Buying time: The S/pace of Advocacy and the Cultural Production of Autism

Abstract

This paper addresses contemporary neoliberal time and its normative understanding of developmental time. As autism is framed as a growing risk to the 'good life' of neoliberal development, autism advocacy emerges as that which must neutralize this risk by targeting individual bodies and minds to secure 'better' (i.e., more normative) futures for all. I ask: how is the space and pace of advocacy working to constitute the relational subjectivities of both the 'advocate' and the 'advocated for'? I examine and analyze two cultural artifacts: one mundane (a special series Starbucks coffee cup aimed at raising autism awareness) and the other spectacular (the United Nations' World Autism Awareness Day resolution). I read these artifacts as prolific, productive and powerful sites of meaning making that shape collective experiences of the passing of time (i.e., as either too slow or too fast) as well as our understandings of bodies in time (i.e., as being either 'on time' or 'late').

(Dis)Embodied Disclosure in Higher Education: A Co-Constructed Narrative

“…According to Titchkosky (2010), Western bureaucratic practice socially organizes the meaning and appearance of disability, understood as a category of interpretation, in such a way as to make it fit a "not-yet" timeframe. We use Titchkosky's analysis of disability within the context of the not-yet time of disability to help us to make sense of this experience of waiting to tell-fearful, hopeful, and frustrating (for more on disability temporality see a special issue of Disability Stud-(Dis)Embodying Disclosure in Higher Education / K. Aubrecht & N. La Monica ies Quarterly, 2010;McGuire, 2013). How many experiences as a student and instructor can be described in terms of waiting?…”

Living fast and dangerously? Spatio‐temporalities of happy and healthful smoking futures

“…Especially when time is a valuable commodity, techniques of ‘saving’ and ‘spending’ time become inflected through a moral lens. In this regard, smokers are dubbed as undesirable neoliberal workers and citizens of the future, because they are engaging in temporal practices that culminate in a ‘waste of time’ (McGuire, ).…”

As If You Have a Choice: Autism mothers and the remaking of the human

“…Motivated by her fierceness, grief and love, this mother works for a future in which her child (and indeed the world) is free of autism, as an assurance of their future happiness and well-being. The embodied differences of autism transgress the normative human demanded in the context of late modernity: the self-interested, rational, autonomous and self-governing consumer subject (McGuire 2013). Already alluded to in my opening quotation, autism mother identities that grieve the loss of this subject and enact love through campaigns against autism thus contain a most "hateful" and unethical duty (Derrida 1995): the implication of an autism mother's very love and identity in the normative violence imposed on transgressive bodies within western bio-medical, colonialist and global capitalist regimes (Rose 1999a;McGuire 2011a;Wynter 2003Wynter , 2006.…”

“…What's more, within the United Nations process, health is now considered a fundamental human right. In other words, this version of health now includes the right to be free of autism (McGuire 2013), or, at least, to be as free of it as possible by western means, which again implicates a particular shape of "mother" the world over (United Nations 2013;World Health Assembly 2013b). This suggests that emerging neoliberal autism mother subjectivities are governmental, implicitly operating as western colonial translations of happiness, health and identity that link one's very love and identity to global health and capitalist regimes (Rose 1999b;Foucault 1982).…”

“…I was not white, it was assumed that I was not educated and therefore he was labeled emotionally disturbed." As we shall see, while "autism" and "autism mother" remain privileged white and western identities today, perhaps one of the most significant and troubling shifts occurring in the present global health context is the push by autism mothers and advocacy organizations in the U.S and U.K., and by United Nations bodies to expand these western identities -and their subsequent biomedical treatment -to as many nations as possible world-wide (Autism Speaks Global Autism Public Health Initiative 2013;Rosanoff 2013;McGuire 2013).…”