Letters To My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism

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I liked how I was able to learn more about women I know of, such as Virginia Woolf and women who I haven’t and how society treated them.

Hun reflekterer også hvorfor den måde vi snakker om folk med intellektuelle handicap på er skadelige, især konceptet mental alder. Men forfatteren ser også på hendes egen lyst til at separere sig fra specifikke typer af autistiske mennesker, såsom dem der er hjerneskadet eller lignede, hun reflektere over det. through letters to women considered 'weird' (limburg arguing who may in fact have autistic traits making them considered 'weird') she explores her own autistic experience and experience of womanhood, and the intersection of ableism and sexism, and therefore disability rights and feminism, throughout history.

I thought at some point I would get used to the second-person letters to various "weird sisters" in history, but I never did. The ways in which the perils of the medical systems impact autistic women also often align with those of other marginalized identities. I love the way this books looks at autism and feminism through a myriad of ways; literary and media analysis, history, current society, politics, different cultural backgrounds, psychological, physiological and anecdotal and considers both the personal and societal impact these things have on the lives of autistic people.

This book really helped open the door and put concepts into words that it would have taken me ages to understand otherwise. Limburg describes movingly her own struggles as a new mother and the pressure of society's expectations. Once you have been pushed outside the first person plural, anything might be done to you, anything might happen. The author did an awesome job explaining how it feels to have autism rather than explaining what autism is.The themes in this book are of interest to me, particularly the exploration of Limburg’s own experience with autism, as, like so many other things in life, we are still only beginning to understand from the perspective of female presentation. I am not autistic and harbour no suspicions that I may be, but I do not sit entirely comfortably within society’s notions of womanhood. An autism diagnosis in midlife enabled Joanne Limburg to finally make sense of why her emotional expression, social discomfort and presentation had always marked her as an outsider.