On Speaking and Not Speaking: Autism, Friendship, Interdependency

This creative nonfiction piece reflects on experiences relating to autism and speech, exploring tensions between independence and interdependency, as well as the potential lines between friendship and accommodation/support in the medical and professional realms

Enhancing Relaxed Performance: Evaluating an Autism Arts Festival

‘Relaxed performances’ allow spectators to enjoy a non-judgmental environment in the theatre, where they can talk or move around, along with other adjustments to make them more accessible to a range of audiences including those on the autistic spectrum. Typical accommodations include reduced intensity of lighting and sound, provision of visual stories to familiarise spectators with the venue and production, and trained staff available to assist visitors. This paper will evaluate the Autism Arts Festival, an attempt to develop the idea of a relaxed performance further to create an entirely autism-friendly festival in Canterbury, UK. We developed a suite of features to make the festival more accessible, and whilst audience response indicates that no single one was used by all audience members, the suite as a whole was nevertheless effective at increasing the accessibility of the festival. Moreover, discussions with the performers indicate that the festival, as an ‘autistic space’, was conducive of both a sense of community solidarity and engagement with the politics of neurodiversity

The Autistic Detective: Sherlock Holmes and his Legacy

Sherlock Holmes has long been rumored to be on the autism spectrum. Yet the significance of the great detective's autism "diagnosis" has been largely overlooked. While it would be impossible to diagnose a fictional character with a neurological difference, it says something about the way that the public imagines autism that Holmes is consistently imagined and described as a person on the spectrum. Indeed, Conan Doyle's character popularized the stereotype of the detective with autistic traits, thus perpetuating several common tropes about autism. Emulating Conan Doyle's famous tales, contemporary crime fiction frequently creates detective characters with autistic characteristics. For example, popular television shows such as Criminal Minds present detectives with autistic traits who are clearly constructed to remind audiences of Holmes. While figures such as Spenser Reid (and other crime fighters following in Holmes's shadow) may seem to counteract fears of people with cognitive disabilities as deviant, criminal, or dangerous, they may actually reinforce those stereotypes

Uprooting the Schizophrenic Seed of Faith: Mental Disability in The Violent Bear It Away

This article examines Flannery O'Connor's depiction of mental disability in The Violent Bear It Away. O'Connor's work presents a particularly rich and complex intellectual space for examining stereotypes connecting mental disability with religious faith. Religious difference and disabled difference are presented as symbolically inseparable in The Violent Bear It Away, a conflation that may encourage negative stereotypes regarding both faith and madness. In the larger scope of the novel, O'Connor uses Tarwater's ambiguous status as both a mad man and a man of faith to question modern psychology and the mental healthcare system: just as readers are implicitly asked to "diagnose" her mad characters (but are set up to fail by the novel's deliberate indeterminacy), the psychologist character Rayber also struggles (and fails) to diagnose the other characters around him. In the end, however, O'Connor's critique of the mental healthcare system may be undermined by her use of mental disability as a symbol to convey religious mystery.© 2016 Loftis. All rights reserved. By author request, this article is excluded from Creative Commons licensing

Introduction: Inclusion Is Hard, or Collaborating in Crip Time

Part of the Palgrave Shakespeare Studies series. The old cliché about Hamlet is that it starts with the question of identity (“Who’s there?” [1.1.1]). Of course, the titular character spends most of the play running around in a state of (teenaged?) angst about his identity.1 His identity in flux includes paradoxes: he manages to be both punningly wise (“I know a hawk from a handsaw”) and potentially mad (“to put an antic disposition on”), both hesitant (“to be or not to be”) and viciously active (“not shriving time allowed”), he is in the clouds and also “too much in the sun” (2.2.379; 1.5.172; 3.1.55; 5.2.47; 1.2.67).2 If the world of the play represents a functioning social system (debatable), Hamlet’s identity breaks the system. In my experience, having a disability is a little like that. In fact, individual identity is often the thing that breaks the systems (even the ones that were already secretly broken when we found them). For example, almost everything in the world is designed for an imagined able-bodied/neurotypical human. This inevitably means that most things in the world were not designed with me (an autistic woman) in mind. Actually, any identity outside of what is falsely assumed as the “normative” or “majority” default tends to break various social systems. This book is about inclusion, so it is also about identity, about the unique places we come from and the life experiences that help make us into the people we are. © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023