War on Autism: On the Cultural Logic of Normative Violence

by Anne McGuire

War on Autism examines autism as a historically specific and powerladen cultural phenomenon that has much to teach about the social organization of a neoliberal western modernity. Bringing together a variety of interpretive theoretical perspectives including critical disability studies, queer and critical race theory, and cultural studies, the book analyzes the social significance and productive effects of contemporary discourses of autism as these are produced and circulated in the field of autism advocacy. Anne McGuire discusses how in the field of autism advocacy, autism often appears as an abbreviation, its multiple meanings distilled to various “red flag” warnings in awareness campaigns, bulleted biomedical ”facts” in information pamphlets, or worrisome statistics in policy reports. She analyzes the relationships between these fragmentary enactments of autism and traces their continuities to reveal an underlying, powerful, and ubiquitous logic of violence that casts autism as a pathological threat that advocacy must work to eliminate. Such logic, McGuire contends, functions to delimit the role of the “good” autism advocate to one who is positioned “against” autism.

Genres: Autistic Spectrum Disorder, Disability, Nonfiction, Philosophy, Sociology, Disability Studies, Politics

274 pages, Hardcover

Published April 28, 2016

Reviews

[Eve · Rating 5 out of 5]

I want to send a copy of this book to so many people. I am so utterly grateful to Anne McGuire for writing it. It is the first book I have ever read about autism by a nonautistic person that has an anaylsis of the precarious situation we find ourselves in as autistics in the midst of a 'war on autism'. Thank you, a thousand times, Anne.

[Lona · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very important book about where mainstream autism "advocacy" has gone wrong, framing autism as a monster you need to get rid of, some horrendous "disease" we must cure or some tragic a family has to "live with" (a good example being Autism Speaks: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5Va_X...).

Framing autism like this often lead to parents trying to wrongly "cure" their children, which isn't even possible because autism is simply a neurotype you can't "cure". Forcing an autistic child to suppress the autism entirely is simply leading to this same child already growing up distressed and often becoming anxious and depressed adults - if they becoma an adult at all.

Furthermore spreading this kind of information leads to families seeing it as "tragic" when their child is getting the autism diagnosis, sometimes even ending in child murder because they "love their child but hate autism" (that's an actual quote from one of the child murderers in the book).

We need better advocacy and this book might not be written by an actually autistic person, but it's worth to read. It's a bit repetitive partly, but important nevertheless!

[Sarah Cavar · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a fantastic inquiry into & takedown of "war on autism" rhetoric, perennially relevant. I find this work particularly useful today as we see increased reactionary, eliminationist rhetoric not only toward autistic people but to trans people and fat people (and all intersections therein) as well, and thus read this book as a call to solidarity among all who have been deemed enemies of neoliberal/ linear time, normalcy, and the "healthy" body politic.

[Jennie Chantal · Rating 5 out of 5]

I came to this book as a non-autistic person with a basic understanding of autism and certainly as a proponent of the disability justice slogan "nothing about us without us" (I have different disabilities). I wanted to learn more about autism and why it is seen with such fear and negativity and have more tools to talk about autism/advocate for neurodiversity with non-autistic (and frankly autism-phobic) people in my life.

I honestly can't do this book justice in a review. I must have 50 flags in this book! But I'd like to highlight several of the things I came away with and hopefully interest you in reading it.

First off, this is a book of academic scholarship and the writing style reflects this. If you are like me and don't read academic books/theory very often, prepare to put the time and work into this one! It took me a month to read, and I read about 12-15 books a month. But it was SO worth it.

Highlights:

1) The current dominant understanding of autism is based in the development of child psychiatry which itself was a product of the eugenics of the 1930's - 1940's. The lines between (so-called) "normal" and "abnormal" were aggressively defined during this time (and continue to be) and were (are) directly linked to the "well-being" of the (neoliberal) state/nation.

2) Autism advocacy groups are (by and large) "against" autism and therefore cannot advocate "for" autistic people. This makes them incredibly dangerous to autistics as they produce a culture/society that is, from the start and without question, "hostile to autistic difference", the result of which is violence (physical, emotional, mental, social) against autistic people.

"The dominant ways we have of engaging in autism advocacy (i.e., by fighting autism, battling it, hating it, waging a war against it, and working to eliminate it) require us to think of autism, not as itself a way of living, but as that which must be 'lived with.'... Autism, advocacy so often tells us, must be minimized and/or eliminated in the hopes of recuperating the present goodness/rightness of normative life."

3) Autistic difference, we are taught, is "bad biology" and "mis-wired brains." It is dangerous, destroys families, steals life, and it is "our" duty to protect families, communities and society at large from it (the enemy). Like other pathologized differences in humans (sexual orientation, gender identity, race, mental illness, disability, etc.) these beliefs result in (and even promote) dehumanization and thereby justify all kinds of things from police brutality, medical therapies and treatments, excessive state, school, and family surveillance, restrictions of rights and freedoms, abuse and violence from family and peers, to outright murder.

4) Person first language makes autism something a person "has," something they (and by extension their families) "live with," a "bad thing" that can (with the right medication, treatment, intervention etc.) be separated from the "good" individual. Autistic self-advocates express that autism is inseparable from the autistic person in the same way people don't "have" femaleness or maleness, they "are" male or female (or neither). Therefore, the war on autism is war on autistics. Being "against" autism is being against autistics.

There is so much more I could say about this book. I hope that you read it and that it gives you information and tools like it gave me to better understand the incredible violence and oppression the global war on autism is causing so that you can change how you advocate, change how you think, and work to change the beliefs of those around you. Because the actual lives of autistic people are at stake.

[Sarah · Rating 5 out of 5]

Everyone involved in autism advocacy needs to read this book.

I went in expecting to already know all this. I mostly just wanted to support McGuire's work. As it turns out, there's a lot I didn't know. The book is well researched, thoroughly annotated, comprehensive, intersectional, and painfully enlightening. The last section, in particular, was difficult to read; It should be. The extent to which we've (all) rationalized and enabled systemic violence is appalling and heartbreaking.

Above all, do no harm.

[Betsy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very dense and difficult read, but is a great overview of how autism has been portrayed in our society as a horrible scourge upon humanity that needs to be fought and destroyed -- ignoring that autism isn't something that can be separated from those of us who are autistic.

This book masterfully outlines a direct line between that mainstream portrayal of autism as something to be battled and the abuse that autistic people (especially those with high support needs and those who are children) face from society at large as well as from their own families and carers.

I think that this is (sadly) a necessary read for anyone who works with autistic people in any capacity.

[Jessica]

Recommended in Rodas' Autistic Disturbances.

[Samantha Kobs · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very interesting arguments and important critiques in today’s autism advocacy and “knowledge.” There are parts that are very philosophy-heavy and difficult to get through. Other parts are very insightful. Great use of visuals such as ads, advocacy website descriptions, excerpts from presidential speeches, etc.

[blank · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vivid, and bearing witness to the inherent violence in normative, modern autism discourse.

Using a multi-pronged approach from disability studies, queer studies, critical race theory, Marxism, etc., McGuire is concerned with the discursive space that shapes and orients bodies, particularly the discursive space of autism advocacy which emerged in response to the desperation of parents and families and the lack of support/resources for them, effectively overlooking normative biomedical definitions of autism as a problem to be rid of, as a crisis of epidemic proportions, ignoring the violence inherent in,
"the work of attempting to recover the normative body of nonautism (e.g., the implementation of and/or facilitation of access to speech therapies, drug therapies, dietary therapies, behavioral therapies that attempt to diminish or even eliminate the signs of autism)." (p. 58)

Giving rise to the biomedical, normative, cultural logic of autism is Kanner and Asperger and the post-WWII environment which was characterised by delineating between the fit and the unfit, and autism hence was pathologized alongside the rise of child psychiatry about 'feeblemindedness' (cf. Yale Child Studies Center and Arnold Gesell),
"Born in and of the heyday of child psychiatry and child study in the 1930s and 1940s, contemporary versions of autism, as determined by Kanner and Asperger, were responses to an historically particular demand for clear ways of distinguishing and dividing abnormality from normality, pathology from health in the name of a scientifically perfectible human race." (p. 36)

But not only that, the war on autism has taken a distinctively neoliberal dimension with the turn of the century and the war on terror. The red warning signs constituting autism 'awareness', the situations which mark the bodies of autistic subjects as underdeveloped and non-vital, are not apart from the death drive of 'terrorists', the 'they' which threatens the normalcy of 'we', as George W. Bush introduces chapter 4, "This way of life is worth defending."

The concept put forth of a ‘human developmental continuum’ that makes itself felt* in modern autism advocacy through red-flag warning signs, and commodities like Juicy Juice for Brain Development or Starbucks coffee cups, inscribes the bodies of the measured as underdeveloped, or otherwise as less amenable to normalizing pedagogy that plays a constitutive role for the able-subject in an historical moment and geopolitical space.

In the analysis of the National Autistic Society “Autism is…” poster depicting the normal-abnormal opposition in terms of warning signs with stick figures, and the Autism Ontario “Red-Flags for Autism” poster,
"Of course, an image of a girl child, a brown child, (and/or perhaps even a disabled child) can appear as images of normalcy, so long as these images conform to and uphold the ideal of white, male, heterosexual, middle-class, able-bodied normalcy." (p. 94)

That autistic lives are measured by the degree to which they are not-lives, or the degree to which there is a lack of potentiality and an excess of abnormality, becomes evident in the final chapter meditation on the material outcomes of the violence the cultural logic conditions. McGuire painstakingly analyses three instances of infanticide made distinct by social classes and the extent to which the autistic lives meet diagnostic criteria, fully unveiling the cultural logic which endorses the elimination of lives apparently empty of potential. In fact, the 'good' autism advocate is against autism.

* yet remains unseen as the panopticon of biomedicine gazes upon both the advocate and the advocated for, and normalcy works as an absent referent ceaselessly regulating its own repetition

[Brooke · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is the best academic text I have read on Autism. This is the author's doctoral thesis adapted into a slightly shorter book format, and it reads as such. While this is not an "easy" book to get through at times, in both its language and its content, it is incredibly well-researched and the argument is delivered brilliantly.

[Macy Miller · Rating 5 out of 5]

should be required reading for every neurotypical person. so so well-researched and accessible. excellently explains how disability has been produced and perceptions of people with disability have been perpetuated.

[Sasquatch · Rating 4 out of 5]

4.5 stars