Autistic identity is political, as are many others. Autistic political identity is unique for the ways that it is caught in the intersections of multiple different power and disciplinary structures, including pathology, environmentalism, sexism, racism, ableism, and animism. These systems influence the way we create knowledge about autistic people and what stereotypes are the public face of the autistic identity.
Most stereotypes about autists are negative as Botha et al writes: “Eight of the top ten stereotypes non-autistic people associate with autism are rated negatively (including autistic people as having difficult personalities/behavior, being withdrawn, and awkward). Similarly, 67% of the medium frames autism in the United States, and Britain over 15 years had stigmatizing cues…In both british…and Australian media, autistic people are portrayed as either dangerous/unstable, or unloved and mistreated. Thin-slice judgements of autistic individuals are more negative than those of neurotypical peers and neurotypical peers are less willing to interact with autistic individuals.” (Botha et al). These stereotypes are all stemming from the neurotypical measurements of what it means to be human and neurotypical prescriptions of value.
What can we do to oppose these stereotypes and stigma? Fighting them directly by providing arguments that demonstrate how autistic people are not dangerous, unloved, or violent only seek to give those using stereotypes another chance to argue against us and to further flatten and homogenize the general perception of autists as a misunderstood group.
In this way, stereotypes are a weaponized extension of identity politics that essentializes our identity. Theorist Wendy Brown discusses at length: “Enter politicized identity, now conceivable in part as both product of and “reaction” to this condition, where “reaction” acquires the meaning that Nietzsche ascribed to it, namely, as an effect of domination that reiterates impotence, a substitute for action, for power, for self-affirmation that reinscribes incapacity, powerlessness, and rejection.”1 In reacting to the weaponization of our identity as autists through stereotypes, we render our power inert because we argee to defining ourselves within the confines of the stereotype, stigma, or mainstream image of the autist by only opposing it. We even agree to having a political identity as autists when we claim the stereotypes about us by correcting them, instead of challenging them.
Brown proposes that we think about positionality, instead of identity, which is defined by a “geneology of wanting” rather than definitive statements of being. She asks: “What if we sought to supplant the language of “I am”-with its defensive closure on identity, its insistence on the fixity of position, and its equation of social with moral positioning-with the language of reflexive “wanting”? …What if “wanting to be” or “wanting to have” were taken up as modes of political speech that could destabilize the formulation of identity as fixed position, as entrenchment by history, and as having necessary moral entailments, even as they affirm “position” and “history” as that which makes the speaking subject intelligible and locatable, as that which contributes to a hermeneutics for adjudicating desires? If every “I am” is something of a resolution of desire into fixed and sovereign identity, then this project might involve not only learning to speak but to read “I am” this way, as in motion, as temporal, as not-I, as deconstructable according to a genealogy of want rather than as fixed interests or experiences.”2
Through expressing want and desire instead of making statements about “what” or “who” we are as autists, we can liberate ourselves from the ugly cycle of identity politics as they relate to autism and make space for imaging and defining what it is that we want and creating practices for achieving those ideals. Such as through the adoption of ‘autistic positionality’ as opposed to ‘autistic identity’.
- Brown, Wendy. “Wounded Attachments.” Political Theory 21, no. 3 (1993): 390–410. http://www.jstor.org/stable/191795. ↩︎
- Brown, “Wounded Attachments.” ↩︎
The Art of Autistic Joy 