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This paper problematizes contemporary cultural understandings of autism.We make use of the developmental psychology concepts of 'Theory of Mind' and 'mindblindness' to uncover the meaning of autism as expressed in these concepts. Our concern is that autism is depicted as a puzzle and that this depiction governs not only the wayWestern culture treats autism but also the way in which it governs everyday interactions with autistic people. Moreover, we show how the concepts of Theory of Mind and mindblindness require autism to be a puzzle in the first place. Rather than treat autism as a puzzle that must be solved, we treat autism as a teacher and thus as having something valuable to contribute toward an understanding of the inherent partiality and uncertainty of human communication and collective life. Introduction: The 'Mystery of Autism'Autism has an enduring association with mystery. In recent times, autism has generated a great deal of intrigue in Western society. This intrigue is grounded in our ongoing fascination with the mind, a fascination that is itself rooted in our culture. We are constantly, for example, intrigued with how people think, what they think, especially of us; we wrestle with questions in relation to what children should know, how they should be taught, and how they can fulfil their potential. We are also intrigued with those minds we interpret as 'not working well' or as having 'something wrong' with them and we struggle with how to remedy these situations. We understand the mind as a mystery-a mystery that holds secrets to how it works and to what is going on in it when it does not work, particularly in ways that are not expected.Autism represents one such 'mystery of the mind'. Indeed, current mainstream conceptions characterize it as the quintessential puzzle. In the same way that the pink ribbon has symbolically come to represent breast cancer awareness, the puzzle piece has become the icon of autism awareness.

This paper engages the appearance of disability in contemporary Western culture. Rather than taking disability for granted as a biomedical condition, I interrogate how disability is made to appear in our culture, including its appearance as a biomedical condition. Fundamentally, disability appears to us as a trouble and, as such, cultural practices steeped in a medical paradigm are invoked as a way to rid ourselves of the trouble of disability. This trouble is transformed into the cultural requirement of making disability disappear into the normative order through conceiving of disability as a conditional feature of human life. This paper concludes by theorizing disability as excess, as too much and not enough. I demonstrate how such a conception of disability permits its normalization while disallowing any engagement with it as having anything to teach us about the social process of norming.

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