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War on Autism: On the Cultural Logic of Normative Violence

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Anne McGuire

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“It was astonishing to finally realize that my difficulties were part of a larger problem that wasn’t my fault alone, but my brain’s, that there was a scientific modus operandi behind everything I’d come to see as the peculiarities of a besieged personality. It was amazing to comprehend that all the cat-and-mouse games my mind plays, all its endless scheming and compensatory, roundabout thinking, not only owned a name, but was a disability many others also suffered from, in many cases knowingly.”

“As it represents and thus conceives of autism as a threat to the normative individual and social body, contemporary advocacy work issues an effective and powerful 'call to arms' against autism. The orientation of contemporary advocacy is clear: to be a 'good' autism advocate is to be positioned 'against' autism, to 'fight' it, 'combat' it, 'defeat' it, and so on. . . It is this war on autism that I take as my focus for the remainder of this book. I do this so as to interrogate how a militarized autism advocacy is systematically producing and sustaining a social environment that is hostile to autistic difference—an environment that, as we shall see, structures and supports possibilities for violence against those who embody autistic difference.”

“While increasing numbers function to expand out, increasing odds conjure an atmosphere of enclosure and confinement. Growing odds tell an allegorical story of a circle that is closing in zeroing in on the '1,' which is, inevitably your '1.' To borrow the tagline from a 2010 Autism Speaks PSA, 'autism is getting closer to home.”

“Within dominant discourses of autism advocacy, the autistic subjectivity—located simultaneously in the perpetual past (e.g. developmentally 'too slow' and always late) and the future (e.g. yet-to-be developed)—is discursively foreclosed from being (existing) in the privileged and agentive time of the 'now.' Via a kind of time-sensitive investment logic, autism is understood not as a being but as a happening—a costly body, a disruptive threat, a risky trend, and so on—a happening, moreover, that is happening fast.”

“In the ratio, as autism rates are understood to be increasing, the autistic 1 stays the same; it is rather the non-autistic population that seems to be getting smaller. . . The ratio works, in effect, to structure a rivalry or competition—a kind of Foucaultian 'agon' or contest—between constructed oppositions: autism/nonautism, pathology/health, underdevelopment/development, cost/benefit.”

“As per the terrorist narrative, the story of autism is told as a kind of 'spreading' pathology, infiltrating normative populations .. Knowing no borders or barriers, autism is framed as .. infiltrating homes, moving next door, and hiding in otherwise normative bodies. Figures of terror, in Bush's words, 'hide in the shadows' (Bush, 2001). Says the voice of autism in Cuaron's film [I am Autism]: they are 'invisible until it's too late' (Cuaron, 2009).”

“Beloved children split in two. A child-with: part child, part autism. A part to love and a part to hate. A part to cultivate and a part to eliminate.. Such cultural orientation did not force [Karen] McCarron's .. hand in killing her child, but it nonetheless provides the necessary conditions .. to make this kind of violence possible and even—for those of us monitoring the headlines—normal.”

“Every belief, every word, every phrase, every observation, every proposition, every citation, every punctuation mark is subjected to ruthless doubt and viscious interrogation. The conventions of grammar oblige me to end most of these sentences with periods, but there are ghostly, invisible lines curling and hovering over most of these tiny dots. What I mean is that most of the periods in this book are interrogation marks in disguise. Most of these declarations are really restless questions underneath.”