Beyond disordered brains

Beyond Disordered Brains and Mother Blame

Patty DouglasB
randon University

Estee Klar
York University

Abstract

This chapter provides an overview of critical issues in autism and mothering in order to open up a complicated terrain of mother blame, deficit understandings of autism and biomedical regulation of mothers. We first briefly introduce the reader to historical currents in autism and mothering, tracing the emergence of autism as a brain-based difference and mothers’ labour as the presumed “fix” for the disorder. Along the way, we meet the “refrigerator mother” – that “cold” mother of the 1950s whose destructive love was thought to cause autism – as well as the “mother therapist” and “mother warrior” of today who must shore up all her resources to wage war against autism in her child. Next, the chapter introduces neurodiversity, feminist disability studies and critical autism studies as academic and activist movements that challenge this fraught terrain and offer new possibilities to understand “autism” more positively and to be in relation with those who have attracted the label of autism. Finally, we recommend future research directions that centre lived experience, embrace difference as fundamental to life, and value interdependence as both an ethics and a politics. The chapter also provides recommendations for further reading.

This is the final author copy of a chapter that was published in the Routledge Motherhood Companion.

Recommended Citation:

Douglas, Patty & Estee Klar. (2019). Beyond disordered brains and mother blame: Critical issues in autism and mothering. In Lynn O. Hallstein, Andrea O’Reilly, and Melinda Vandenbeld Giles (Eds.). Routledge Motherhood Companion. Routledge.