Meet Julia

[ysabetwordsmith]

Sesame Street has introduced Julia, a Muppet with autism.  For a while now she has appeared in some of the background materials, but recently made her first appearance on the show proper.  Read about Julia and watch part of the first episode.

I think they did about as well as neurotypical people can do on a first attempt.  What I would really like to see is people sending in examples of what autism means for them, or how  they/their kids have interacted with autistic friends.  Using that to inspire Julia's character development and plot dynamics would help her authenticity.  But even in this first clip, I see a lot of things that I recognize.  :D 3q3q3q!!!

Comments

Re: Yes...

[beasts_of_homeworld]

:D <3 (delighted face, heart)

>> I really want to use resources from the people who have the trait they're talking about, as much as possible. <<

yess, always best practise, in our opinion. we appreciate that you do this, and it shows in the quality of your work.

it's interesting - we realised academically that of course you would be interested in the words of autistic hand-flappy people about hand-flappy things. but that didn't stop it feeling really surprising to us, and like someone was doing something amazing. it's because we're too used to a world where discussions of marginalised experiences are the province of non-marginalised 'experts' and nobody wants to listen to us or value our input. you and our other friends are helping change that.

we may never reach a point where we expect people to listen to us on the subject of us, and stop expecting to be dismissed or overruled. but honestly, that's because how we feel now is an accurate expectation for us to have in this world, for the most part. it's part of our survival skills. maybe we'll change the world, instead. *grin*

>> In some areas, those are really hard to find, so I've made gather pages. <<

yeah it can be really hard to find ways to hear people whose voices society doesn't want you to hear. especially when it's often been dangerous for them to speak about that thing. gather pages are a great solution!

if there's any other things you look for more first-hand discussion of, and that we experience, you're welcome ask us about them. we trust you with this sort of thing, and are happy to share. we can list things we are/we experience if desired.

>> I don't think there can be a complete guide to flapping, any more than for any other type of body language. But one can make a good start! <<

yes, very true!

we managed to work out the other thing we were feeling a bit off about in our original comment - our wording got a bit mixed up in the penultimate paragraph when we changed around the specifics of what we were saying.

so what we meant was more like:

most flapping we've seen is from the wrist. a lot of that is side to side, a lot of it is up and down or forward and back, and some of it is the twisty-turny shimmy we described.

the way we re-worded things in the first comment ended up implying a 'most' that excluded things that belonged inside it. *grin*

also, all the kinds of flapping are awesome and wonderful! ^_^ (happy face)