Autism and Mothering: Pursuing the Meaning of Care

This dissertation investigates the cultural production and lived meanings of the identity ‘autism mother’ from its emergence in 1943 to the present day. Drawing on critical and interpretive methods and theories within disability studies, informed by philosophical sociology, poststructuralist and phenomenological philosophies, cultural and maternal studies and feminist philosophies of science, my project explores the shifting emergences, historical traces and cultural meanings of this new mother identity. The analysis addresses psychoanalytic understandings of the ‘cold’ mother thought to cause autism in her child during the 1940s-1960s; the ‘mother therapist’ of the 1970s-1990s who must utilize scientifically guided techniques to achieve a ‘normal’ child; and today’s ‘mother warrior’ who must intensively fight against the so-called rising threat of autism. I take up the identity ‘autism mother’ as a way to explore, and offer an alternative to, Western patriarchal, racist, scientific and capitalist modes of power, knowledge production and subjectivities that are captured by cultural understandings of autism as an undesirable neurodevelopmental difference, non-autistic life as the only life worth living, and mothers as culpable for the remediation of their autistic child. The historical and social significance of everyday text and talk during 1943-2015 by and about autism mothers in the mass media and popular science, as well as focus groups held with autism mothers in Toronto in the fall of 2013, are analyzed. This work reveals the identity ‘autism mother’ as a key cultural contradiction through which scientific, bourgeois, white understandings of autism, and a contradictory femininity have come to regulate the good/bad mother in new ways, alongside the ever-present complexity and meaning of caring. Emerging from my analysis of everyday texts and focus group dialogues with mothers, I propose pedagogic care as an important alternative that embodies a creative critique of and resistance to exclusionary, and sometimes violent, biomedical and professional regimes. Critically pursuing questions of the meaning of ‘autism’ and ‘autism mother’ as culturally produced, lived identities integrally linked to knowledge production and power opens space for new meanings.Ph.D