Letters To My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism

Product Information

In her letters, the author reveals insights into her own experiences that at times made for difficult reading (often very relatable), but with an ultimately empowering message.

I’ve always felt…well, a bit weird, and this book has also granted me some insight of more personal relevance that I will need to dwell on. Any girl or woman who suspects herself to be anything other than perfectly pretty, nice and odourless inside and out risks not being a girl or a woman at all. The way Limburg then turns these moments into a chance for connection with the woman her letter is addressed to, and into something poignant about the changes needed in society to support people going through similar issues around childbirth, is genuinely powerful on several occasions. My one complaint about this phenomenal book is that while it deals exclusively with the intersection of gender and neurodivergence, Limburg at no point acknowledges that many non-binary people, especially those who were assigned female, as well as trans men, will be able to identify strongly with the experiences being ascribed to women here, despite not being women themselves. That’s as good a definition of autism as I’ve ever read, and reminds me of the value of the unclassified routes down which our autistic brains so often travel.

Being around me doesn't always feel like being around a fellow human being, and that discomfort rarely brings out the best in people. For selvom forfatteren ikke selv er intellektuelt handicappede så giver hun gennem hele bogen henvisninger til yderlig læsning. Anyway I found it hard to read, but that's not to say it wasn't good, because it certainly wasn't bad.

These cookies help provide information on metrics the number of visitors, bounce rate, traffic source, etc. 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. The essential anger of activism combined with the character limits of Twitter et al, can render the medium a blunt tool. Her letter to Frau V, the (possibly autistic) mother to Fritz, one of Hans Asperger’s autistic patients, reaches far into the culture of motherhood over the past decades and I found it very affecting. The letter to Katharina Kepler focused on the traumatic and literally life-threatening effects of social isolation and stigmatization of disabled people.How as women we are held to certain expectations of how we act and behave and are constantly reminded and policed on that.

Yes, we do have to say so every time, because every time we see another woman's body objectified, it is by implication an attack on our personhood, and when we are attacked in this way, we have every right to re-assert that personhood by refusing that objectification. Det var en super interessant vinkel at tage at det den manglende villighed til efterleve feminitet på samme måde som neurotypiske der gør folk utilpasse. I was also grateful for the nuance she brought to the topic of “autism mothers” and felt both understood and rightly challenged by her words. Jeg synes det var hårdt at blive mindet om alle de små “double takes” og folk misbilligende blikke om træder ved siden af.For all that time, womanhood from the inside, as a way of experiencing and navigating and making sense of the world, was expressed, for the most part, only in unpublished words, in letters and private journals.

Once you have been pushed outside the first person plural, anything might be done to you, anything might happen. Hotjar sets this cookie to know whether a user is included in the data sampling defined by the site's daily session limit. Whilst I enjoyed the content, I did feel it jarred every time Limburg brought the letter back to the subject of the recipient, and the formatting just didn’t flow as nicely together as Limburg perhaps intended. The next chapter went back to a far too meandering and personal narrative, when she was meant to be writing about Adelheid Bloch.Payments made using National Book Tokens are processed by National Book Tokens Ltd, and you can read their Terms and Conditions here. the juxtaposition of historical, anecdotal, and sociological perspectives significantly enriched limburg’s examination of the intersection of ableism and misogyny. I think it's a wonderful read for anyone interested in disability and gender, regardless of whether they're autistic. I have been waiting to read something like this for a very long while, and I know I will keep coming back to it many times now that I have finished it.