Autism Industrial Complex , livre ebook

ADVANCE PRAISE FOR
The Autism Industrial Complex: How Branding, Marketing, and Capital Investment Turned Autism Into Big Business
“This is such a smart book, one that I and so many others have been seeking. Exhaustively researched, The Autism Industrial Complex: How Branding, Marketing, and Capital Investment Turned Autism into Big Business brilliantly lays out the onto-epistemological stakes of the entwinement of autism and capitalism. Broderick historizes the how and why of the commodification of autism, providing a jarring critique of the neoliberal logics of inclusion and intervention. The AIC is a tour de force; I cannot wait to teach it.”
Jasbir Puar author of The Right to Maim and Terrorist Assemblages
“This is truly innovative work. It sends a critical lightning bolt into the enormous professional industry of autism that has tendrils sunk into university departments of medicine, rehabilitation, psychology, and education. Notions I’ve only half-wondered about this book puts together so well, so clearly, and with such detail that the readers will experience either satisfaction because they knew something was awry here or discomfort at the sheer scale of the problem.”
Scot Danforth, PhD
Professor, Disability Studies and Inclusive Education,
Assistant Dean of Research
Chapman University
“Autism is at an inflection point today. We are poised for a paradigm shift in autism research, education, and therapies; this book initiates that shift, and does so superbly. In The Autism Industrial Complex: How Branding, Marketing, and Capital Investment Turned Autism into Big Business , we learn about the history and evolution of this multi-billion dollar/year operation. Thanks to this history, we will remember Lovaas, ABA, and behaviorism in general not as a science, but as a branding, rhetoric, and marketing plot that transiently misguided many well-intended parents and professionals, and that in so doing profited with greed, by preying on our human hopes, our trust in science, and our fears.”
Elizabeth B. Torres, PhD Professor & Computational Neuroscientist, Rutgers University
Principal Investigator, New Jersey Autism Center of Excellence (2018-2023)
“In this exquisite analysis of the Autism Industrial Complex (AIC), Broderick leads her readers through a complex and nuanced argument that begins with the straightforward premise that ‘autism is a construct inscribed upon, experienced through, and materialized by the bodies of autistic people.’ Her critique is richly informed by the intersection of social, historical, cultural, political and economic infrastructures that ‘produce and sustain autism as a lucrative commodity.’ Broderick, with great detail and critical insight, reveals the unfortunate impact of behaviorism as an ideology that has, for too long, held a stranglehold on our understanding of autism as little more than a scorecard of deficiency and lack. This book strengthens the arguments of those who advance alternative frameworks to understand autism in particular and disability in general. In so doing, it will undermine the institutions we have created to mine difference as problem.”
Linda Ware, PhD
Independent Scholar
The Autism Industrial Complex
The Autism Industrial Complex
How Branding, Marketing, and Capital Investment Turned Autism Into Big Business
By Alicia A. Broderick

GORHAM, MAINE
Copyright © 2022 | Myers Education Press, LLC
Published by Myers Education Press, LLC P.O. Box 424 Gorham, ME 04038
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DEDICATION
For Michael, Nicholas, and Robin, with love
In memoriam: Bill Newell, for teaching me to think interdisciplinarily and Steve Taylor, for encouraging me to “enter the fray”
CONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Foreword – Anne McGuire
Part One: Forging The Autism Industrial Complex: Manufacturing Foundational Commodities (1943–1987)
1. Autism, Inc.: The Autism Industrial Complex by Alicia A. Broderick and Robin Roscigno
2. Consuming Autism as Social Problem and the Cultural Logic of Intervention by Alicia A. Broderick and Robin Roscigno
Part Two: (Re)Branding and Marketing the AIC: Manufacturing Markets, Consumers, & Consumer Confidence (1987–present)
3. Rhetoric and Neoliberalism: On (Re)Branding and Consuming Hope
4. The Politics of Hope: Autism and “Recovery [to Normalcy]”
5. The Politics of Truth: Deploying Scientism in ABA Rhetoric
6. The Politics of Fear: The Fires that Forged the Economic Apparatus of the AIC
Part Three: The Economic Apparatus of the AIC: Incorporation, Legislation, and Capital Investment (1998–present)
7. Intervention, Inc.: Nonprofit Corporations and Venture Capital
8. Prevention, Inc.: The Cultural Logic of Prevention, Basic Research, Hedging Bets, and Perennial (re)Branding
Part Four: Autism and Biocapital: On Precarity and Futurity
9. Autism and Biocapitalist Emergences: Biopolitical Technologies of Control
10. On Being Autistic in Neoliberal Capitalist Ruins: Endemic Precarity and Autistic Futurity
About the Author
Index
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
T HIS BOOK IS PERHAPS aptly described as what the Great Lakes Feminist Geography Collective calls “slow scholarship” (Mountz et al., 2015), which may be an understatement, as it represents the present culmination of the gradual evolution of my own thinking and scholarship on the cultural politics of autism over the course of approximately two decades. I published several pieces of scholarship advancing this line of thinking over the years, in what I understood to be nascent, emergent, and partial forms, as the demands of the neoliberal university require not deep, complex, or comprehensive, but rather, frequent, regular, and visible publication.
Portions or earlier versions of the following chapters have previously appeared in print in other publication venues:
An earlier version of Chapter One and an earlier version of a short passage in Chapter Ten were previously published as “Autism, Inc.: The Autism Industrial Complex” in the Journal of Disability Studies in Education , (2021), 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1163/25888803-bja1000 © Alicia A. Broderick & Robin Roscigno. Part One was written with the collaboration of my colleague, Robin Roscigno.
Earlier versions of parts of Chapter Four, “The Politics of Hope: Autism and ‘Recovery [to Normalcy]’” were originally published under the title “Autism, ‘Recovery [to Normalcy],’ and the Politics of Hope” in Intellectual and Developmental Disability , (2009), 47 (4), 263–281. Reprinted with permission.
Select passages in Chapters Three, Five, and Seven were previously published, in earlier versions, in 2011 in Disability Studies Quarterly, 31 (3) in a manuscript titled “Autism as Rhetoric: Exploring Watershed Rhetorical Moments.” https://dsq-sds.org/article/view/1674/1597 © Alicia A. Broderick.
My Part One coauthor, Robin Roscigno, and I met under serendipitous circumstances (from my perspective; from Robin’s, the circumstances were certainly strategic, and in hindsight [from my perspective again], deftly precipitated). Following a long period of chronic personal and professional stress, I had retreated to a (metaphoric) cave for a couple of years and simply stopped going to professional conferences and other social/professional venues where I typically met emerging scholars in the field and reconnected with longtime colleagues and friends. And in truth, I didn’t write much (at least, not much that I cared about). Then I got a cold email from Robin. I almost never respond to cold emails (and I’ve never taken a cold phone call in my life), but this one was different from the usual sort (and no, I’m not going to tell you how, lest you try to contact me yourself), so I responded. Suffice it to say, Robin got my attention, and kept it, and we began meeting, and talking, and reading together, and not long after, writing together. Thank you, Robin, for waking up my brain again, for being my muse, for knowing exactly how to finish my sentences and for letting me finish yours. Working with you has been like working with my own younger self, if my younger self had known back then what I know now 20 years later, but still had some energy and vitality left in me. Our collaboration has been soooooooo very I N T E R E S T I N G. Thank you for that.
To my colleagues and friends (some of whom are both), I much appreciate your conversation and prodding and listening and support over the many years that these ideas have been percolating in my head. Many of you listened politely, not having any earthly idea what I was talking about, but just letting me talk through the ideas out loud nevertheless was helpful to me. T