metaphors – Autism: Explorations

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Autism has taken over mainstream media to the point where people discuss Autism around the water cooler now.
Every parent wonders about it, every new parent fears it, schools need to be aware of it and anyone within the Autism community promotes it’s awareness.

Stuart Duncan

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Autism Spectrum Disorder is now among the most commonly diagnosed developmental disabilities […] A flood of professionals and programs has emerged to serve these children: physicians, therapists, schools, afterschool programs. There are karate classes and theater programs for children with autism, sports camps and religious schools and yoga classes. […]

Barry M. Prizant

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Autism is now part of the mainstream, whether you are autism accepting or looking for the cure, we are all pretty much in agreement that autism is a fact and everyone knows someone who knows someone… You get the picture.

Cheri Rauser

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My Son’s Swim Coach’s Second Cousin’s Wife has a Student With Cerebral Palsy: The Disability Anecdote

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Autism has become to disorders what Africa is to social issues, the celebrity cause du jour. […] Awareness of autism has seeped into the culture enough to make it a handy metaphor.

Caryn James

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Becoming an object of popular fascination is the opposite of humanizing.

Caroline Narby

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Talking about a disabled sibling: burden narratives and funny stories

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Pop culture’s more interested in disability as a metaphor than in disability as something that happens to real people. […]
Of course, in some sense, we all know what it’s like to feel self-divided, or alienated from the world […] Disabled characters are often seen as symbolizing the triumph of the human spirit, or the freakishness we all feel inside. […]

Christopher Shinn, Charles Isherwood

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Remembering that people with disabilities have always existed – Institutions, communities, and visibility

Outside of Stereotypes

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[…] for every behaviour or response or trait that even we think of as being ‘typically’ autistic, we can find someone on the spectrum who doesn’t have it, or do it.

We come from both genders and the inter-gender, all races and nationalities and religions and sexualities, all classes and sub-sections of humanity, and all ages too […]

But that’s only the tip of the iceberg. There are autistics, for instance, who are fine with eye contact, extroverted autistics who enjoy other people’s company […] and autistics […] who are comfortable with change and variety […]

There are autistics who have never had a meltdown, who are hypo-sensitive to sensory input, especially pain, whose stims are non-existent […] or non-obvious, who have no particular ‘special interests’, or who are hopeless with maths and/or technology, preferring the social sciences or the arts or just about anything but computers.

There are whimsical autistics, and those who are totally serious. […] There are autistics who can handle and even do sarcasm and metaphor, and those who can understand and use abstract or figurative language and/or philosophical concepts just fine.

And while many autistics struggle with friendships and/or relationships, choose not to try for them, or truly don’t want them, many others are able to build long-lasting connections with others […] There are also many autistics who have no problem with physical or verbal affection […]

There are even autistics who can read facial expressions […] Some of us [are] actually quite socially savvy, and some are just naturally ‘social beings’ […]