Misfit Managed: Empty Fortresses, Social Robots, and Irony in Autism Research

• In Event: Creative Misfits - I: Crafting Misfits: Technosocial Constructions of Disability

Abstract

Bruno Bettleheim defined autism as a condition of selflessness. The child was an empty fortress, into which personhood had to be poured by dedicated therapists. Later, Lovaas would describe autistic children as “having all the elements of a person” -- but personhood again would require constructing through “screams, slaps, and love”. Diagnostic measures would come to reinforce tropes of autistic uncanniness -- monotonous speech, jerky movements, systematic, over-logical minds, robotic affect. Throughout the short clinical history of autism, the figuration of Autistic as Robot -- misfit android, denizen of the uncanny valley -- remains constant. Today, Milo and other robots are being developed and pitched as therapeutic tools to intervene in the social (under)development of autistic children. Milo has a monotonous voice, jerky, discoordinated movements, an unsettling affect, and his behavior is entirely predicated on a logic system of finite states and transitions. Somehow, we are disordered because we are “too” robotic. Somehow, we can be cured by … robots? This presentation will draw upon the work of Melanie Yergaue, Anne McGuire, Julia Miele Rodas, and others in Critical Autism Studies to reflect, critique, and disrupt our understandings of autism as deficit and disorder. Popular studies of robotic assisted social interventions for autism will be analyzed for the ironic tensions between their understanding of autistic traits and their hypothesis about how robots can regress these traits toward a normative mean.

Author

• Rua Mae Williams, University of Florida