Neurodiversity

Book excerpt: Judy Singer is usually credited with coinage of the word that became the banner for the last great social movement to emerge from the 20th century. The word was just one of several ideas in this work, her 1998 Honors thesis, a pioneering sociological work that mapped out the emergence of a new category of disability that, until then, had no name. And in the process, prefigured a new paradigm within the disability rights movement of the time. The work attempted a wider view of this new terrain from within a post-modern, social constructionist, feminist, disability rights perspective. Its chapters included a brief history of autism, self-exploration of Singer’s life in the middle of three generations of women “somewhere on the autistic spectrum” and her research as a participant-observer on InLv, an internet community of people on the spectrum. At the same time it offered a critique of what Singer perceived to be a certain tendency towards social-constructionist fundamentalism within the disability movement, which, she argued, limited the potential of the new paradigm. This volume reproduces the original thesis with the addition of a new introduction, giving some background to the creation of the work and offering thoughts on the current neurodiversity movement.