Academicy Things

WOOHOO AN ABSTRACT
So I sent in an abstract for this virtual conference for students looking at ability studies. The deadline for doing so isn't until July 30, so you have time if you want to do one yourself. The call for abstracts is here.

This is my abstract:

Autistic people with queer identities often find their identities erased from many directions. Society as a whole tends to assume that autistic people are either asexual or are hypersexual, needing others to control their sexuality. Additional labels of intellectual disability can increase the likelihood of that issue. Queer communities often have ableism and accessibility issues. The broader disability communities have history of excluding cognitive disability, and this history of exclusion often affects Queer Disabled communities. Queer Autistic people, then, face erasure from parents, caregivers, society as a whole, disability communities, queer communities, and sometimes even queer disability communities. This paper will examine these forms of erasure using a combination of previous academic works and accounts written by LGBTQ+ Autistic people.

Basically, I'm going to be talking about how Queer Autistic people are ignored, how people neglect to mention that we (yes, I'm Queer,) exist, how we get excluded from stuff, and how some people actively use one identity to prevent us from realizing or expressing the other. I actually talked about that a little bit a while back, with the "You're not trans*, you're just autistic!" being a thing that people were worried about hearing when a study found that trans* people are more likely than the general population to be autistic. I've gone back and made some language changes a couple times in that piece as I learned more about trans* stuff.

Also, I'm going to be talking about intersectionality stuff at Society for Disability Studies. That abstract I submitted is totally relevant to why I'm talking there. The fact that I know Dr. Grace of Tiny Grace Notes is also relevant.

And I found a thing. It's a cool thing. It's Autonomy, the Critical Journal of Interdisciplinary Autism Studies. Since everything I've done with my paper about the erasure of Queer Autistic people so far has been talking about it at conferences, I might be able to submit it for publication there. That would be cool. I might go for Disability Studies Quarterly first, I'm not sure. I think DSQ is currently higher-profile, but I want this one to become high-profile. I'm not a big enough name to make anything high-profile, though. I'm not really a name at all, just some blogger on the internet who sometimes writes more academically and cites sources. Being an Autistic blogger, though, I suspect that I am right in the audience that Autonomy is looking to get authors from.
The main point is that Autonomy is a thing that you should check out, and it's a thing that should happen and be a thing. Interdisciplinary Autism Studies: Part of Interdisciplinary Neurodiversity Studies, which also needs to be a thing.