ASD as a Rising Subculture

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lol. No, just the lack of interest in my approach to Autism.

I don't see what there is to be divided about.

People with Asperger's, at least, seem to have it within them to cope with the NT world's BS. I certainly managed. Then, I'm still left with my outside-the-box style thinking, my ability to choose, when I need to, not to fixate upon conformism or social norms, rigid logical capabilities, etc.

It's really as simple as this: Mitigate the weaknesses that Asperger's brings, and capitalize upon the strengths. By the Gods, why is this so complicated for people?

And if we're some kind of emerging, superior sub-species of humanity, then we'll just out-compete the NTs naturally, just the way natural selection has been doing things for billions of years. We don't need to go around acting like Magneto.

Hi, VA Grad Student:

Oh, I have not read Jack Vance - excellent ! I will put him on my reading list

Sorry, yeah, that example was not very clear, but the book I was quoting is entirely written in abstractions like that. My personal opinion, which is by no means expert since I'm a first year Masters student and I haven't even gotten to do a study yet, is YES, exactly what you're saying. Just like Black people and LGBT people. My thought is that first aspies and later hopefully everyone on the spectrum would be just known in a "no big deal" kind of way as "different kinds of people" just like different races and orientations. IN the main culture, but also having special attributes that give them subculture status.

To elaborate:

At this point, I think we can say that there's nothing wrong with being Black, although our culture still isn't advanced enough to make being Black as socially easy as being White. You'll still find people who aren't ashamed to say that there's something wrong with having a non-standard gender or sexual orientation, but generally this also isn't something that is assumed to be a real problem, even though it's not as easy as being straight and identifying as your biological gender.

So what I've been doing is comparing autistic identity with race and gender. I'm wondering if a sort of "black is beautiful" phenomenon is already going on as people are seeing that many autistic traits give them special abilities which perhaps they might not want to trade for "normalcy." Dr. Foster seemed to be saying something about this, where some people get a sort of Superman feeling about themselves.

I do not like labels. People tend to place too much importance on them!

Its not impossible that something like that could be happening.

Look at the passion aroused on the TV Forum here about the seemingly inane subject of the character Sheldon on the "Big Bang Theory". A minority of posters hate the show and are insulted by the character, by a 100 times more people love the show and the character (who is not described on the show as being an aspie but is nontheless a kind of characture of an aspie in his behavior).

Either way- insulted or impowered- by the sitcom character it shows a group awareness.


So there are starting to be pop culture points of reference about the spectrum (for both aspies and non) . How this would evolve into a "subculture" I dont know.But there is starting to be a consciousness by the group themselves of themselves as a group- and by non spectrumites ofthem/us as a group.

Last edited by naturalplastic on 14 Aug 2012, 9:45 am, edited 1 time in total.

I don't think that an autistic culture will form because a culture is defined by a set of beings all voluntarily behaving in a certain way to be part of the group identity.

This social communication and automatically adjusting your behaviour to be part of the group is exactly what autistics lack. If you put ten aspies in a room for group therapy, either none of them will talk to each other or one of them will talk none stop about my little pony while another will talk non stop about programming in assembly language.

I think we may be facing a change in approach to autistics thanks to sites like this and to studies done by people like Francessa Happe that demonstrate that forcing aspies to behave like normal people often does more harm then good, far from 'curing' their autistic traits it just means the person is suppressing them leading to lots of stress, anxiety and depression.

what if the comunity identity is a lack of that ability.

Then you have a collection of individuals and not a 'culture'.

[quote="DC"][/quote]




isnt culture as much a collection of individuls and their actions and habits as that?

culture is at the best of times a fairly vaguely defined concept.


i think a better question would be; at what point does a collection of people, habits and mannerisms convert from a collection to a culture ?

With Autism awareness on the rise and all these movements going on you would figure autistic districts would be established in all the main cities like how San Francisco etc have LGBT districts heh. I wish I had my own community in a neighborhood where I can express myself freely but at the same time not be discriminated. With next door neighbors just like me.

ASD should never become a culture of any kind. Aspergers/Autism should never become a label or a stereotype, as all subcultures inevitably do.

could it be possible to change the way people relate to sub cuktures instead?

Aspies are not really analogous to a race or a religion.

We are somewhat equivalent to the gay community.

We are also somewhat like Alcoholics Annonymous and the recovery movement.

But thats not usually thought of as a "subculture".

There is no exact analogy. But analogies are rarely exact.

I dunno.

At some point in the future will aspie children see famous "openly aspie adults" in the media that they can have as role models?- maybe thats the question to ask.

^ This is what I'm saying, basically. I'm reading another book now, called "Outsiders" by Howard S. Becker, written in 1963, and it's about the sociology of deviance in culture. I just started it, but so far it's asking the question, "What makes someone 'act wrong' and therefore put themselves outside of society?" Becker's answer is that it is NOT THE INDIVIDUAL'S CHOICE. He says it is SOCIETY that decides that an individual is "deviant" or "wrong".

So this applies to someone who "looks wrong" (a Black person in White society), or someone who performs "wrong acts" (a homosexual person when most people are heterosexual), or someone with "wrong social mannerisms" (autism). So if you look at it this way, subcultures are not formed voluntarily, but are formed through the main society continuously discarding the same sort of people into the same pile.

That Sheldon character bothers me, but if I accidentally leave the TV on and end up watching some of that show, I admit I laugh at the aspie jokes. But then I'm not sure if it's okay for me to laugh. In some ways I feel that Sheldon is a Jar Jar Binks, shuckin' and jivin' for the neurotypicals.

But Natural Plastic is saying, it shows that there are characteristics that people recognize as "autistic" or "aspie", even if they are not identified as such. I have read a study about this. It's called "Performative Acts of Autism" and it's by Jessica Lester and Trena Paulus, although I don't think it's available for free online yet. Basically it showed that the parents of autistic kids were aware of "autistic traits" that they either said they're kids DID or DIDN'T have, thus proving that the "autistic look" is commonly known at this point. They said things like "Oh Stevie doesn't look autistic but he does sound a little autistic."