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Argument, Autistic Pride Day Symposium 2024
Sandra Thom-Jones said screens cast autistic people as burdens or superheroes
In short
At the 2024 Autistic Pride Day Symposium in Sydney, the autistic writer and researcher said film and television show autistic characters but rarely autistic people, and that The Good Doctor combines both stereotypes.
Read it instead, 5 minutesThe transcript
The story
Sandra Thom-Jones began with a distinction. Film, television and books are full of autistic characters, she told the media panel at the Autistic Pride Day Symposium in Sydney in June 2024, and “that’s not the same as seeing autistic people.” The portrayals, she said, are mostly created by people who are not autistic, and they are stereotyped in a consistent way.
What appears on screen, she said, is mostly autistic males, typically young and white, cast in one of two roles. The first is the burden. The family is trying to cope, the autistic person is presented as the problem, and the story is about the stress it causes. The second is the superhero, the autistic person with great skill, the amazing doctor, lawyer or scientist, whose talent compensates for all the problems and burdens that are assumed to come with being autistic. Neither role, she said, presents autistic people as whole people who are valuable for who they are.
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Sources the story draws on
- Representation of autism in fictional media: A systematic review of media content and its impact on viewer knowledge and understanding of autism (opens in a new tab), Autism (SAGE) (Jones, Gordon and Mizzi)
- En empirisk studie av autisme på film og TV (Autism on film and TV: an empirical study) (opens in a new tab), Tidsskrift for Norsk psykologforening (Anders Nordahl-Hansen, Magnus Tøndevold, Roald A. Øien, Sue Fletcher-Watson)
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