‘Autism Spectrum Disorder’ (ASD) describes a cluster of neurodevelopmental disorders
characterised in clinical settings by impaired communication skills, impaired social interactions, repetitive behaviour, and restricted interests (American Psychiatric Association, 2013). Much of the literature on ASD, scholarly or otherwise, replicates this deficit language. Representations of people with ASD, typically produced by non-autistic people, have long been problematic.
The character played by Dustin Hoffman in the 1988 film “Rain Man” has become “the public’s primary definitional text” for ASD (Baker, 2007, p. 229). A more recent definitional text might be Abed Nadir in the television sitcom Community (2009-2015).
Despite never using the term ‘autism’, readers of Mark Haddon’s The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time are able to identify the narrator and protagonist as autistic because Haddon presents a stereotypical image of autism (Burks-Abbott, 2007).
Some studies claim that people with autism are less able to produce creative work, since one of the classic diagnostic criteria of autism is “impaired imagination” (Baron, 2008, 103). Yet a number autistic people are better with words and images than with numbers, and don't exhibit impaired imagination (Burks-Abbott, 2007; Baron, 2008). People with autism are just as likely to be present in the creative industries as in any other industry, and research suggests that as many as 11 % of unwaged people with ASD are hoping to work in the arts (Buckley, Pellicano, & Remington, 2021).
Not only do people with ASD regularly encounter harmful stereotypes, the creative expression of people with autism is often understood as symptomatic of a disease and inherently impaired. Yet autistic people possess a range of talents and are involved in the creative arts professionally and non-professionally. People with autism experience states of creative flow, can be simultaneous detail and big-picture oriented, are contemplative and richly imaginative, deeply empathetic especially toward animals, can be of any gender, are fully capable of staging professional performances, and are worthy of employment in creative industries including the performing arts. In the following posts we’ll explore the connection between autism and the creative arts through three pieces from artist Peter Myers, poet Les Murray, and playwright Rhi Lloyd-Williams. These pieces move beyond showcasing the capabilities of the “artistic, autistic savant” (Treffert, 2007, p. 323), and challenge pernicious stereotypes of ‘autistic deficit’, representing autism through the creative expression of autistic people.
References
American Psychiatric Association. (2013). Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, 5th Edition. American Psychiatric Publishing.
Baker, A. (2008). Recognizing Jake: Contending with formulaic and spectacularized representations of autism. In M. Osteen (Ed.), Autism and Representation (pp. 229–243). Routledge.
Baron, M. (2008). Autism – a creative process? Poetry, poets, imagination. Popular Narrative Media, 1(1), 103–114.
Buckley, E., Pellicano, E., Remington, A. (2021). “The real thing I struggle with is other people’s perceptions”: The experiences of autistic performing arts professionals and attitudes of performing arts employers in the UK. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders, 51, 45–59, doi: 10.1007/s10803-020-04517-0
Burks-Abbot, G. (2008). Mark Haddon’s popularity and other curious incidents in my life as an autistic. In M. Osteen (Ed.), Autism and Representation (pp. 289–296). Routledge.
Treffert, D. (2007). The autistic artist, “special faculties”, and Savant Syndrome. Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine, 161(4), 323-323.
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