9 Quotes by Anne McGuire

Autism is dominantly conceived of as a pathological threat to (normative, liberal versions of) individual life and is even framed as actively spoiling/wasting away this life.

Watch,' the posters tell the potential advocate, but only if you embody normalcy. For it is normalcy, the posters point out, that is endowed with the power of the qualification to see. Abnormalcy is unseeing. . . Autism is not qualified to see itself.

Despite the constant lament that autism is just too costly, a significant or even 'crippling' economic burden for the social whole, the production of the time-rich but not time-efficient body of the autistic child has generated a multibillion dollar 'autism industrial complex.

Whether the autistic subject is inscribed as 'nearly' developed or 'under' developed, developmental discourses always situate the autistic subject as partially developed and thus not fully human. [...] Developmentalist discourses frame the autistic subject in need of advocacy as a kind of development project, the autistic body becomes understood as 'develop-able.' The autistic is, in other words, framed as one who needs to be taught humanness.

[The] excited, angry, upset, or calm choreography of fingers fluttering is simultaneously medicalized and moralized: re-encoded as '[an] odd or repetitive way of moving fingers.' The quiet play of a lone child in a busy playground is now seen as a pathological sign pointing not to personal choice or preference or even to social exclusion but to (medical/moral) deviance.

As per the terrorist narrative, the story of autism is told as a kind of 'spreading' pathology, infiltrating normative populations .. Knowing no borders or barriers, autism is framed as .. infiltrating homes, moving next door, and hiding in otherwise normative bodies. Figures of terror, in Bush's words, 'hide in the shadows' (Bush, 2001). Says the voice of autism in Cuaron's film [I am Autism]: they are 'invisible until it's too late' (Cuaron, 2009).

While increasing numbers function to expand out, increasing odds conjure an atmosphere of enclosure and confinement. Growing odds tell an allegorical story of a circle that is closing in zeroing in on the '1,' which is, inevitably your '1.' To borrow the tagline from a 2010 Autism Speaks PSA, 'autism is getting closer to home.

In the ratio, as autism rates are understood to be increasing, the autistic 1 stays the same; it is rather the non-autistic population that seems to be getting smaller. . . The ratio works, in effect, to structure a rivalry or competition—a kind of Foucaultian 'agon' or contest—between constructed oppositions: autism/nonautism, pathology/health, underdevelopment/development, cost/benefit.

Beloved children split in two. A child-with: part child, part autism. A part to love and a part to hate. A part to cultivate and a part to eliminate.. Such cultural orientation did not force [Karen] McCarron's .. hand in killing her child, but it nonetheless provides the necessary conditions .. to make this kind of violence possible and even—for those of us monitoring the headlines—normal.