Elizabeth Maher

My project brings together analytical frameworks from critical disability studies, disability justice, neurodiversity studies, and critical race theory to examine how discourse around autism served as a means of articulating anxieties and dreams about the future of white masculinity and the reproduction of the white middle-class family in the mid-twentieth century United States. Beginning in the 1940s with the earliest writing on autism as a discrete diagnosis and continuing to the eve of the purported “autism epidemic” in the 1990s I trace how autism became associated with white middle-class technocratic masculinity in both the clinical and popular imagination. In doing so, I explore how clinicians, researchers, parent advocates, educators, popular writers, and autistic people themselves utilized rhetorics of race and gender to make arguments about the “humanity,” “worth,” and “potential” of autistic people, and in doing so reified racist, sexist hierarchies that portrayed white men as more suited for “modernity.”