Letters to my weird sisters

"One of the many things I've learned...as a student of performative womanhood is that there is no such thing as an acceptable resting face when the face is on a woman."

Hi fellow human, 

Last night I finished reading 'Letters To My Weird Sisters: on autism, feminism and motherhood' by Joanne Limburg. I love the concept of the book. Joanne writes a series of wide-ranging letters to four 'weird sisters' from history, including Virginia Woolf, discussing topics such as autistic parenting, social isolation, feminism, the movement for disability rights and the appalling treatment through history of those who are deemed 'weird'.

"... it was the weird women I needed to write to, and not just about. Weird women have been spoken about quite enough. We're all sick of it. I've said it before and I'll say it again: when people talk about you and not to you, it's dehumanizing." - Joanne Limburg

Today I reviewed my marginalia, as I do once I've finished any book that teaches me something, or many things, and transferred my most pertinent notes to my common-place book for safe-keeping.

I wish to share them here with you. This is not a review, nor a comprehensive overview of the book, merely some ideas of personal interest that you might find inspiring too. 

---

Notes:

I have been asked how I can communicate so expressively in my videos, in my writing, or when giving speeches, but struggle in social groups so I appreciate this explanation Limburg offers:

"Receptive language skills are not the same as expressive ones (I find it hard to employ both at the same time, which makes conversing with more than one or two other people very difficult for me. Lecturing, appearing at book festivals etc. - please note: not a problem)". 

---

Because people are unique, multiple identities are possible. I want to learn from autistic people with different intersectional identities than me whether that be, for example, gender, race, class, sexual orientation, or other disability. Joanne shares the work of Amy Sequenzia and the late Mel Baggs, two influential multiply-disabled autistic advocates who can use spoken language very little or not at all but can use alternative and augmentative communication (AAC) methods to communicate. Joanne also highlights Anand Prahlad's accounts of life as a black autistic person. I am compiling a list of autistic advocates who can use spoken language very little or not at all and a list of non-white autistic advocates, so please let me know of anyone in the comments. I will share the compiled list with you at a later date. 

"I don't want to have to argue that I'm special in order to justify my existence. That's not autism acceptance. Acceptance isn't about being celebrated: it's about being unremarked and unremarkable, the opposite of uncanny."

Limburg explores her affinity to Daphne in the book 'A Summer Bird Cage' by Margaret Drabble:

"Throughout the novel, every time Daphne appears, Sarah [Daphne's cousin] puzzles over exactly what it is that makes Daphne so unfortunate - is it frumpiness or plainness, and can the two ever really be untangled? How can she, Sarah, ever really be certain that she is in no danger of becoming Daphne?".

"Girlishness is made up not only on the outside, but on the inside too. When one girl gives the game away, the other girls will pull off their masks and show their teeth...If a girl or a woman has the slightest smidgen of disgust about her body or fears about her social status - and pretty well all girls and women do - a Daphne will reflect it back to her, horribly magnified."

---

I learned early-on that to be a girl was to present myself as nice and sweet, and that this would take continuous self-monitoring. Limburg astutely shares:

"One of the many things I've learned in my long, not entirely successful career as a student of performative womanhood is that there is no such thing as an acceptable resting face when the face is on a woman."

It is only since my diagnosis and unfurling of various societally dictated beliefs I held that I have started to let my face and voice rest in public. This has led to a noticeable uptick in white middle-aged men I do not know commenting upon me in public. It seems this happened to Limburg too, as I’m sure it happened to many other women:

"When I was younger, I was always being told to smile by strangers in the street - specifically, male strangers: Smile, love - it might never happen! One man said this to me a week after my miscarriage; I didn't have the energy to point out to him that it already had." 

---

Limburg identifies a phrase from Virgina Woolfe's Mrs Dalloway that exemplifies this. Woolfe describes a character, Doris Kilman, as 'in her abstraction'. I was in my abstraction when these men took it upon themselves to approach me in public and tell me my mannerisms were unacceptable. I was thinking my thoughts staring into the middle distance - not performative enough for them. Limburg shares:

"Because when a woman like you or me or Miss Kilman is in her abstraction, her manner marks her out as a woman who moves through the world as if the way she appears to other people in it were not her primary concern. And there's a price to be paid for that...A woman is not supposed to forget - not even for a moment - that whatever else she is, she is also an object." 

---

Limburg beautifully describes writers as 'mothers':

"If I have been able to speak my shame, it is only because you [Virginia Woolf] were brave enough to speak first."

and their fictional characters as 'friends':

"I could be sure there were some rooms [works of fiction] I could enter where my experiences were comprehensible, where I didn't have to apologize, offer a tortuous explanation of myself or turn myself into a joke."

---

Since my diagnosis I have come to think more critically about words that are so often used casually as insults in conversation, like "idiot" or "crazy" or "normal" or "childish". All words have roots, and change in usage depending on context but throughout history people have sought out "idiots" for medical, scientific, or economic reasons with one aim: to control them or make them disappear. Another example: separating the '“normal" from the “abnormal” became routine via standardisation of things such as education and social norms during the period 1840 - 1860.

"In the same period that the Victorians were standardizing time and building idiot asylums, they were calling the norm into being. And you cannot do that without summoning its shadow, the abnormal."

"Adulthood is not a developmental stage but a social position, and as such cannot be attained or maintained without the support and acknowledgement of others. And what others are acknowledging is... the observable adherence to certain norms, of speech, of behaviour, of appearance, and the successful performance of certain roles."

---

One of the reasons I dislike going to the doctors is that I now see how not to act around doctors but find it painfully difficult to comply with the social norms. Limburg discusses autism in the consultation room by sharing that:

"What we saw as conscientious and helpful - doing our research, making suggestions, acquiring the correct clinical terms - was seen by professionals as odd, inappropriate and uncooperative."

I can't count the number of times I've been sitting in a consultation room wishing the ground to open beneath me and swallow me whole because I realise I've broken one of the unspoken rules of going to the doctor: don't let on that you know more about them than the ailment you are seeing them about.

"If you irritate someone by talking too much at a party, you feel it - the shame, the sense of social failure, all of that - but the real consequences are trivial. If you irritate someone by talking too much in a consulting room, the consequences can be serious."

"When you are autistic, and your experiences are so different from most people's, you are often speaking in translation, even when the language is supposedly your own. And sometimes you're just too scared to speak." 

Limburg's description of her mask as Socially Gracious Joanne (SGJ) stopped me in my tracks.

"SGJ is a rigid container for an unruly social self. Her underpinnings are made out of explicit corrections - Don't-Sit-Like-That; Don't-Look-Like-That; Don't-Talk-Like-That; Don't-Move-Like-That. They are made from what I have learned by pre- and proscription. Her made-to-please covering consists of fragments of other women's dress sense, tone of voice, demeanour, facial expressions, gestures and turns of phrase. It is made from what I've learned by example... SGJ is a complex, even paradoxical figure, at once the embodiment of both my disability and of the privileges which protect me from so many of the consequences of being disabled. On the one hand, she is exhausting to run, and drains resources from me, resources which I might otherwise use to be the best version of my autistic self rather than an inferior version of a non-autistic woman. And SGJ is in some respects a lousy piece of kit: she doesn't always work, she has limited spontaneity and almost no initiative, she can't always quite fit herself to the situations she finds herself in, and anyone who's around her for long enough will start to notice the joins and hear the creaking... SGJ does not respect my experience or my feelings as an autistic person... she forces me to do and tolerate things that make me uncomfortable, unhappy and drained... SGJ wants me to feel good that I am not Mel Baggs; she wants me to pity and distance myself from them, and other autistic people like them. SGJ is the personification of my internalized ableism..."

---

There is so much more to learn from this book. If you read it, I hope you enjoy it.

Sending you love,

Charlie

---

If you enjoyed this letter and wish to support my work you can become a free or paid subscriber, leave a heart and comment on this post on Substack, share this letter with a friend, or restack it on Substack. Thank you for reading and supporting Rewild.