Chapter 48

Embodied Semiosis: Autistic ‘Stimming’

as Sensory Praxis

Jason Nolan and Melanie McBride

48.1 Introduction

For individuals diagnosed with autistic spectrum disorders (ASD), the senses and
sensory perception and integration are both the authority and the warrant by which
disablement and psychiatric intervention are rationalized as the purview of medical
and institutional power/knowledge (Foucault 1980, 2009). This is, by and large, a
semiotic process that discursively constructs the autistic in a deficit-driven language
of disease rather than difference. Within the medicalized semiotic domain of autism
as disease, autistic sensory experience is a sensory integration ‘disorder’ (American
Psychiatric Association 2013) that also, simultaneously, reinforces and produces a
normative sensory ideal. As Connolly (2008) notes, this semiosis of medicalized
discursive practices reduces the disabled person to an essentialized biological body.
Recognizing the discursive and semiotic nature of disablement, autistic self-advo-
cates (also self-identified as ‘neurodiverse’) coined the term ‘neurotypical’ to define
non-autistic subjectivity, sensory orientations and social norms on their own terms
(Broderick and Ne’eman 2008). As with deaf culture, the neurodiversity movement
defines itself as a distinct social and cultural identity (Molloy and Vasil 2002) rather
than impairment.
From a Marxist standpoint, the production of an essentialist (and disabled)
body is a form of ‘reification’ that serves to abstract and ‘mystify’ (Lukács 1971,
p. 840) sensory experience and perception according to externally defined, nor-
mative ‘imaginary’ (or, ideal). Against this normative imaginary/ideal, the ‘lived
body’ (Kasnitz and Shuttleworth 2001) of persons with disabilities such as autism
becomes a semiotic site of struggle between the deficit-driven and pathologizing

J. Nolan ( )
Ryerson University, Toronto, ON, Canada
e-mail: jnolan@ryerson.ca
M. McBride
York University, Toronto, ON, Canada
e-mail: mcbride.melanie@gmail.com
© Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015 1069
P. P. Trifonas (ed.), International Handbook of Semiotics,
DOI 10.1007/978-94-017-9404-6_48
1070 J. Nolan and M. McBride

rhetorics of disease-driven medical models and the counter-narratives of the neuro-

diverse (Broderick and Ne’eman 2008). As Fredric Jameson (1981) suggests, ‘the
very activity of sense perception has nowhere to go in a world in which science
deals with ideal quantities’ (Jameson, p. 229) shaped by a historicity of competing
institutional and commercial interests.
Beginning with the developmental reification of sensory experience according to
behaviourist ‘ages and stages’, this chapter traces a historicity of semiotic disable-
ment. Through the embodied sensory phenomenology (Connolly 2008) of neurodi-
versity, we reconstruct autism as an embodied semiosis that locates the body as ‘the
nexus of lived experience and culture, as a portal, a site, an experience’ (Connolly
2008, p. 242) from which to listen to and engage the unique multimodal and meta-
communicative utterances of neurodiversity. Finally, we argue that the physical
and sensory behaviour of autistic self-stimulation (i.e. ‘stimming’) is an expression
of embodied autistic semiosis that communicates sensory significations otherwise
pathologized within neurotypical semiotic domains.

48.2 Imagining Autism

AAutism is characterized as a sensory disorder with, according to the medical

model of the American Psychiatric Association’s Diagnostic and Statistical Man-
ual of Mental Disorders: DSM-5, mild to severe deficits in social-emotional reci-
procity, nonverbal communication, difficulty maintaining social relationships and
stereotyped/repetitive speech, movements, ritualized patterns and hyper- or hypo-
sensitivity to sensory experiences (American Psychiatric Association 2013). Social
and physical manifestations of autism, such as repetitive hand flapping, rocking or
clapping, referred to as self-stimulation (or ‘stimming’), are ‘treated’ with applied
behavioural analysis (ABA) and conditioning (Attwood 1995; Cooper et al. 2007;
Dillenburger and Keenan 2009). ‘Stimming’, in particular, is among the most rec-
ognizable manifestations of autism because it is observably different from the be-
havioural norms of neurotypicals and, we argue, constitutes an utterance that poses
a challenge to those norms.
Institutional spaces such as classrooms have played a significant role in reinforc-
ing and authorizing medicalized assessments and interventions for ASD individu-
als. Educational practitioners (from early childhood to K-12) are still largely trained
according to behaviourist psychology models. Within this context, assessments of
student learning, attention and engagement are left to the professional judgement of
teachers who approach neurodiversity and disability from a behaviourist standpoint.
Even so-called progressive classroom management is characterized by an ableist
discourse of engagement, attention and participation that is socially and cognitively
overwhelming for the autistic. Words like ‘disengaged’, ‘distracted’ and ‘disrup-
tive’ are used to describe individuals whose bodies or sensory responses disrupt
the outdated and alienating performativity of engagement defined by behaviourist
norms and values. For many autistics and their parents, the amount of behavioural
48 Embodied Semiosis: Autistic ‘Stimming’ as Sensory Praxis 1071

modification required to function ‘successfully’ in a classroom can preclude any

possibility of learning anything beyond the implicit and disabling lesson that their
ways of being and knowing are inferior to those of neurotypicals.
While many autistic self-advocates agree that autistics benefit from accommo-
dation in the context of a neurotypical society (Molloy and Vasil 2002), they reject
pathologizing interventions that attempt to ‘cure’ or ‘normalize’ autistics according
to a neurotypical sensory and social imaginary. A review of research into autism
therapies by Warren et al. (2011) for the US Department of Health and Human
Services questions the validity and efficacy of ABA in real-world conditions and
concludes that the vast majority of research into autism therapies, less than 10 %
of the 159 studies considered, were of good quality. Most of the research focuses
on supporting prosocial behaviours and reducing repetitive activities such as stim-
ming. However, autistic self-advocates within the neurodiversity movement reposi-
tion autism as a social and, even, cultural ‘difference’ rather than a disability. As
Connolly and Craig (2002) argue, building on Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of
embodiment, autism may be better understood as a ‘stressed embodiment’ in which
the autistic subject ‘transgress(es) the logics and inscriptions of a culture based in
ableism’ (p. 456). Given the specifically sensory dimensions of autism, many autis-
tic self-advocates argue that autism is a uniquely embodied and sensory language
(Baggs 2007; ‘Kulamalynne’ 2012; Yergeau 2010; Broderick and Ne’eman 2008)
that defies neurotypical logic and comprehension.

48.3 Sensory Periodization

Early childhood is a significant location in the historicity of normative sensory

imaginaries. For a relatively brief period, children are permitted voluntary sensory
exploration that is otherwise off limits to older children and adults. Piaget’s genetic
epistemology, which defines 0–2 as the sensory motor stage where we acquire phys-
ical knowledge through sensory experience as a primary way of learning, describes
the assumption that there are stages that we move through as we develop (Sternberg
2005; Piaget 1962). The sensory motor stage is socially and culturally valued as an
important stage of human development when children autonomously gather multi-
modal sensory and tactile knowledge of the world around them (Kamii 1991).
These ‘ages and stages’ of developmental periodization have come to define
how and when children ought to move on, with specific purpose through hierarchi-
cal developmental ‘milestones’ (National Association for the Education of Young
Children 2009). Within this hierarchy of sensory learning, children are expected to
‘grow out of’ more carnal, sensory and embodied ways of knowing to embrace, in-
stead, the more rational and ‘adult’ world of signs and symbols constituted not from
their own sensory experience or self-selected objects of inquiry but from received,
valued and codified social and cultural knowledge. Such developmental rationalism
implicitly rewards and values the individual who charts this path faster or better as
more ‘mature’, ‘gifted’ or ‘advanced’ in a ‘rational’ and socially acceptable regula-
tion and control of the body and its sensory needs.
1072 J. Nolan and M. McBride

As an individual moves from physical experience to social knowledge, interac-

tion with others is encouraged as the primary way of knowing (Callaghan 2005;
Suizzo 2000). At the level of experience, we can perceive the taste of an orange,
but we cannot know the semiotic descriptors of sweet, tangy or even orange, unless
someone shares these terms and links them to that which is signified. What we sense
and how we interpret and communicate that sensory information is fundamentally
guided and influenced by the social and cultural context in which we experience
it to the point that we unconsciously assume verisimilitude. But in the case of the
autistic whose utterances, such as stimming, emerge from within, the ‘develop-
ment’ of shared and social knowledge serves to silence rather than enhance their
own language and phenomenology, which is substituted with disembodied and non-
intuitive notions of feeling, sensing, communicating and relating that are character-
istic of the socially and culturally derived sensory integration of the neurotypical.
According to Rogers and Swadener (2001), ‘current theories of cognitive develop-
ment do not address the cognitive complexity of living a relational life nor do these
theories recognize the everyday nature and requirements of symbolic exchanges
in human discourse’ (p. 5). This is particularly true for the autistic, whose sensory
development is characterized as being stuck or delayed (Broderick and Ne’eeman
2008) at the sensory motor stage. Those who do not ‘move on’—or decide to con-
tinue engaging in sensory explorations that are not deemed socially acceptable (i.e.
stimming)—are psychopathologized and marginalized; those who, according to this
narrative, have moved on (Mestrovic and Cook 1988).
It is easy to see how social knowledge is a consensus building apparatus that
allows us to situate our sensory experiences with physical knowledge within larger
social and linguistic contexts as we develop cognitively (Callaghan 2005). Social
knowledge; the social contexts in which sensory experiences are made available to
us, and semiotic systems that serve as a heuristic model for interpreting these expe-
riences, serve to not only enculturate us into the normative procedures of the society
in which we will live, but also serve as a heuristic filter that over time causes us
to become desensitized to certain forms of stimuli. And language is the medium of
this enculturation. Language acquisition theories largely assume that when we are
born, we are capable of learning any language, yet as we learn language, most of us
gradually lose the ability to learn other languages, or even respond to other sounds
as language (MacWhinney 2005). As individuals are inculcated into their social and
cultural contexts, more of their sensory experience is culturally determined rather
than experienced directly. These symbolic expressions of experience can also come
to over-represent, over-determine (Rogers and Swadener 2001) and abstract more
empirical and embodied forms of listening and communicating, particularly those
of dis/abled or neurodiverse bodies, into symbolic, rather than grounded, qualities.
As we grow up, knowledge about the world is less and less located in any em-
pirical physical, sensory or cognitive experience. What we learn about sensory in-
formation as we grow shifts from direct physical contact with sensory information
that is interpreted by successive waves of external influence from family, social
group, learning institutions and dominant cultural or corporate influences. These
48 Embodied Semiosis: Autistic ‘Stimming’ as Sensory Praxis 1073

influences compete with direct sensory experience for control over what sensory
information is engaged with, how it is interpreted and how it is valued. Ultimately,
what has not been pathologized or reified is alienated and lost, filtered out to the
point that it effectively disappears. In the case of the autistic, this theft of embodied
sensory experience represents a denial of their very being.
Ihde and Selinger (2004) point out, in their exploration of Merleau-Ponty’s ‘phe-
nomenological commitments’, that in many cases of emergent understanding of
phenomena, there can be ‘a radical inversion between the traditional priority of
theory over practice…that practical coping tends to precede theoretical reflection’
(p. 363). When trying to understand normalizing or neurotypical conceptualizations
of the body and senses, it is important to regard the philosophy of the body and the
senses as not only re-enforcing monadic, euro-centric, bourgeois notions, but also
further reducing them to external models as tools for knowledge production about
the external world. Brey (2000) attempts to clarify Merleau-Ponty’s theory of ‘em-
bodiment relations’ as being based on the assumption that the body experiences the
external environment differently than the interior experience of that environment,
and that one’s body is not ‘normally’ perceived spatially. Brey highlights a fruitful
disjuncture between lived and embodied experience of the senses that disrupts cul-
tural and social semiotic inscription. When applied to the autistic semiosis, sensory
information that conventionally exceeds or radically diverges from neurotypical
expectations can be seen along a continuum of differences that impact each of us
differently:
However, in everyday actions, one does not normally experience the body as a physical,
spatial structure in the external world. Instead, one experiences the body as a not expressly
spatial means by which the spatial world is engaged. Moreover, although one may be aware
of the relations between different parts of one’s body, these relations are not normally
understood as spatial relations. (Brey 2000, p. 5).

Beyond the mystifications and regulations of a normative sensory imaginary, the

body is always full of possibility as an instrument with which to engage and interact
with the world rather than being seen as an object in space, of situation rather than
position (Brey 2000). If one’s body is known, immediately and without question,
through the ‘body image’, as Merleau-Ponty (2012) suggests, as a coherent and
unified ‘taken-for-granted’ assumption, there is an obvious invitation to critically
confront the assumption, especially when the assumption is based on commonplace
examples and neurotypical enactment of the senses otherwise frozen and periodized
in time. That these perceptual functions privilege the visual, aural and tactile is to be
expected, based on the purposive and utilitarian framing of the senses.
Despite a reliance on the most common and shared sensory experiences that are
as culturally situated as any of Freud’s theorizing, sense and sensory interaction is
not a universal constant across all conditions or immutable across contexts. Neuro-
science research has already shown that individuals experience sensory information
differently. Sensitivity to stimulus changes from person to person and also in the
same individual based on a variety of possible factors. However, Merleau-Ponty’s
advocacy for an awareness of the primary place of perception in coming to know
1074 J. Nolan and M. McBride

and engaging with the world is essential in conceptualizing a more neurodiverse

semiosis of embodiment. In response, Rogers and Swadener (2001) suggest that
applied semiotics offers a means to create more inclusive stories of human develop-
ment formalized into theory.

48.4 Stimming Semiosis: In Our Own Language

For the autistic, stimming can be a coping mechanism that is most often met with
attempts to modify or eliminate it through operant conditioning in the form of ABA
(Dillenburger and Keenan 2009). There is, in fact, a growing body of ethnographic,
cultural and anecdotal narratives from autistic self-advocates that suggests that the
embodied semiosis of stimming is as much a sensory exploration as it is a balancing
homeostatic response to externalities (Nijhof et al. 1998). Autistic self-advocate and
professor of English and rhetoric Melanie Yergeau’s (2012) video ‘I Stim, There-
fore I am’ offers a powerful redefinition of stimming as an embodied rhetorical,
aesthetic and phenomenological response. In the video, Yergeau combines still and
moving images of herself as child and adult engaged in stimming. In one take, she
is shown rocking back and forth in the floor of an office with a voice-over narration
in which she describes her body as ‘stiff and stimmy’, her movement as ‘elegance’
and her ‘rocking’ body as a valued difference rather than deficit:
Oddness and rigidity are grace […] stiff and stimmy is grace […] these are all autistic/these
are all rhetoric/these are all fluid/Moving/Grace. I am fascinated by my five year old body/
it is loud and it doesn’t give a fuck. (Yergeau 2012)

Reframed on Yergeau’s own terms, stimming is illuminated as a political, aesthet-

ic and metacommunicative act of embodied semiosis. When we look beyond the
medical model of disability, autism’s semiosis is at home within more inclusive and
counter-hegemonic models of cultural and social diversity. For an autistic, almost
anything can provide a ‘stim’. It can be elusive and imperceptible to non-autistics,
especially in case of autistic individuals diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. Yer-
geau’s rhetorics of stimming are not unlike those of autism self-advocate Aman-
da Baggs, whose YouTube video ‘In My Language’ (2007) introduces viewers to
Baggs’ visual, sensory and auditory ways of seeing, sensing and speaking through
sounds and movement. In the video, Baggs rocks, hand-flaps, twirls and stims on
varied objects such as beads while singing in sounds and tones rather than words.
Baggs’ utterances constitute not only an expression of her identity and lived ex-
perience as an autistic but also an expression of communication she suggests is
unknown and misunderstood by non-autistics:
Failure to learn your language is seen as a deficit. But failure to learn my language is seen
as so natural that people like me are officially described as mysterious and puzzling rather
than anybody admitting that it is themselves who are confused. Not autistic people, or other
cognitively disabled people. (Baggs 2007)
48 Embodied Semiosis: Autistic ‘Stimming’ as Sensory Praxis 1075

Yergeau’s and Baggs’ videos illuminate the largely nonverbal complex semiosis
that constitute sensory utterances of autism in which ‘the body and its sensory ap-
paratus function as both index and sign systems that hold these together’ (Connolly
2008, p. 242). In the context of traditional (i.e. neurotypical) semiotics, these texts
offer an important expression of visual and auditory utterance beyond the tradition-
al oral and written scholarship that favours, as Yergeau (2010) argues, neurotypical
discourse and embodiment.
Reframe stimming within the semiotic domain of play, the stim becomes an ex-
pression of focused engagement with an intrinsically attractive or motivating sen-
sory event or as ‘unstructured’ and open-ended exploration. Replace the word ‘play’
with ‘stim’ in Huizinga’s forward to his seminal work Homo Ludens (1955) and
otherwise unknown correspondences between neurotypical and neurodiverse epis-
temologies emerge:
For many years the conviction has grown upon me that civilization arises and unfolds in
and as stim…because it was not my object to define the place of stim among all the other
manifestations of culture, but rather to ascertain how far culture itself bares the character of
stim…to integrate the concept of stim into that of culture. Consequently, stim is to be under-
stood here not as a biological phenomenon but as a cultural phenomenon. It is approached
historically, not scientifically. (Huizinga 1955; interpolations italicized)

If ‘stimming’ was an acceptable and valued aspect of social and cultural behaviour,
how might it be incorporated into design or social practices? Might the expressive
and embodied behaviour of stimming benefit non-autistics, who are also similarly
conditioned to resist such physical utterance? This semiotic praxis also involves dis-
rupting narratives of autism as deficit or disease and regarding it, instead, as an op-
portunity to realize more inclusive visions of sociality imagined by the neurodiverse.
If we are to liberate sensory experience from a historicity of normative sensory
imaginaries, we must first reposition it outside the ‘grand narrative’ of developmen-
tal psychology. To achieve this, autistic self-advocates argue that ‘counter-narratives
are required to dominance discourse’s positioning of autism within solely medi-
cal and disease-oriented language and practices’ (Broderick and Ne’eman 2008,
p. 469). As a semiotic phenomenology of embodied metacommunication, the move-
ment from disablement to empowerment may also require what Foucault referred
to as ‘a wise madness’ on the part of the neurotypical who embraces neurodiversity:
If madness comes to sanction the efforts of reason, it is because madness was already part
of those efforts: the liveliness of images, the violence of passion, the great retreating of the
spirit into itself are all part of madness, but are also the most powerful, and therefore the
most dangerous, tools that reason can use. (Foucault 2009, p. 34)

From a semiotic standpoint, if the ‘language’ of autism were already ‘part of these
efforts’, it might serve as a ‘revolutionary rather than evolutionary gaze’ (Fleer
2006, p. 132) through which we could regard these other ways of thinking, sensing
and communicating beyond the sensory imaginary of the neurotypical. This depar-
ture is as much a project of philosophy as it is one of advocacy, for it requires an
inversion of received thought about what we believe is rational or irrational. In his
controversial writings on schizophrenia, The Politics of Experience and the Bird of
Paradise, New Left psychiatrist R. D. Laing (1967) suggested that normative ways
1076 J. Nolan and M. McBride

of regarding madness and interpreting another’s behaviour are more phenomeno-

logical than pathological in nature:
I see you, and you see me. I experience you, and you experience me. I see your behaviour.
You see my behaviour. But I do not and never have and never will see your experience of
me. Just as you cannot ‘see’ my experience of you. My experience of you is not ‘inside’ me.
It is simply you, as I experience you. And I do not experience you as inside me. Similarly,
I take it that you do not experience me as inside you. (p. 15)

In many ways, Laing’s observation describes the existential dilemma of sensory

experience and play as a form of communication. Laing’s existential ‘politics’ of
experience is at the heart of how many of us conceive of impairment simply be-
cause we cannot perceive or know another’s interior experience of that embodied
state. As Merrell and Anderson (2001) suggest, the semiosis of disablement ‘pre-
cipitates vigorous waves of semiosic processes in the reader/consumer, touched by
those experiences and narratives and ideas’ (p. 268) that speaks to a new literacy of
neurodiverse expression and epistemologies. This is all too familiar to autistic self-
advocates who invoke ‘alien’ metaphors (Broderick and Ne’eman 2008) to describe
the foreignness of neurotypical communication in relation to neurodiverse ways of
seeing and sensing. Connolly (2008) suggests:
our strangeness to each other need not be the end of a shared world. We have to move to
a place of learning from each other’s differences (and embodied experiences) rather than
creating hierarchies of legitimacy which exclude (or reprogram) those who do not fit within
the narrow parameters of what is considered to be the ‘norm.’ (p. 245)

For a new discourse to emerge, we must be more self-reflexive about the nature of
the semiotics to configure and periodize a sensory imaginary to engage the nulli-
fied and revolutionary experience of feeling, sensing and understanding beyond the
neurotypical.

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1078 J. Nolan and M. McBride

Jason Nolan is autistic. He is director of the Experiential Design and Gaming Environment
(EDGE) laboratory, http://edgelab.ryerson.ca, and a professor in early childhood studies at Ry-
erson University. He is also a faculty member in the joint Ryerson/York graduate programme in
Communication and Culture. Jason graduated with a Ph.D. in critical pedagogy from the Ontario
Institute for Studies in education in 2001, with a dissertation on virtual learning environments in
education. His research focuses on adaptive design for children with disabilities, gaming/play,
privacy/autonomy, sensory play, informal learning environments, virtual worlds and the voices
of ‘digital natives’. His work has appeared in journals such as Canadian Children, New Media &
Society, Surveillance and Society and Jeunesse: Young People, Texts, Cultures. He is co-editor of
The International Handbook of Virtual Learning Environments (2006).

Melanie McBride is a doctoral student in York University’s joint programme in Communica-

tion and Culture, where she is investigating the role of multimodal technologies and technology-
enhanced environments in supporting diverse sensory needs and preferences, such as the autistic
spectrum, that exceed or challenge the normative ‘sensory order’ (Hayek 1952). Deemed one of
the ‘lower’ senses, her work focuses on olfaction as an under-examined modality of digital com-
munication and info-culture. Melanie’s work with the laboratory has contributed to the develop-
ment, conceptualization and design of multisensory environments and tools for inclusive learning
and well-being. Visit her at: melaniemcbride.net and her multisensorymel blog.