Hello! This is yet again another assignment that I did for an English class. It’s one of my proudest works and I hope you enjoy it! Abstract The main topic of this paper is misogynoir, and how it effects Black women and feminine presenting people. We’ll be looking at a series of personal experiences, studies, and definitions to explore this topic. There will be sections that focus on misogynoir in school, workplaces, protesting, and childbirth. I felt that these were some of the most important and/or interesting presentations of misogynoir. There will also be some ways you can help combat misogynoir and be of support to the Black feminine community. Keywords : misogynoir, racism, intersectionality, misogyny, feminism, Black women, obstetric racism, feminine presenting What is Misogynoir? First and foremost; what is misogynoir? I would define misogynoir ...
Hello! This is an original work that I wrote for an English class (I think) about 2 years ago. This references a lot of my own personal experiences with autism and includes research I've done on teens and young adults with autism. It’s certainly not my best research, but I still hope you enjoy it!
Stuck in the Tesseract: Teenagers and Young Adults with Autism
Being a teenager with autism is the weirdest thing I’ve ever had to deal with. I got diagnosed pretty late. Most people get diagnosed in early childhood while I was diagnosed in late 9th grade, I’m in 11th grade now. To make this easier to understand, I’ll give you my own personal definition and experience with autism. If you’d like a more professional definition, most of the papers I’ll be citing have a good description. For me, autism is having an extreme disconnect or misunderstanding with everyone around you. Sometimes it’s even like that with other autistic people. Missing social cues, making facial expressions that mean nothing to you but offend everyone else, not knowing how to socialize, having different ways of doing almost everything, I could write an entire separate paper on this. Maybe even a book. Having autism as a teenager and fearing what it may do to you and your life as a young adult, is practically impossible to deal with. I’d like for you to join me on this journey of figuring out how to live in an ableist- discriminating people because if their abilities- world with autism. We’ll be looking at some of the most important situations you can experience as a teenager, how it’s different with autism, how you can cope with it, and how others can support you. “But Jasmin it’s a persuasive research paper not a mom blog?!?!” Most every argument that have to do with autism are very ableist. There’s only one that I’m willing to entertain, and that’s the argument that others shouldn’t adapt to help people with autism.
Let’s talk about one of the most important things to practically the entire human race, socializing. If you have autism and you’re reading this: There’s no reason for you to change or make yourself uncomfortable just to make friends. If you feel like you need to do that with certain people, you shouldn’t be around them, that goes for everyone. To lighten the mood and to explain why I made this one of the main topics in the essay, I’ll tell you a short story. I was in 3rd grade; my best friend of 2 years had moved schools, and I was terribly lonely. I heard 2 girls talking about the times they had thrown up and what colors their puke was, I went up and told them what mine looked like. They looked at me weirdly and walked away. I think you could say I’m bad at socializing. The reason I said that to them is because I thought that was how you make friends, apparently it isn’t. Hopefully I can learn something from this section, as I can only communicate through texts.
There are certain things that autistic people may do that can make it difficult to socialize, like stimming- an act of showing emotion through physical acts- or not making eye contact. Personally, I feel like the best solution to socializing with autism is to just be yourself and stay away from anyone who doesn’t like it. But unfortunately, there’s situations where you must fake it ‘til you make it. In those situations, the adaptive skills in the book “Social Skills for Teenagers and Adults Asperger Syndrome: A Practical Guide to Day-To-Day Life” by Nancy J. Patrick would be very helpful (151). In that section, Nancy J. Patrick talks about certain strategies that people can use to help make socializing a bit easier, like scripts, eye gaze, and role-playing, among others. Scripts and role-playing seem obvious, weird but obvious. So what’s eye gaze? Eye gaze is a technique that I’ve been using my entire life to make it seem like I’m looking people in the eye. Apparently not looking at someone’s face is disrespectful in most countries, so if you feel uncomfortable doing that you can look around their eyes. I usually chose the forehead. I use this mostly when I’m in class or in some sort of important meeting where I want to seem like I’m paying attention, because according to neurotypicals you need to look at someone and nod to be considered attentive.
Another thing that can really affect autistic people is school. Not having a diagnosis for an IEP, autism meltdowns can lead to bullying, and just not understanding how things work in class. The most difficult part is preparing for college. You could decide to not go, but there’s no reason why a disability should stop you from going. The most important thing you could do is to advocate for yourself. Psychologist Dr. Sarita Freedman recommends learning how to disclose your disability to school administration and get an IEP or 504 (73-74). Colleges don’t have IEP (individualized education plan) or 504, so you’d need to learn what disability services your college of choice offers and learn to adapt with what they don’t have. So maybe they don’t offer extended test time like you had in high school, you’d need to learn how to take tests faster. That may involve developing more study skills and learning how to cope with test anxiety. You should also observe how you learn the best and find a way to gain motivation to do work you don’t want to do. The thing with IEP, 504, and other school accommodations is that it’s the school that must adapt. Some people don’t believe that autistic people deserve accommodations.
A lot of autistic people go undiagnosed, and it leads to this feeling that something is wrong with them. When you feel like something is wrong with you and you don’t know what it is, you tend to imitate the people around you to feel normal. This is called masking, or camouflaging. Unfortunately, a lot of adaptive techniques for autistic people like forcing eye contact or using scripts can be qualified as masking or camouflaging (Leaf). A lot of people believe that autistic people should mask, or that they shouldn’t get accommodations. How many neurotypicals use planners? Nancy J. Patrick recommends electronic planners for autistic people that need help remembering things, same thing with graph paper to keep numbers aligned when doing math problems (152). Many things that people use to make life easier can be life-changing for people with disabilities. A student needing headphones during work time in class won’t affect the other students or the teaching process. The worst that could happen is the teacher starts teaching again and the student can’t hear, in which case the teacher could just come over to the student and tap them on the shoulder. If a student has a meltdown at work or in class, there’s no reason to keep them in the situation where they would continue to be triggered. What’s the issue with having a calm, safe place that anyone can go to when they need to? Everybody uses accommodations in everyday life, why is it an issue when someone with a disability needs one?
Being a teenager with autism is the weirdest thing I’ve ever had to deal with. Navigating the world with a disability that some people don’t even think is real can feel impossible. As the world changes and becomes more accepting and accessible to all, hopefully being a teenager with autism gets easier. Hopefully we can go to college without worrying, learn to drive without being scared, and make friends without changing who we are.
Works Cited
Falk, Dean. "Non-Complicit: Revisiting Hans Asperger’s Career in Nazi-Era Vienna." Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, vol. 50, no. 7, 2020, pp. 2573-2584. ProQuest, http://168.156.198.98:2048/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/non-complicit-revisiting-hans-asperger-s-career/docview/2193420210/se-2, doi:https://doi.org/10.1007/s10803-019-03981-7.
Freedman, Sarita. “Developing College Skills in Students with Autism and Asperger’s Syndrome”. Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2010.
Leaf, Justin B., et al. "On the Status and Knowledge of Camouflaging, Masking, and Compensatory Behaviors in Autism Spectrum Disorder." Education and Training in Autism and Developmental Disabilities, vol. 58, no. 3, 2023, pp. 283-298. ProQuest,http://168.156.198.98:2048/login?url=https://www.proquest.com/scholarly-journals/on-status-knowledge-camouflaging-masking/docview/2858414566/se-2.
Patrick, Nancy J. . Social Skills for Teenagers and Adults with Asperger Syndrome a Practical Guide to Day-to-Day Life. Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2008.
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