The Siobhanic is a rhetorically romanticized version of editorship. The Siobhanic form of textual regulation is virulent precisely because it is so transparent: we often ask the Couser-like question, in hushed innocent voices, “How is Siobhan’s role different from teachers, different from publishers, different from the inner machinations of the literary marketplace?” While I’m not entirely sure how much we can extrapolate Siobhanic telepresence from the teacherly love of red pens, I do believe that the sheer transparency of Siobhan in Curious, along with the transparency of my own authors, when combined with the subjugation of autism as a discourse, should signal alarm bells.

In “The Regulatory Role of the Writing Center: Coming to Terms with a Loss of Innocence,” Nancy Grimm (1996) purported that peer tutors are transparent extensions of a controlling, hegemonic academy. Tutors ward off minority discourses with the same repellant as used by professors and administrators. In a sense, to be othered is to be authored by the Siobhanic—and much like autism is defined via varying levels on a spectra of symptoms, perhaps, when it comes to textual regulation, we likewise arbitrarily create levels of otheredness on all scales, levels of telepresence and agency. Of course, I might be positing this hierarchical leveling theory because I’m autistic and therefore crave linearity.