Letters To My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism

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I had a duty to bear witness… to remember, to make sure that your memories and names would never be erased as your living bodies and minds had been.” MAIN THEMES/SUBJECTS—Autism, epistolary memoir, disability awareness, disability history, adult diagnoses, solidarity with the experiences of historical figures, intersectional feminism, patriarchal oppression & weaponized misogyny, nazis & eugenics, state-sanctioned murder, institutionalization, ableism, bullying, pregnancy & parenthood as a disabled person, social isolation, disability rights movement Jeg synes det var hårdt at blive mindet om alle de små “double takes” og folk misbilligende blikke om træder ved siden af. 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.

Final note: I have Limburg’s poetry collection THE AUTISTIC ALICE on my TBR (& shelves) to read next! Astute, humane and breathtakingly true, Letters to my Weird Sisters captures the intricate truth of life on the outside. Joanne Limburg's project to find mirrors of herself across history casts so much light. I adored it."—Katherine May, author of Wintering Diagnosed with autism in midlife, Joanne Limburg finally felt she could make sense of what marked her as an outsider. In this book Limburg explores women that have been similarly marked ‘outsiders’ through history, and through writing personal letters from she to them, humanises their differences and compassionately explores what made them ‘weird’.Bettelheim, Bruno (1967) The Empty Fortress: Infantile Autism and the Birth of the Self. New York: Free Press. That being said, it is fully Joanne Limburgs prerogative to place focus on whomever she sees fit in a book of her own making. Simply a personal preference on my behalf. Overall, an interesting book that covered topics that I have not read about before. I would definitely recommend.

Then an old friend of Limburg’s from Cambridge shifted her understanding of those criteria. Her friend said she had Asperger Syndrome, an autism spectrum diagnosis then (less now) applied to people who might experience some challenges but who displayed high intelligence and unimpaired language skills. “She wasn’t the stereotype at all!” says Limburg, still sounding surprised. “She was very sociable, empathetic… a very good actor. Then I typed ‘Aspergers’ and ‘women’ into Google. I’d never put the two words together before. And there I was, very recognisably, at the intersection.” Limburg describes movingly her own struggles as a new mother and the pressure of society’s expectations…Through such delicately intertwined experiences, Limburg quietly shouts for change.’ Times Literary SupplementThat sentence you just read—it is not only part of a text, but also part of you, and part of the person who wrote it, all at the same time.” Haunting, probing and astonishingly intimate, Joanne Limburg's Letters to My Weird Sisters explores the myriad ways that creative, eccentric women have been exiled to the margins of society and defined as 'other,' even at the cost of their lives. A redemptive and unforgettable journey through the shadowlands of literature and history. - Steve Silberman, author , Neurotribes

We exchange opinions on the possibility that various authors, pop stars and visual artists might be autistic. My other autistic female friends (most of whom have humanities degrees) play this speculation game on a regular basis. It’s a guilty secret. They are all, constantly, scanning the radar for pings from other weird sisters. But Limburg and I agree not to include the names of the artists we discussed in this article. “I wish this were the sort of thing one could say out loud,” shrugs Limburg. “But it isn’t. Because there is a stigma and people are seen as their own family’s property.”In the introduction to Weird Sisters she writes: “I read about witches; I read about writers; I read about nuns, beguines and anchoresses; I read about women who had been shut up in institutions; I read about outcast girls and pathologised mothers. Sometimes I would read myself down a blind alley: anchoresses, for example, turned out to be not weird at all, but more akin to the sort of modern woman who has raised her family and decided to retrain as a counsellor.” Whether they were women who went against the grain, or women whose identities and behaviours clashed with wider society (Jews and people with mental illness during the time of the Nazis, women behaving 'erratically' during a time of witch purges), Limburg's letters to these women feel like both an apology for how they were treated, and an attempt to find commonality with them. As part of this, Limburg weaves in her own stories and experiences, and, in doing so, makes an often beautiful and heartbreaking plea for understanding and action. In Letters To My Weird Sisters: On Autism, Feminism and Motherhood, Joanne Limburg writes a series of letters to different women in history from Virginia Woolf to Katherina Kepler. In writing to these various weird women, Limburg is not saying that these women were necessarily autistic but looks at them through the lens of autism and how aspects such as their bluntness, non-conformity, and other aspects that relate to being "different" and autistic.

I would recommend this book to readers who are interested in reading more about Autism, disability rights & awareness, intersectional feminism, disability & motherhood, and neurodivergent histories. This book is best read empathetically. While surviving the decade after graduation working at an assortment of short-lived jobs (including a comically inappropriate stint as a careers officer), Limburg met her future husband – a computer scientist called Chris – in her late twenties. “Dating was horrible,” she tells me. “Autistic women don’t simper. We have no interest in making a man feel big. Chris has been my only proper ‘relationship’, as opposed to ‘encounter’.” many of the moments when my autism had caused problems, or at least marked me out as different, were those moments when I had come up against some unspoken law about how a girl or a woman should be, and failed to meet it.” Psychologists and psychiatrists sometimes like to argue that their language is value-neutral, but I don't believe that language which people use to describe other people could ever be.” 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. If you have any level of interest in this subject, you will find this book honest and enlightening and you will more than likely want to read more.While most women might occasionally fail to meet the stringent rules of femininity, the experience is much more common and painful for autistic women. In many ways, autism constitutes a failure to embody with docility the norms of femininity as, for instance, sensory sensitivity can make difficult to wear certain clothes, jewelry, or to use make-up. In social situations it can also be difficult to engage in small talk, smile and comply with the idea that women have to be warm and welcoming. Many of the women presented in this book cannot resort to the protection of benevolent sexism that the adherence to feminine norms could grant. In the foreword, Limburg underlines that she wanted to write about weirdness rather than rebellion, and that she was ‘less interested in women who chose to be difficult than [she] was in women who couldn’t help being weird’ (p.15). The author tells us about her own attempts to adhere to social norms by exercising a strict control on her way of appearing and speaking when in public. Such attempts are so extensive that she describes feeling a different person, for which she uses the acronym SGJ – Socially Gracious Joanne. It is difficult not to see in SGJ a reference to the camouflage (or masking) practices that many autistic people and especially women use to hide their autistic traits and pass for neurotypical. It is important, from a feminist perspective, to understand how and to what extent autistic masking is influenced by the strong gendered expectations imposed upon women, and what is the impact of these expectations on autistic women. 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. It's possible to save these lives—all we need to do is get everyone to agree that it's worth the effort.” I honestly don't know what I think of this one. I think that Joanne's story was one that I knew all to well; growing up undiagnosed autistic for years is traumatic and her experiences with OCD and feeling socially isolated were things that hit slightly too close to home. I really liked her idea of writing letters to 'weird women' who have graced the earth too - not all of these figures had definite signs of autism but they were all deemed heathens and ostracised from their communities for one reason or another. Joanne related the stories of each of these women to her own very well and it made me feel quite seen; there's other women out there just like me. I also liked the academic references she used in the book to studies and other research that people had done - it made the whole thing way more interesting to me. My personal favourites were the letter to Virginia Woolf, Adelheid Bloch, and Katharina Kepler - although every letter is exceptional.