" shoes", or various versions thereof, to someone who feels right in loose baggy clothes, socks, no heels,,etc ( a stylish black and white or grey , pure cotton, and clean!, "ensemble" for example, NOT necessarily slobbish !, more than acceptable to anywhere that doesn't have a stupid dresscode in fact !), feels like hell!!
Especially as 75% of people on the AS experience sensory disorders, which can make tight clothing, artificial fibres and certain colours , certain textures and certain "shapes" and styles of clothing difficult to wear. I very early on realised I had to write off certain jobs SIMPLY because of their dress code!! That was before writing off almost all jobs because of masses of other things that made it impossible for me to deal with them. Yep, here's to aspie liberation. Down with Dresscodes!

It is only one, but not the least, of the many things which contribute to the discrimination, for neurological reasons, against people on AS, which as your thread title so militantly suggests, constrains and limits Aspergers, and routinely, and yet invisibly to most NTs, causes them difficulty.

I suspect that this is an oppression which female aspies will have experienced more acutely than male aspies! ( both in terms of the pressure of expectations, AND in womens apparently[?] greater sensitivity to all the social nuances of the dresscode language that need to be learned. By rote. It takes a lot , a massive , overwhelming amount of energy, of data processing . And once acquired the million rules every aspect of dress becomes as crucial as a molecule in a chemistry formula . One bit wrong is the whole thing ruined.)

I wonder whether all of this could just be included in disability/ablism agendas/campaign demands. What is it that makes it different?

Last edited by ouinon on 01 Nov 2007, 3:26 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I used to be driven mad by labels in shirt collars, and I would continually be pulling on my shirt collars around the front of my neck. I still do so once in a while, but, at 51, I have overcome many (though certainly not all) of the issues I had years ago.



I have the soul of a revolutionary. I was involved in some of the student protests of the 60s (even though I was quite young). I now combine the ideas of Michel Foucault (un poststructuraliste français) with those of Karl Marx. My idea is to promote the development of an ideology of neurelitist liberation, consciousness raising, and solidarity.

Your English is quite good, by the way, especially considering you are from France.

Interesting. I'm often told my ideas are "pure Marx" despite never having read nor studied him. Foucault, on the other hand, I have read and I find his writing a bit disturbing. Perhaps I didn't fully grasp his ideas, or perhaps they just didn't sit comfortably with me. And I found, when I allowed my inner revolutionary to speak, that there is a human tendency to swing too far in the opposite direction in reaction. Today, I try to work on the principle of evolution, not revolution, but your ideas are intriguing and I'm keen to hear more when you are ready to share them with us.

I suppose that any faith I might have once had in gradualism (gradual change) has fallen by the wayside.

Basically, like Foucault, I see all social discourses (knowledge systems) as dominated by power interests. Also like Foucault, I have no problem with social discourses in themselves. I do, however, believe that we should subject, or be willing to subject, them to criticism and social scrutiny.

Since all social discourses are constructed by those in power (and are not real), they can also be deconstructed. However, one of the ways in which people in power remain there is by convincing us that their particular social discourse is real; and, if you reject it, you are delusional, lacking in common sense, or even unpatriotic. George W. Bush has done precisely that with his war on terror (which I reject).

For me, poststructuralism is very liberating. Once one recognizes that social discourses are entirely constructed, one can be free to work with others to create new ones. I see that happening on message boards like Wrong Planet. People are challenging conventional ideas on Asperger's syndrome and autism and constructing a new social discourse.

One of my projects is to have neurelitism become a part of that discourse.

Yes, yes. I like it. Important to deconstruct social constructs. But I have an idealistic view that a more natural re-construction will happen if we don't force it, but allow it to evolve and ensure that no purposeful construction interferes. Probably too idealistic, but I have seen informal groups thrive on the basis of individual responsibility and no leadership nor organisation. A big leap, I know. Perhaps your revolution is necessary first, then we can see if next step evolves out of that...

Thank you.



Well, by revolution, I only mean becoming activists for a new social discourse. I am not referring to political revolution. However, I hope you are right. Whatever works.

I just revised the essay again (the one at the beginning of this thread). I added considerably more material.

I have been finding this process to be very healing. The more I write, the more I remember.

I recommend it.