Minding otherwise: autism, disability aesthetics, and the performance of neurological difference

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.