autism

Mattie Ross, the young protagonist of the Coen brothers' acclaimed 2010 film True Grit, is so compelling and memorable because she is so odd. Her eccentricities are characterized by what I would call "autistic difference" but, given the nature of the film, my aim is not read autism onto Mattie. I want to map Mattie onto autism.

Of course one doesn't have to go finding autism in popular fiction—it's the subject of intense cultural fascination right now, so it's just there, everywhere. In novels like Mark Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time and Jodi Picoult's House Rules; in films like Mercury Rising, Mozart and the Whale, Adam, and of course Rain Man; and in television shows like Parenthood and Alphas. But I do believe that, in my latest post, I exhausted my personal list of autistic characters whom I—as an autistic consumer of fiction—enjoy and whose stories I find compelling. Someone in my position might just have to go looking for autism to find more autistic characters with whom to relate.

I do not mean nor wish to suggest that, for a person to relate to a character, said character must be like the reader or viewer in every way. Of course one could identify with characters who are very unlike oneself. But fiction is a very powerful force. It influences the way we see the world and ourselves. When there is a glaring lack of characters with certain traits, or existing representations fall into harmful tropes, it hurts.

In mainstream film, autistic characters seem to appear most frequently in two types of movies: award-grubbing dramas and horror films. Both genres stick to a disappointingly narrow range of tropes.

Autism Speaks is an easy, easy target. And a literally huge one—it's the largest and best-funded autism "awareness" and "advocacy" (I kind of want to just call it "autism-themed") organization in the world. Autistic self-advocates rip into Autism Speaks every day because of the organization's silencing and dehumanizing rhetoric, and its focus on "curing" autism rather than dedicating its resources to practical support for autistic people. I thought I'd comb through the resources on their website to see information they might offer regarding sex, gender, and sexuality.

The 2009 romantic drama Adam features a relationship between a non-autistic woman and a man with Asperger syndrome. Any portrayal of autistic sexuality has the potential to be subversive, but unfortunately this particular movie squanders that potential and reinforces existing tropes about autism and disability.

This blog series is rapidly closing in on its second week and I have only just gotten started. I have a lot in mind to cover—autistic gender and sexuality in parents' guides, autism and sex ed, the pathologization of gender non-normative behavior—and I have barely scratched the surface of portrayals of autists in film, television, and news media. As I did with my previous post on Erasure and Asexuality, however, I want to take a moment to step back and pause before charging on ahead.

I'm about to wax rhapsodic about a cheesy, transparently manipulative martial arts film. But seriously: Prachya Pinkaew's 2008 movie Chocolate is the best film I've ever seen that features an autistic protagonist. And it's the only piece of media I've personally encountered that features a nonverbal protagonist.

The result of prevailing cultural attitudes is that autistic people are perceived as inherently non-sexual. Not as asexual—the mainstream paradigm erases the experiences of asexual autists right along with those of other queer people on the spectrum.

 When I first conceived the idea for this blog, I knew that I had to write a post about Lisbeth Salander. For the most part, any discussion of queer autistic sexuality in fiction must focus on lack, on the absence of representations, but Stieg Larsson's lurid Millenium novels and the films based on them feature an antiheroine who is both queer and (probably) autistic.

Welcome to my guest blog series, Double Rainbow. I am very excited to be blogging for Bitch and for the opportunity to lend my voice to discussion about representations of autistic sexuality (and lack thereof) in popular media. I chose the title of my blog both as a playful reference to the "Double Rainbow" meme and as a reference to the fact that I am a lesbian on the autism spectrum. The aim of this blog is to explore and interrogate popular representations of autistic sexuality and gender performance from a queer, autistic perspective.