Thinking On Sunday: Weird Sisters – On Autism and Feminism

It seemed to me that many of the moments when my autism had caused problems, or at least marked me out as different, were those moments when I had come up against some unspoken law about how a girl or a woman should be, and failed to meet it.

An autism diagnosis in midlife enabled Joanne Limburg to finally make sense of why her emotional expression, social discomfort and presentation had always marked her as an outsider. Eager to discover other women who had been misunderstood in their time, she writes a series of wide-ranging letters to four ‘weird sisters’ from history, addressing topics including autistic parenting, social isolation, feminism, the movement for disability rights and the appalling punishments that have been meted out over centuries to those deemed to fall short of the norm.

Her book Letters To My Weird Sisters: On Autism and Feminism will be available on the day of her talk. This heartfelt, deeply compassionate and wholly original work humanises women who have so often been dismissed for their differences, and will be celebrated by ‘weird sisters’ everywhere.

Joanne Limburg was born in London in 1970 and studied Philosophy at Cambridge. She is the author of two poetry collections. Femenismo (Bloodaxe, 2000) was shortlisted for the Forward Best First Collection Prize; Paraphernalia (Bloodaxe, 2007) was a Poetry Book Society Recommendation. She lives in Cambridge with her husband and son and is currently the Royal Literary Fund Fellow at Magdalen College.

** This event will be held with an in-person audience at Conway Hall *AND* online, via Zoom. Everyone wishing to join this event must register for a ticket in advance, using the “Book Now” link **