February 23, 2016 - 08:20
In reading Yergeau’s piece, I began thinking about dynamics that lie at the heart of oppression in many forms. This line of thinking was sparked by a talk about whiteness and racism by George Yancy that I attended on Monday afternoon. When I began to read Yergeau’s piece later that night, I read it with Yancy’s words about blackness and the treatment of black people fresh in my mind. Following these threads through Yergeau’s work helped me to pick up on crucial intersections between racist and ableist oppression—and likely between other forms of discrimination as well. In both Yergeau’s and Yancy’s stories of injustice, I heard about dehumanization, the stripping of agency, and the denial of subjective experience. Unpacking some of these forces a bit more, it is clear that dehumanization is central to both forms of oppression. Yergeau and Yancy describe how their bodies have been taken from them— “restrained and discarded” (Yergeau). Yergeau states that “theories about ToM deny autistic people agency by calling into question their very humanity and in doing so, wreak violence on autistic bodies” (Yergeau). This quote can be compared to Yancy’s statement in his book, Look, a White, that “black people…undergo ontologically truncating traumatic experiences in the face of white others who refuse to recognize their humanity (Yancy 19). In both passages, the authors express similar senses of powerlessness—of having their personhood denied by the hegemonic forces of Theory of Mind and whiteness.
Another really interesting parallel that I found in these conversations was the idea that the “normal” has been defined only in reference to what the marginalized identity is not. As Yancy explains it, “at the heart of whiteness is a profound disavowal: ‘I am not that’” (Yancy 20). Yergeau gets at a similar idea when she asks: “Would we have a theory of mind without autism” (Yergeau)? Both statements point towards the concept that marginalized identities have been constructed as a way to delineate the boundaries of normality. To claim oneself as normal depends on knowing what normal is not. While experiences of abeism and racism are certainly distinct in many ways and should not be conflated, it is striking to mark the commonalities that bind different narratives of oppression. It would also be really interesting to take an intersectional perspective here and ask: What does oppression look like for autistic people of color? How might their experiences differ from those of white autistics?
Yancy, George. Look, a White. Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2012. Print.
Yergeau, Melanie. “Clinically Significant Disturbance: On Theorists Who Theorize Theory of Mind.” Disability Studies Quarterly 33.4 (2013). Web.