Main description:

Within capitalism, the Autism Industrial Complex (AIC) produces both autism as commodity and the methods of intervention to deal with it. Comprised of ideological, rhetorical, material, and economic infrastructures, the AIC is not only a variety of businesses and industries that capitalize and profit from it. In the production of autism as commodity, the AIC also produces that commodity's market, its consumers, and its monopoly control of that market through production for consumption of need for, consent to, and legitimacy of interventionist logics. Given this, almost anyone can capitalize on and profit from autism. And within the AIC, autistic people--their very bodies--function as the raw materials from which this industrial complex is built, even as their very identities and selves become unwitting, and often unwilling, products of the AIC. Autism, Inc. is essential reading for a variety of audiences, from healthcare providers to educators to parents.

Perfect for courses such as: Introduction to Critical Autism Studies; Disability Studies--Theory, Policy, Practice; Disability & Rhetoric; Disability & Cultural Studies; Doctoral Seminar in Disability Studies; Cultural Foundations of Disability in Education

Contents:

Acknowledgments
Foreword - Anne McGuire
Part I: Forging The Autism Industrial Complex: Manufacturing Foundational Commodities (1943-1987)
1. Autism, Inc.: The Autism Industrial Complex
by Alicia A. Broderick and Robin Roscigno
2. Consuming Autism as Social Problem and the Cultural Logic of Intervention
by Alicia A. Broderick and Robin Roscigno
Part II: (Re)Branding and Marketing the AIC: Manufacturing Markets, Consumers, & Consumer Confidence (1987-present)
3. Rhetoric and Neoliberalism: On (Re)Branding and Consuming Hope
4. The Politics of Hope: Autism and "Recovery [to Normalcy]"
5. The Politics of Truth: Deploying Scientism in ABA Rhetoric
6. The Politics of Fear: The Fires that Forged the Economic Apparatus of the AIC
Part III: The Economic Apparatus of the AIC: Incorporation, Legislation, and Capital Investment (1998-present)
7. Intervention, Inc.: Nonprofit Corporations and Venture Capital
8. Prevention, Inc.: The Cultural Logic of Prevention, Basic Research, Hedging Bets, and Perennial (re)Branding
Part IV: Autism and Biocapital: On Precarity and Futurity
9. Autism and Biocapitalist Emergences: Biopolitical Technologies of Control
10. On Being Autistic in Neoliberal Capitalist Ruins: Endemic Precarity and Autistic Futurity
About the Author
Index