A Rest By Jasbir Puar Summary

My poem, “a rest,” explores autistic sensory sensations, the naming of autism, eugenics, and autistic communication. Performing allistic (non-autistic) communication styles is a constant process of interpreting, measuring, responding, and assessing whether a response was appropriate, so engaging in autistic sensations feels, in its literal and metaphorical meanings, like a rest. Before writing the poem, I read Jasbir Puar’s piece “Coda: The Cost of Getting Better Suicide, Sensation, Switchpoints.” Puar engages with disability studies and argues for rethinking debility in terms of diverse switchpoints, surveillance of the assemblage of a body, and briefly mentions language as a measured form of capacity. She writes that “the inability ‘to communicate’ functions as the single determinant of mental or cognitive impairment.” Following this, she argues this capacity for communication therefore “regulat[es] the human/animal distinction, thus destabilizing the centrality of the human capacity for thought and cognition.” Within my poem, I remark on feeling like a dragon, a mythical animal that opens new capacities for communication. Comparisons of humans and animals are fraught with racist historic and current day power, and simultaneously, human and animal boundaries are imposed and enforced to organize a hierarchy of being and animacy, as explored by Mel Chen. Autistic people are frequently described by their "affinity to animals," and the poem includes multiple

Autistic individuals who can articulate their experiences online are accused of faking their disability because of their ability to communicate, ignoring that the same individuals use this platform to describe their differences in communication, instances of non-verbal shut downs, and difficulty connecting with allistic