If we are going to embrace the turn away from a deficit-centered framing of autisticness, then we will have to come to terms with the backlash we will inevitably receive in failing to meet the standards of white supremacist, patriarchal, neurotypical ways of living and knowing, and embrace the position of being “unimaginable” by the mainstream public who follows neurotypical logics of being.
Theorist David Jackson-Perry writes about this and labels the autistic rejection of neurotypical standards as “autistic failure.” He writes that “rejecting ‘autistic deficit’ as a point of discussion, I paraphrase Halberstam to embrace ‘autistic failure’, on the basis that ‘under certain circumstances failing, losing, forgetting, unmaking, undoing, unbecoming, not knowing may in fact offer more creative, more cooperative, more surprising ways of being in the world’… Failure—when success is measured by neuro-, hetero-normative, and cisgenderist standards—might indeed be the only reasonable way to go.”1
Put another way, autistic failure is the embracing of our right as autistic people to reject what isn’t good for us and to forge our own pathways to self-care and the meeting of our needs through creative methods that go beyond the options set out for us by neurotypical ways of being.
In doing this we are likely to become “unimaginable” in the eyes of the dominating paradigm which has both positive and negative aspects. The positive aspects of failure and unimaginability that Jackson-Perry points out are:
- Providing a way for exploring autistic ways of being without requiring that autistic people defend their experiences as valid or purposeful to first do so,
- Creates a recentering of autists who fail,
- And creates an understanding that failure and unimaginability act as a mirror that reflects the issues of the dominant framing structures rather than reinforcing them, and acknowledging the authenticity of experience.2
One example of autistic failure is written about by Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, an autistic, multiply-disabled, queer theorist who reflects on autistic failure in relation to love, dating, and pleasure their essay “Republics of desire.”
They write that: “pining is looked down on. Something we run from as disabled queers. We want to prove stereotypes wrong: that we are fuckable and desirable and loveable, and we can get what the abled and normal do–sex, dates, partnership…But in a world where disabled people are some of the most vulnerable to both rape and rejection, perhaps sometimes we use pining and fantasy, relationships that stay in longing and away from ever being actualized, as a way to create freedom space of dream that is safe…making up some hot shit that doesn’t hurt our wild brains.”3
From the neurotypical perspective, pining would not be seen as a valid or recognizable source of sexual or emotional pleasure, but for Piepzna-Samarasinha who is vulnerable because of their disabilities and particular sensory needs, pining is the practice that liberates them from neurotypical expectations around what love and pleasure look like, and provide them the pleasure they need in a way that also meets their sensory and safety needs.
By empowering themself to decide that the practice of pining is right for them, they create a space where autistic joy can happen, and it does: Piepzna-Samarasinha writes in relation to this about having some of their most pleasurable days finding sexual pleasure alone in their house during the pandemic.4
From the perspective of the mainstream, pining, is unrecognizable as a valid form of pleasure because of the ways it challenges our category of pleasure. This is what it means to be unrecognizable: you are not unreconizable to yourself, but to others, especially those who work under oppressive power systems that rely on the presupposition of value onto experiences and things, because you are or practice something that does not have presupposed value.
When you are unrecognizable you are in the space within”“this uneasy interstice where value [understood from the neurotypical perspective] hasn’t yet shaped the event.”5
This is a powerful space to be as the unimaginable and practices of autistic failure disrupt and complicate neurotypical systems of logic that pathologize and suppress autistic ways of living, being, and knowing. In doing this too, we are able to free ourselves from the categorization imposed on us by oppressive systems which they then use to control and harm us.
Jackson-Perry reminds us that: “Failure, [and in being unimaginable] here, is the mark of survival. It is failure that makes self-recognition possible, albeit at a price.”6
The price here is the that of not being recognizable and therefore we may developed a sense of estranged social belonging, as we are still part of a community but our community members, if they live within the dominant framings, will not be able to recognize us.
But giving up the permission we give ourselves to fail and the failures themselves would compromise our own personal values and needs, which has the potential to cause us more physical and emotional harm, as Audre Lorde writes: “As we begin to recognize our deepest feelings, we begin to give up, of necessity, being satisfied with suffering and self-negation, and with numbness which so often seems like the only alternative in our society.”7
Lorde reminds us that we do not have to suffer through things that are hard to change, and that we have the power to resist them: “Our acts against oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within. In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial.”8
When we start listening to ourselves and rejecting what causes us harm, we get in touch with what Lorde calls the erotic, or as she writes: “When i speak of the erotic then, i speak of it as an assertion of the lifeforce of women; of that creative energy empowered.”9
To participate in autistic failure, or to become unimaginable is to engage with the erotic because these things are all a recentering of the self and the autistic body as the primary sources of knowledge. Then, if we are to know, we must be able to feel which is where sensory self-care comes in as a practice to keep us from becoming numb or burnt out from too much feeling.
Autistic Failure and practices of unimaginability and the erotic are all practices that help us to resist limiting neurotypical expectations and logics and promote our own well-being and confidence in our ways of being.
- Jackson-Perry, David. 2020. “The Autistic Art of Failure? Unknowing Imperfect Systems of Sexuality and Gender.” Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research 22 (1): 224. https://doi.org/10.16993/sjdr.634. ↩︎
- Jackson-Perry, “The Autistic Art…” ↩︎
- Piepzna-Samarasinha, Leah Lakshmi . 2024. “Republics of Desire.” In Disability Intimacy, 152-3. New York, N.Y.: Vintage..) ↩︎
- Piepzna-Samarasinha, “Republics of Desire”, 144-159 ↩︎
- Manning, Erin. 2024. In Conversation With Erin Manning: A Refusal of Neurotypicality Through Attunements to Learning Otherwise Interview by Vivienne Grace Bozalek. Qualitative Inquiry. https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/10.1177/10778004241254397. ↩︎
- Jackson-Perry, “The Autistic Art…” ↩︎
- Lorde, Audre. 2019. “Uses of the Erotic.” In Pleasure Activism : The Politics of Feeling Good, 27–35. Chico, CA: AK Press. ↩︎
- Lorde, “Uses of the…”, 33. ↩︎
- Lorde, “Uses of the…”, 30. ↩︎
The Art of Autistic Joy 