Feminist, Gender, and Sexuality Studies Commons^™

Representing Autistic Masculinity: Hegemonic Gender Performances In Contemporary Autism Films, James Samuel Kizer

All Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Other Capstone Projects

While longstanding notions of autism have conceptualized it as medicalized disability, recent scholarship has advanced theories of autism as cultural production; in other words, autism may be better understood as a synthesis of medical science, media portrayals, and societal attitudes rather than the product of any of these arenas individually. Academic inquiry into the intersection of autism and gender, though, remains largely underdeveloped. Work has been done theorizing how autistic people understand their gender but little exists regarding how cultural apparatuses actually produce it. My study, then, addresses this gap through examining media representations of autism, specifically autistic masculinity in …