Autism and First-Person Accounts: The Cognitive Problem

Costa, Jurandir Freire; Grinker, Roy R.

doi:10.1007/978-3-319-93293-4_7

Cited by 1 publication

(1 citation statement)

References 14 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…In large part the result of the writings of autistic individuals, many of them activists (see, e.g., the works of Temple Grandin and Donna Williams), scholars are chipping away at the assumptions of deficit by identifying rationality, coherence, logic, creativity, and metaphor where these were assumed to be absent (Costa and Grinker 2018;Draaisma 2009;Savarese 2018). Following Biklen (2005), Hacking (2009), and others (see Osteen 2008), Costa and Grinker (2018), for example, draw on phenomenology and philosophy of mind in an analysis of firstperson accounts of autism by Sean Barron (Barron and Barron 2002), Lucy Blackman (Blackman 2001), Carly Fleischmann (Fleischmann 2012), Naoki Higashida (Higashida 2013), Tito Mukhopadhyay (Mukhopadhyay 2011), Stephen Shore (Shore 2003), and Daniel Tammet (Tammet 2006) to challenge longstanding assumptions about the nature of autistic cognitive impairment. In psychology and allied disciplines, researchers are detailing new kinds of sociality (Frith 1989;Happé, Briskman, and Frith 2001;Hobson 2014).…”

Section: S62mentioning

confidence: 99%

Autism, “Stigma,” Disability

Grinker¹

2020

Current Anthropology

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

Erving Goffman's 1963 foundational discussion of stigma has been both embraced and critiqued in disability studies and other fields. In Goffman's interactional and ahistorical analysis, stigma was presumed to exist as a natural feature of humanity, deflecting attention away from historical analysis. This article, in contrast, argues that stigma-particularly surrounding "mental illness"-is deeply embedded in historically contingent structural conditions of modern capitalism and ideologies of individualism that shape ideals of the modern worker. Specifically, I use the case of autism-and its commodification in the United States-to show how a stigmatized "mental illness" is intertwined with a range of financial interests that come to depend on the continued production of certain diagnoses. For example, an analysis of the "autism industrial complex" in the United States reveals how economic changes set the conditions for a range of practices that promise to reduce stigma; these include special education, activism/advocacy, and selfrepresentation. These occur in the context of a transition toward more flexible employment and the increasing value of technological and artistic skills often associated with neurodiversity. Despite the fact that a capitalist logic continues to define valuations of personhood, families and autistic self-advocates have been empowered in recent years to use a variety of strategies to decouple stigma and illness and resist conventional definitions of autism as a syndrome of deficits.

show abstract