Letters To My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism

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I love the way this books looks at autism and feminism through a myriad of ways; literary and media analysis, history, current society, politics, different cultural backgrounds, psychological, physiological and anecdotal and considers both the personal and societal impact these things have on the lives of autistic people.

The book wouldn't have been something I'd pick up if I'd have known that it would have a text bookish feel to it, but I'm glad I did kind of pick it up. Når disse fortælling og refleksioner kobles sammen med feminisme og handicapaktivsme, så sker der magi.Whilst I enjoyed the content, I did feel it jarred every time Limburg brought the letter back to the subject of the recipient, and the formatting just didn’t flow as nicely together as Limburg perhaps intended. The next chapter went back to a far too meandering and personal narrative, when she was meant to be writing about Adelheid Bloch.

through letters to women considered 'weird' (limburg arguing who may in fact have autistic traits making them considered 'weird') she explores her own autistic experience and experience of womanhood, and the intersection of ableism and sexism, and therefore disability rights and feminism, throughout history. I’ve always felt…well, a bit weird, and this book has also granted me some insight of more personal relevance that I will need to dwell on.Once you have been pushed outside the first person plural, anything might be done to you, anything might happen. Jeg synes det var hårdt at blive mindet om alle de små “double takes” og folk misbilligende blikke om træder ved siden af.

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. I liked how I was able to learn more about women I know of, such as Virginia Woolf and women who I haven’t and how society treated them.While I am sure it could have been done otherwise, I feel it helped to make clear that Limburg is not attempting to diagnose Woolf. 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 love the premise of this book, I love the letters from Limburg that make these historical women current and therefore bringing their differences and ‘weird’-ness into the modern day where perhaps they would have been better understood. I've only known I'm autistic for about a year, and I'm really starting to dig into some deeper ideas about how people relate to autism and how we fit into this world that doesn't make space for us. Corvus Atlantic’s commercial fiction list which includes women’s, historical, romance, sci-fi, crime and thriller.

Limberg’s letter to Katharina Kepler, a 16th century woman accused of witchcraft was also, at times, a difficult read. For all that time, womanhood from the inside, as a way of experiencing and navigating and making sense of the world, was expressed, for the most part, only in unpublished words, in letters and private journals. I could honestly gush about this book for ages, so I'll stop myself now and just finish by saying that I would recommend this to anybody.

Forfatteren er selv autistisk og frem for at prøve at diagnostisere disse kvinder så fortæller hun om deres liv og oplevelser og hvordan hun tolker det gennem en autistisk linse. My one complaint about this phenomenal book is that while it deals exclusively with the intersection of gender and neurodivergence, Limburg at no point acknowledges that many non-binary people, especially those who were assigned female, as well as trans men, will be able to identify strongly with the experiences being ascribed to women here, despite not being women themselves. Any girl or woman who suspects herself to be anything other than perfectly pretty, nice and odourless inside and out risks not being a girl or a woman at all. We are, all of us, striving constantly to pass those normality exams, to take our raw and boundless selves and squash them into the forms of neater and nicer girls.