Echophenomena: Imitative or repetitive actions without explicit awareness.
According to Kawohl and Podoll, echophenomena are “environment-driven responses … defined as pathological imitations of external stimuli.” These imitations are multiply embodied, and include such motions as
- echolalia (the repetition of words and phrases),
- echopraxia (the repetition of body movements or configurations)
- echomimia (the repetition of facial expressions)
- echographia (the repetition of written words), and
- echoplasia (the repetition of shapes by means of sculpting, tracing, or drawing)
To be autistic is to negotiate intentional movements, movements that straddle the rhetorical and the non-rhetorical, that middle and murk.
Yergeau 2018 (179), Yergeau, M. Remi. 2018. Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness. Duke University Press.
echophenomena—that is, the echoing of words, sounds, motions, and other sensory stimuli. Echolalia, the more commonly known echophenomenon in autistic discourse, involves the imitation of sound or speech; echopraxia, as another example, is embodied echoing of others’ movements. In clinical discourse, echophenomena are represented as both involuntary and pathological—as corporeal motions that transpire beneath the level of conscious awareness. Engaging what Casey O’Callaghan calls “echophenomenology,” I consider the ways in which autistic echophenomena might be queerly read and queerly practiced as demi-rhetorics, as a/volitional motions that queer the between spaces of bodies, objects, environs.
Embodied communicative forms—including the echo, the tic, the stim, the rocking body, the twirl—represent linguistic and cultural motions that pose possibility for autistics.