White Flight from Idiocy
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 11280665 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Ittai Orr (corresponding author) |
| Year | 2025 |
| Volume | 43 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 59-82 |
| Publication date | 2025-12-01 |
| Peer Reviewed | Yes |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Social Text (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0164-2472 • E-ISSN: 1527-1951 |
| Publisher | Duke University Press (PUBLISHER • US) |
| DOI | 10.1215/01642472-11960459 |
| OpenAlex | W4417513017 |
| Language | EN |
| References cited | 13 |
Arguing against the notion that autism was waiting to be discovered before its emergence as a unique diagnosis in the late 1930s, this article traces autism's invention to the demand for a category that would preserve the “cognitive potentialities” of neurodivergent white middle-class children in the context of a panic surrounding older, racially disqualifying categories like “idiocy” and “feeble-mindedness.” Texts by authors including Willa Cather, Leo Kanner, Hans Asperger, Bernard Rimland, and Temple Grandin shed light on the conditions that established the apparently paradoxical discourse of autism as both privilege and curse — as disability and eccentricity. The prevalence of families with means in early autism studies; the whiteness of autism in twentieth-century popular media; the paleolithic imaginary of the contemporary antivaccination movement; and the recent turn to evolutionary defenses of autistic thinking as a valuable part of humanity's “genetic legacy” all have roots in the racial “biopolitics” first described by Michel Foucault in his analysis of the ways late nineteenth-century ruling classes managed their own biological functions. Autism (along with other categories like Asperger's syndrome, high-functioning autism, and “the geek mind”) owes its paradoxical status to its earliest function as a waiting room in which members of the ruling classes were able to briefly place neurodivergent children in anticipation of some future intellectual virtuosity. Ultimately, the story of autism presented here invites scholars to consider how the logic of eugenics extends beyond its supposed expiration in the 1940s into current debates about autism, parenting, and neurodiversity
Autism · Biopower · Context (archaeology · Curse · Frith · Mohawk · Remorse · The Imaginary · White (mutation · Autism Spectrum Disorder Research · Historical Psychiatry and Medical Practices · Neuroethics, Human Enhancement, Biomedical Innovations
| Citation velocity | historical |
|---|---|
| Highly cited | No |