Today’s episode provides excerpts from an essay by Jaime Hoerricks, PhD, titled “The Curriculum of Touch,” which serves as a lyrical introduction to the author’s “Afterglow” project, intended as a sensual archive of queer, trans, and autistic memory. Dr. Hoerricks critiques established clinical and academic views of autism, particularly the focus on “deficit” and “lack of empathy,” by arguing that autistic perception is instead a form of “sensory literacy” and precise attunement. Drawing heavily on experiences in the San Francisco Tenderloin during the late 1980s, she frames the marginalised queer community as a “pedagogy of proximity,” where non-verbal communication and touch became a necessary, highly precise language of survival and intimacy. She seeks to provide a “counter-canon” to pathologising research, using erotic writing as a form of “counter-education” to restore and preserve the true history of connection among neurodivergent and queer individuals.

Here’s the link to the source article: https://open.substack.com/pub/autside/p/the-curriculum-of-touch-autism-attunement

Let me know what you think.

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