Autism Speaks for Whom? Neoliberalism, Nonprofit Infrastructure, and the Economics of Autism Advocacy

Abstract

Arguably one of the best current examples of the nonprofit industrial complex in action, Autism Speaks dominates public discourses surrounding autism. Autistic people and their allies have long criticized the organization's harmful ideologies, but comparatively little attention has been given to how Autism Speaks develops its ideologies in the first place. I address this gap in the sociocultural study of autism in the present paper by situating Autism Speaks within neoliberal thought and demonstrating how those logics undergird its nonprofit infrastructure. Drawing upon critical nonprofit studies and Suárez's (2020) model for the drivers and determinants of nonprofit advocacy, I argue that neoliberal notions of medicalization, bodyminds, and labor are inherently intertwined with Autism Speaks' budget, resulting in the organization's narrow framing of autism advocacy and problematic ideology about Autistic people themselves.

A Note on Language

I utilize identify-first language in this essay (‘Autistic person’ instead of ‘person with autism’) to reflect the growing consensus among Autistic people that doing so is semantically necessary. Autism is not an experience that can be isolated from the person experiencing it, rendering person-first language problematic because “with autism” is a prepositional phrase that can be removed without changing the sentence meaning. But Autism is the meaning! Being Autistic is simultaneously salient, corporeal, discursive, and analytical; it is intrinsic to the bodyminds who possess it, which also makes it always already political. In a similar vein, I use capital-A “Autistic” when referencing Autistic people to encapsulate its political significance. See Brown (2011) and “The A Word” (2009).