Looking Autistic
This image is somewhat extreme (I’m autistic too but nowhere near as pretty as this young woman), but it makes the point effectively that autistic people are not gremlins. Autism is not ugly. The image gives a shallow and superficial definition of beauty, young and surface level and female, but it does the job of grabbing the attention of the shallow and superficial to make the point that autistic people are beautiful in their own, very human, way. The image uses looks to humanize autism. The effectiveness of the image lies in using looks to challenge the convention which judges people by looks. In saying ‘I don’t look autistic,’ this young woman is saying precisely the opposite, she is saying I don’t look like the monstrous other that some people are still inclined to see autism as.
That negative conception of autism lies behind the statements that well-meaning people make when they say ‘see the person, not the label.’ I would agree, so long as that statement means ‘see the autistic person,’ rather than deny his or her autism on account of its supposedly negative connotations (as though these can be neatly identified with the label and discarded).
So what does ‘looking autistic’ involve? What does an autistic person look like? You may as well ask what a human being looks like. The answer is: same but different.
