Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of figures
- Permissions
- Preface: questions
- Introduction: autism and narrative
- 1 Presences: autistic difference
- 2 Idiots and savants
- 3 Witnessing
- 4 Boys and girls, men and women
- 5 In our time: families and sentiments
- Conclusion: causing/curing/caring
- Acknowledgements
- Select bibliography
- Index
Introduction: autism and narrative
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of figures
- Permissions
- Preface: questions
- Introduction: autism and narrative
- 1 Presences: autistic difference
- 2 Idiots and savants
- 3 Witnessing
- 4 Boys and girls, men and women
- 5 In our time: families and sentiments
- Conclusion: causing/curing/caring
- Acknowledgements
- Select bibliography
- Index
Summary
I
Listening to the radio while driving into work one morning in 2006, I heard an advertisement for a new breakfast show that was about to start on BBC's 6 Music, one of the Corporation's digital channels. The ad itself was mainly a monologue by one of the presenters – I missed the name – full of rapid-fire speech that captured what seemed to be an intended manic personality. I presume the idea was that the programme could be sold by getting any potential audience interested in the personalities of the hosts – pretty much the idea behind any breakfast show. The words didn't make any real impression until I suddenly heard the voice say: ‘I've got OCD and he's got ADHD, so how can you not tune in and listen?’ My response was to be quite startled. As I took that trip to work, I was thinking, in a general sense, through the issues of this book, namely how narrative representations of autism are becoming increasingly common in contemporary culture, and how there seemed to be a public awareness of the condition and others like it that had formed but had not, as yet, really been analysed. Suddenly, listening to the radio, I felt that I was being far too slow in my considerations. Here was a programme in part being sold, quickly and in an almost throw-away manner, precisely because of an assumed public knowledge of neurobehavioural difference, using acronyms that would have been meaningless just a few years before. In addition, I realized that the conditions mentioned were here being used not as indicators of medical difference or personal difficulty, but as badges of personality, signs of eccentricity that a public culture could, and would, recognize. Clearly, there were more narratives, and they were doing more, than I had grasped. People might now know more about the relationship between the brain and behaviour, might speak of ‘cognitive impairment’ instead of ‘mental retardation’, but for the BBC to advertise itself in such a way was obviously something else altogether.
The general public awareness of autism and other neurobehavioural conditions invites a number of considerations.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Representing AutismCulture, Narrative, Fascination, pp. 1 - 26Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2008