This eight-and-a-half-minute video begins with a woman rocking in front of a window and waving her hands. We hear a woman’s voice singing the sound of “e,” almost without melody. The first half of the video follows this woman’s activities: a shot of her hand rhythmically scraping a looped wire against the surface of a door, repetitively stroking a keyboard, batting at the pull chain for window blinds, and bouncing an orange plastic slinky. The woman rubs her face against the pages of an open book and rocks and listens to the sound of the book’s pages as she flips through them.
Halfway through this short video, text appears: “A Translation.” What follows—in the form of a voiceover and subtitle text—is more than a translation of the autistic woman’s actions just observed. It is a manifesto revealing and protesting the assumptions often made about people with autism and how those assumptions have led to institutionalization and the exclusion of people with autism from the category of persons.
