Minding otherwise: autism, disability aesthetics, and the performance of neurological difference
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New York University
Abstract
This dissertation considers how autism and neurological disability have been persistently
unsettled and unruly conceptual categories that have troubled the ways in which the human
sensorium is governed, regulated, represented, theorized, and imagined. Concentrating on the
postwar period to the present, the study focuses on how the historically unsettled category of
autism has been shaped by the broader historical, conceptual, and aesthetic contours of what I
describe as the politics of neurological difference. Using the critically capacious lens of
performance and the methodological resources of performance studies, the project tracks shifts in
scientific expertise, social policy, and cultural representations of autism, mental disability, and
the nature of the mind and the brain. The project assesses how emerging concepts such as
neurodiversity and neurological difference might become significant critical terms for studying
disability, performance, and aesthetics. Case studies include discussions of the films and
cartographic drawings created by the radical psychologist and educator Fernand Deligny in
collaboration with autistic adolescents in the 1960s and 1970s; collaborations between the
experimental theater director Robert Wilson and the autistic poet, artist, and performer
Christopher Knowles, with a particular emphasis on Knowles’s contributions to the influential
1976 experimental opera Einstein on the Beach; contemporary video and performance art by
autistic activist Amanda Baggs and multidisciplinary artist Wu Tsang; and the case of Avonte
Oquendo, a 14-year-old nonverbal autistic middle-school student whose disappearance from his
New York school prompted one of the most extensive urban search efforts of the past decade.
The dissertation uses these cases to develop an account of neurodiversity as a minoritarian
sensory formation that calls for the cultivation of other modes of perceiving, recognizing, and
accommodating the different shapes that personhood can take.
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Hilton, L. J. (2016). Minding otherwise: Autism, disability aesthetics, and the performance of neurological difference. Retrieved from ProQuest Digital Dissertations. (AAT 10139649).