Evil Autistic Masterplan for Academia
with Ekat Osipova
Autistic people are often the “good” cripples: visually not too distinctive, causing little bother, excelling at some sort of GDP-relevant job in the IT-sector, and grateful to be tolerated (in the same sense as “good immigrants” adapting perfectly and working hard to compensate their implied otherness, prioritising the dominant culture over their own, expressing constant gratefulness despite accepting standards lower than those extended to members of the dominant culture, and most importantly, never asking for anything).
“Good” autistic people are often marketed as “geniuses”, qualifying autistic existence through autistic usefulness in terms of workforce—“use the potential of autistic people,” German social innovation company auticon proudly tout on their homepage to promote autistic IT-services to companies. This is nothing new. The “good” autistic person has been described before by Hans Asperger, who doted on his “miniature adults” or “professor[s]” that displayed the characteristics of a diagnosis later named after him, a diagnosis setting them apart from those autistic and otherwise disabled children who couldn’t make themselve useful, whom he dismissed to the children’s euthanasia station Am Spiegelgrund.
The academic industry is often criticised for being extremely competitive, stressful and exploitative, but such critiques rarely mention that disabled, neurodivergent, chronically ill or mentally ill academics are disproportionately impacted. Many discussions about the system being “broken” end in patch-it advice for individual coping—the kind of self-care that privileged people engage in: therapy, getting a new hobby, touching grass. The alternative is, of course: leaving. In this way, Academia follows a eugenic logic, making it impossible to those of us who do not make up for our differences to survive within.
Autism is only destigmatised or celebrated when the capitalist system profits off it. By framing inclusion or acceptance as conditional on competence, strengths and productivity, people with those disabilities that do not happen to bring a system-relevant ‘superpower’ with them are deemed unworthy of existence in a given context. Those of us who are not inspirational “automatons” (also an Asperger quote, eerily similar to current framings of autism) often wonder: how many of us, for how long, can survive here? Which in turn makes us ask: How can we make room for more of us? What does it mean, inspired by r/evilautism, to be a ‘bad’ autistic who unapologetically and confidently thrives in Academia on their own terms? Can such a thing be acheived?
More to ourselves than to any readers, we hence documented our everyday practices as autistic academics that do struggle, from individual coping mechnisms to stay afloat in the system as is, to hopes and plans for changing it for the future.
You can read the entire plan in the living document (it’s google drive cause we figured it would be the most accessible). Or, you can print out the arguably more aesthetically pleasing zine, which is split up in fragments that you can roll up into handy little scrolls:
