Description: Autism, a concept that barely existed 75 years ago, currently feeds multiple, multi-billion-dollar-a-year, global industries. In this work, the author analyzes how we got from the 11 children first identified by Leo Kanner in 1943 as "autistic" to the billion dollar autism industries that are booming today. Broderick argues that, within the Autism Industrial Compex (AIC), almost anyone can capitalize on autism, and she shows us how.
Brief description: Alicia A. Broderick is a Professor of Education at Montclair State University. She is a Disability Studies (DS) scholar and a scholar of Critical Autism Studies (CAS). For the past two decades, she has published critical scholarship on autism, deploying a variety of interdisciplinary conceptual frameworks, including critical discourse analysis, rhetoric, cultural studies, and historically-situated analyses of ideology, metaphor and narrative. Her present analysis synthesizes and reframes much of her extant work by deploying the overarching epistemological and ontological lens of neoliberal capitalism in analyzing the shifting meanings of autism within capitalism over the past 75 years.
Review Quotes: "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