Animal studies, literary studies, and disability studies have recently converged around what could be called a counter-linguistic turn.1 Although many current projects are intent on proving that certain animals do have language capabilities like those of humans, other sectors of animal studies are concerned with forms of subjectivity that are not language-based. Instead, they are concerned with ways of knowing that appear to work outside those processes of logocen-tric, rational thinking that have defined what is proper to the human, as opposed to the nonhuman animal. These concerns are also shared by a subset of disability studies that focuses on persons with so-called disorders that manifest themselves linguistically such as Asperger syndrome and autism. Temple Grandin is perhaps the most well-known example, perhaps because she is so keenly aware of the way her autism challenges preconceived ideas of what constitutes rational thought. "I think in pictures," she writes in the beginning to her second book, Thinking in Pictures. "Words are like a second language to me." Moreover, she emphasizes, "I would be denied the ability to think by scientists who maintain that language is essential for thinking."
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