Shark Infested Waters
Pressure
In plain words
The water around everything else. It is the idea that there is one right way to have a mind. It is in schools, jobs and doctors' rooms. You do not just swim in it. You drink it, and it becomes part of you.
The water the whole map sits in: neuronormativity, behaviourism, and the double empathy problem. Neuronormativity is the assumption that there is a correct way to exist in this world. Behaviorism reduces human beings to simple inputs and outputs. The double empathy problem names the mutual incomprehension between people of different dispositional outlooks — mutual, and not the Autistic person’s fault.
A summary written for this site, not a quotation. The double empathy problem in it is Damian Milton’s, in their own words.What changes this
Other water to drink. These are the conditions the rest of the map sits in, made and maintained by institutions, and they do not stay outside a person — the water gets absorbed. Astrida Neimanis’s hydrofeminism is the borrowed frame here (Bodies of Water, 2017): bodies are permeable, and there is no clean edge where the outside stops. So the change is not scrubbing the water out of somebody, which cannot be done. It is that nourishing water has to be within reach — Autistic community, spaces built for the bodies in them, people who do not read you as a deficit. Most of the rest of this map is that water. This is the area with a politics rather than a coping strategy.
Where it is on the map
Area 13 of twenty, printed on the map as Shark Infested Waters of Neuronormativity and Behaviourism & Double Empathy Problems. It borders:
Read more
- Stimpunks glossary
- Mapping Monotropism in Education — what this part of the map means at school, by Helen Edgar.
- Damian Milton on shark infested waters