Anne McGuire Quotes

While autism's embodied pathology is understood to be certain, its etiological origins remain unknown. Because of this unknown origin, all bodies are understood as potentially disordered. The mother, who was not so long ago under surveillance and scrutiny, must now adopt the paternalistic position of surveiller - she must watch her children and look for bodily manifestations or signs of disorder and seek biomedical intervention. This, of course, does not free the mother completely from being herself an object of scrutiny.

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.

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.

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.