Autistic Pride and Ownership

I just added the following two paragraphs to my narrative. Normally, I would not publish a new addition to this blog, but I felt that the statement was, at least to me, especially significant.

These days, I will refer to myself, conversationally, as an autistic or, in those instances where more precision may be required, either as an Asperger’s autistic or, informally, as an aspie autistic. I know of other autistics, particularly other autistic activists, who also follow this basic convention. There has been a history of oppressed peoples taking ownership over designations which had been historically associated with socially stigmatized statuses. On its most basic level, owning a word deprives the bigot of a portion of her power to hurt the targeted individual.

For instance, Quaker was at first a term of derision for members of the Religious Society of Friends, while Shaker was a taunting appellation for members of the United Society of Believers in Christ’s Second Appearing. Even the initial use of the word, Christian, was, in the ancient Roman Empire, gibelike. In recent years, the pejorative fat has been embraced by the National Association to Advance Fat Acceptance. Some lesbians now openly speak of themselves as being dykes, and many lesbians and gay men routinely refer to themselves as queer. (There is even a queer theory in the humanities and social sciences.)

One may argue for a substantive, or at least mitigatory, value in calling oneself an Asperger’s autistic when others have tried to flee from the autistic label. As I have grown ever more self-conscious in the biographical social alienation of my autistic self, ownership has, to me, become a statement, an affirmation, of autistic pride, a sentiment I would, nonetheless, immediately distinguish from a platitudinous arrogance or banal superiority. As I am proud to be an autistic, I am, within the compasses of my other selves, proud of being a sociologist, a journalist, a ventriloquist, and so forth.