Unmothering Autism

As global rates of autism diagnosis rise, dominant cultural representations continue to define autism as a tragic neurological disorder. And mothers – as primary caregivers and advocates – are centrally implicated in the impulse to find both cause and cure. How should we care about autism and autistic people? Unmothering Autism emerged from Patty Douglas’s desire to understand a contradiction: she and her two sons (one autistic) experienced beauty living together, while their public encounters with doctors, school professionals, and agencies were fraught and sometimes violent. Interspersing her own insights and conversations with other mothers, Douglas offers a critical history of popular and biomedical assumptions about autism, expressed through shifting social constructs: the white “refrigerator mother” of the 1940s who seemingly caused autism by her disordered love; the “mother therapist” from the 1970s on, compelled to labour to normalize her child with behavioural practices; and today’s “warrior mother” who must watch her own behaviour to eliminate autism in her child. Unmothering Autism theorizes an “ethics of disruption,” reorienting research and practice to affirm autism and autistic people as valuable and fundamentally human. It centres the previously marginalized perspectives of mothers and autistic individuals to affirm their knowledge of living well together in, and through, difference.