Unmothering Autism: Ethical Disruptions and Affirming Care

Centers the previously marginalized perspectives of mothers and autistic individuals to affirm their knowledge of living well together in, and through, differences.

As global rates of autism diagnosis rise, dominant cultural representations continue to define autism as a tragic neurological disorder. As primary caregivers and advocates, mothers are centrally implicated in the impulse to find both cause and cure.

Unmothering Autism emerged from Patty Douglas’s desire to understand a contradiction: she and her two sons, one who identifies as autistic, experienced beauty living together, while their public encounters with doctors, school professionals, and agencies were fraught and sometimes violent. In this book, Douglas offers a critical history of popular and biomedical assumptions about autism, expressed through shifting social constructs that blame or valorize maternal care. She also intersperses her own insights throughout and shares conversations she has had with other ＂autism mothers.＂

This book theorizes an ＂ethics of disruption,＂ reorienting us to autism and autistic people as valuable and fundamentally human.

Patty Douglas is associate professor of disability studies, the inaugural chair in student success and wellness, and co-director of the Centre for Community Engagement and Social Change in the Faculty of Education at Queen’s University. She leads Re-Storying Autism (www.restoryingautism.com), a multimedia storytelling project located in Canada, the United Kingdom, and Aotearoa (New Zealand), and she speaks internationally. She is also a senior research affiliate at the Re-Vision Centre for Art and Social Justice at the University of Guelph. Patty identifies as neurodivergent and invisibly disabled.