Historicizing Jim Sinclair’s “Don’t Mourn for Us”: A Cultural and Intellectual History of Neurodiversity’s First Manifesto

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Abstract

Jim Sinclair’s 1993 essay “Don’t Mourn for Us” has influenced the neurodiversity movement since its publication. Sinclair’s essay stands out as particularly radical when considered within the context of other autistic writings from the 1980s and early 1990s. While writers such as Temple Grandin and Donna Williams introduced mainstream audiences to the concept of autistic people narrating their own experiences, their works still relied on ableist ideas about autism promoted by non-autistic scientific “experts” and parents. They positioned autism as a tragedy. Sinclair, who was very familiar with parent-centric autism culture, upended those notions by challenging the notion that parental grief was the inevitable result of autism. In doing so, Sinclair played a major role in establishing the intellectual and cultural foundations of neurodiversity.

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Pripas-Kapit, S. (2019). Historicizing Jim Sinclair’s “Don’t Mourn for Us”: A Cultural and Intellectual History of Neurodiversity’s First Manifesto. In Autistic Community and the Neurodiversity Movement: Stories from the Frontline (pp. 23–39). Springer Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-13-8437-0_2

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