Commodifying Autism: The Cultural Contexts of ‘Disability’ in the Academy

Abstract

The cultural presence of autism has grown vastly over the past few decades, with the impairment becoming the subject of films (e.g. Rain Man, 1998; Snow Cake, 2006), novels (e.g. Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, 2003), autobiographies (e.g. Grandin, 1996; Lawson, 2000), museum exhibitions (e.g. Welcome to Our World … Living with Autism, 2011) and newspaper articles (e.g. McNeil, 2009; Alleyne, 2010). In turn, these have attracted the attention of academics in the humanities and social sciences (for instance, Greenwell, 2004; Murray, 2008; Davidson and Smith, 2009). Such considerations acknowledge, as Murray (2008: xvii) does, that autism can be considered ‘compellingly attractive in the way it presents human otherness’. However, although autism as a mysterious and fascinating style of human difference has been explored for what it reveals of popular understandings, the fascination signaled by its emergence and proliferation as an academic presence has not been scrutinised. In this chapter we are interested in approaching autism critically. We seek to understand the cultural contexts of this academic presence and think through its implications. By positioning academia as part of contemporary consumer culture, we borrow from Marxist-inspired theories to conceptualise the processes by which ‘seemingly the most enigmatic of conditions’ (Murray, 2008: xvi) has become produced, traded and consumed within the social sciences. These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.

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