The Autistic Community Deserves Intentional Representation in Entertainment

When I was a little kid, I was teased for being autistic. They didn’t know they were teasing me for that and if I mentioned it to them today, they’d probably deny it.

But I was. Because there is no difference between mocking someone for being autistic and mocking someone’s autistic traits, even when you don’t know what those traits mean. Many people can’t recognize autistic traits unless they follow the strict stereotype of “young white boy who’s obsessed with trains.” This leaves many people of color, young girls, and undiagnosed adults without access to diagnosis, and thereby the tools they need to live their lives.

This also means that writers will frequently write characters they don’t realize are textbook autistic, especially when that character fits into one of the above groups. This usually happens because writers take inspiration from the world around them. They see someone with unusual traits and think, Huh I should write someone like that. It’s not until an autistic audience sees it that anyone realizes this character is likely autistic.

We often say in the autistic community that people are good at accidentally creating autistic characters, and not so good at intentionally creating them. It’s how characters like Sherlock Holmes, get “autistic-coded,” yet creators don’t acknowledge them as autistic. In Arthur Conan Doyle’s case, he’s long dead and can’t formally acknowledge it if he even wanted to. However, many creators have followed the same pattern. Because so often, autistic characters on television and films follow that well-worn pattern of “young white boy obsessed with trains.” Sometimes it’s “teenage white by obsessed with penguins” as in Netflix’s Atypical, or “adult white man with savant syndrome” as in ABC’s The Good Doctor.

Now, I applaud those shows for what they are trying to do, which is normalize autism and bring autistic characters to a larger audience, but they still follow the schematic. This leaves many POC and girls out of the representation. I have seen one autistic girl on television, Fiona from CBS’s Elementary and one POC autistic character, Abed from NBC’s Community. While there may be others I simply haven’t heard of, it’s a trend I and the autistic community are sick of.

On the other hand, while autistic white boys and men have these characters, they are often terribly stereotyped into “Rain Man” figures, leaving little accurate representation even for white men who happen to be autistic.

This is where fandom comes in.

One of my dear friends who is also autistic introduced me to a character on Star Trek: Deep Space Nine named Julian Bashir. He canonically had a developmental disorder, but it was never specified which one. Nearly every autistic person I know who has watched the show knows it to be autism. Now, would the creators agree? We don’t know. It doesn’t really matter that much, because we’ve seen the evidence for ourselves. That’s what autistic representation is made of for us: putting together the pieces and claiming it’s proof.

We don’t get to see ourselves on screen, accurately portrayed. More frequently, we’re used as inspiration porn for non-autistic people.

My current special interest, Star Wars, has no canon autistic characters, but we read into it what we can. I know many people who headcanon Luke Skywalker as autistic, and I personally headcanon all Force-Sensitive characters as autistic, which would take more time than I have here to explain. (That black and white mentality, being able to manipulate the world around them as an allegory for sensory issues many autistic people have? Hmmmm?)

We are left with scraps at the table for representation. This is even more true for autistic people of color and autistic girls. We need more. We deserve more. Stereotypes not only hurt our perception of ourselves, it means people who need help are going undiagnosed and unassisted. We’ve been here forever. We make up one in 36 of humanity, at least. It’s time to show that on screen.

 

About The Author

Rachael is an autistic double major in Film and Video and Women, Gender, and Sexuality student. She also majorly loves fandom. Her Twitter is @rachaelizabet.