TURNING THE CAMERA AROUND

A Treatise on Autism and Normalism

Disorder or difference?

It’s the wrong question. The real pathology lurks all along on the other side of the camera.

 ‘The problem is not autism, autistic people, or autistic characteristics. The real problem is what I shall define as Normalism, and the normalistic societies built to rearrange all aspects of life in the interests of people who believe in, and inflict on others, the illusion of normal.’

This text is an attempt to drastically re-frame the ways we talk about autism. To invite us instead to gaze back through the lens and confront the abusive societies which, in their mad quest to pressure everyone into conformity, have drenched the journey of humankind in a tempest of arrogance, violence, cruelty, hypocrisy and lies.

Normalism, not autism, is what has heaped suffering upon countless human beings, abolished the very concept of truth, and now bleeds the living Earth to breaking point. Is it not time to turn the camera around?

Turning the Camera Around includes:

• An account of my own experiences of normalistic social abuses, and the failure of conventional autism storytelling to represent them;

• A brief history of autism – as not a medical concept, but a political and cultural one which emerged from a history compromised by eugenics;

• A deconstruction of the normalist gaze, through a reversal of its own diagnostic frameworks;

• And ‘Through the Mirror’ – a thought experiment, on how normalists might be viewed in a world where they never seized the power to reshape society in their own image.