"I guess I just like liking things"
This is a collection of seminal texts in autistic knowledge production in critical autism studies over the past 30-ish years, plus my own understanding of these things. If you are only familiar with dominant medical theories of autism, this is a starting place towards are more modern and person-focused understanding.
This article was originally published in 1993, and the author gave a talk to parents of autistic children. This is one of, if not the foundational text for our modern conception of autistic advocacy.
I might even add a favorite passage at some point
This work is a great bridge from where we were in 1993 with Sinclair's work into today.
The Re-Thinking Autism Network suggests that autism is purely a cultural construct lacking the qualities to be a ‘natural kind’ (Arnold 2016; DISABILITY & SOCIETY 977Milton 2016). This ignores how autism runs in families, the flourishing distinctive autistic culture and the importance of self-diagnosis to autistic persons’ sense of well-being. Autism is a diagnostic category (Milton 2016) distinguishing certain human behaviours, similar to how maps signpost specific geographical variations. Autism Studies is intrinsically interdisciplinary, as autism is contextualised, particu-larly in the dynamics of autistic persons, who often have other diagnostic labels, impairments and other myriad forms of human diversity. Hence, CAS has to be interdisciplinary focusing on intersectionality, such as how culture contributes to certain interpretations of autism (O’Dell et al. 2016).