Autism-as-Machine Metaphors in Film and Television Sound

Around the turn of the millennium, there was an outpouring of autistic representation in literature, film, and television. These resulted in a multitude of new cultural texts that reinforced damaging metaphors about autism that had previously emerged in medical discourse. In film and television, autistic people are portrayed through a variety of metaphors: as impenetrable fortress, missing puzzle pieces, confusing aliens, and as malfunctioning robots or supercomputers. In this paper, I examine the role of film and television sound in reinforcing the metaphor of autistic people as “unfeeling machines.” The unfeeling machine metaphor is personified through sound tracks that deploy a number of mechanical sound effects, including vintage typewriter or calculator sounds, binary code sound effects, as well as sound mixing techniques that evoke the supposedly mechanical, and computational nature of autistic behaviour and thought processes. It is also through the autistic voice and nondiegetic music that machine metaphor are exemplified; which I argue both consciously and unconsciously influence the audience’s perception about autism. In this paper I examine films and television programs including Rain Man, Mercury Rising, The Big Bang Theory, The Good Doctor, Touch, and Atypical to reveal how the sound tracks of each film reinforces the harmful autism machine metaphor

Stimming, Improvisation, and COVID-19: (Re)negotiating Autistic Sensory Regulation During a Pandemic

Many autistic people consider repetitive and sensory practices such as stimming central to their identity and culture. In this paper, I argue that stimming is an improvisatory practice because it constitutes an articulation of autistic aesthetics and sensory preferences, is a crucial component of autistic culture, and consists of moment-by-moment negotiations with environmental and sensory barriers. Autistic people often stim with the help of technologies such as music and stim toys or tools to mediate between inner worlds and outer environments that may over/underwhelm us. I argue that during the COVID-19 pandemic, where the objects we touch (and our bodies) have become potential locations for transmission of the virus, our relationship with stimming (and our stim tools) has changed. This article connects critical improvisation studies, discourses on autistic stimming, and affordance theory to present a framework for understanding autistic stimming during the COVID-19 era: as improvisatory responses to the opportunities and barriers presented by the pandemic. I argue that stimming during the COVID-19 era is a continuously mediated response between our body-minds and the affordances of our environment, and I maintain that this process is a lived improvisation

Playing the Changes: Improvisation, Metaphor, and COVID-19

Erin Felepchuk and Ben Finley examine the use of improvisation within the language of crisis response. They argue that historic cultural anxieties have generated negative connotations for improvisation within such conceptual metaphors as “illness as war” (where improvisation is positioned as a defensive strategy) and, more broadly, “improvisation as disorder,” and draw on improvisation studies theory and discourse to propose alternate metaphors for disease and disease mitigation