#ActuallyAutistic community and métis autistic rhetoric on Twitter

This paper examines how pervading normative discourses show how able bodies and minds produce identity, knowledge, and power, and the ways that disabled bodyminds resist and through métis. This study examines tweets from the #ActuallyAutistic hashtag in the wake of the trailer and film release of Sia’s film Music. I analyze the ways that autistic Twitter users responded to the anti-autistic rhetorics of the film, as well as non-autistic Twitter users’ ableism and defense of Sia. Findings demonstrate how autistic Twitter users perform métis online to create an autistic rhetoric and reclaim rhetoricity. The success of this activism is seen through negative film reviews, which cite the film’s ableism, and other popular media rejections of the film. I argue that as a virtual and textual kairotic space, Twitter helps autistic people retake agency and provides a space to use métis rhetorics to center autistic experience and create an autistic rhetoric.