Is Autism a Superpower?
It can be. But it usually isn’t.
As an autistic, your identity might seem fluid. It might be hard to feel rooted in anything because so much of your time is spent in a performative role, masking to an audience, each person being different from everyone else. It might make you sometimes ask yourself: What do I believe? About myself and others.
This is how I feel about the question of whether autism is a disability or a superpower. Depending on the type of person I’m around, I can be inclined to think either view is correct — so much so that sometimes I’m disinclined to be open to hearing another person’s point of view on the subject.
But I’ve concluded that by and large, it is not a superpower and it is a disability.
The Medical Model Versus the Social Model of Disability
I grew up saturated with the medical model of disability, being a child of the late 70s, 80s and 90s. I never heard anything to the contrary. The medical model was gospel according to the professionals of the era. As a young special education student in the 80s and 90s, I lived, breathed, and internalized this model. Nowhere was I ever exposed to the social model of disability, and it wouldn’t be until the year 2004 that I heard of it after I received my diagnosis.
The medical model of disability breeds shame.
When I think of how our politics work, one side, in particular, emphasizes personal responsibility, individuality, and pulling oneself up by one’s bootstraps, lifting oneself by one's earlobes to fit oneself into the capitalist meritocracy where one earns their share of the pie — no hand-outs. As Ja’Net DuBois and Jeff Barry wrote in The Jeffersons theme song…
Fish don’t fry in the kitchen;
Beans don’t burn on the grill.
Took a whole lotta tryin’
Just to get up that hill…We finally got a piece of the pie.
Or, as Archie Bunker famously sang in the opening to All In The Family…
Didn’t need no welfare state
Everybody pulled his weight
Gee, our old Lasalle ran great
Those were the days!
After all, that’s what school trains every American child to do for the rest of their lives. Pull their weight. Children wake up at 6:15 in the morning, quickly eat breakfast, take seven classes a day with four minutes to shift gears between periods, and then come home to finish hours of homework and all of their extracurriculars. Never mind that it may be overwhelming and not objectively commensurate with a person’s age to work nonstop without much of a moment’s rest, neurotypical or not. But, hey, it’s training for life. Or so we tell ourselves. Life is the law of the jungle. We need to train children to be as “normal” as possible so they can survive. I’m not the first to comment that, in many ways, school can feel like daily incarceration.
This is the medical model at work, and I believe it appeals to the conservative angels of our nature. If you’re different or disabled, the onus is on you and your family to fix the issues that ail you so you conform to corporate America’s future role as an employee more effectively. It’s your responsibility to get the treatment you need within a hierarchically structured medical profession that will do anything it can to get you to “overcome” your disability. If you need more than the system or your insurance can provide you, that’s just too bad. Your parents should have worked harder and earned more money to help you better.
The social model is more progressive and, in my view, is the correct way to approach disability. Instead of trying to change the individual, the focus becomes on changing society to accommodate the individual so that their natural talents can flourish in the right environment. The social model sees the whole of humanity as having a collective responsibility to ensure the well-being of disabled people — accepting them as disabled people without trying to change them.
So what about Superpowers?
But if the social model was a complete reality today, autistic people wouldn’t still need to mask their true selves. It hasn’t entirely worked, despite a road paved with good intentions.
To compensate for this lack of structural understanding autistic people face, the notion of the “autistic superpower” was born. Greta Thunberg famously declared autism to be her superpower several years ago, and this sparked a deep resonance within some individuals and segments of the autism community. Greta’s ability to cut through the bullshit and see things as they are does indeed give her a unique ability to reach people on an intellectual and emotional level regarding the existential issue of climate change. If she plays any role, even a small one, in extending human life in the 21st century and into the 22nd, and she very well might, we can rightfully call her a superhero.
Daniel Tamnet is another such person who some people might view as having an autism superpower. Anyone who can recite Pi from memory to 22,514 decimal points confounds the mind — it seems beyond what a human brain can do.
Or Stephen Wiltshire, the autistic man who can draw entire cities from memory simply by flying above them once. What mortal being can do this?
Or Derek Paravinci, an autistic blind ‘savant’ who can play any piece by memory after hearing it just once.
This list can be a lot longer than the scope of this article, but suffice it to say there is no shortage of autistic individuals with superpowers.
Superpowers Are An Ableist Concept
The problem is that there is also no shortage of autistic individuals who don’t have superpowers.
Don’t get me wrong, I think autism has helped me in specific ways. As an example of just one, it gave me certain advantages as a tennis player in seeing patterns in my opponents despite my small physical stature and unathletic build. But that doesn’t qualify me as having a superpower.
Seeing autistic individuals as having superpowers across the board is problematic. It fetishizes autistic people. It creates unrealistic expectations that most autistics can’t live up to, and if they don’t, it can lower our self-esteem. It risks tokenizing certain autistic people who may not represent most autistic people writ large. It diverts attention from everyday successes that autistic people should absolutely have the right to celebrate, such as meeting a new friend or taking up a new hobby. It reinforces stereotypes that autistic people can “save the world” since Elon Musk (?) and Greta Thunberg think they are trying to do so.
Coming full circle, we mentioned how the medical model values training disabled people to conform to fit within the capitalist structure in American society. The same is true of glorifying those with supposed superpowers. We are celebrating overproductivity when we engage in the superpower narrative. We are commodifying neurodiversity by reducing it to a population that corporate America tries to take advantage of — often with autistic people who don’t even possess superpowers to begin with. Superpowers are marketable, flashy, and stand out amongst the competition. Sure, it’s very commercial, but it is not representative or inclusive as a concept for the autism population.
Sometimes the best articles are found on this platform, not in the New York Times or the Washington Post. From Sarah Reade, published in Artfully Autistic…
Let’s talk about what a superpower is; according to dictionary.com, it’s “power greater in scope or magnitude than that which is considered natural or has previously existed.” Now, everyone — not just autistics — have strengths and each person’s ability level in these strengths is different.
But assigning autistics with strengths “greater in scope or magnitude” than the norm is harmful.
One word comes to mind — savant.
Hollywood has done a great job of creating the stereotype that all autistics are savants. Characterizing autistic strengths as “superpowers” reinforces this assumption.
“The reality, however, is that few people with autism are savants, though many are very intelligent. It’s been estimated that one out of every ten autistic people are savants,” said Lisa Jo Ruby.
No, I’m not a savant. Frankly, I haven’t met an autistic who is. And considering that so few are savants, it’s dangerous to stereotype our strengths as such.
When an employer expects superpower level skills, the autistic employee feels the need to live up to them — an unrealistic expectation to be sure. Because what happens when an employee doesn’t live up to their employer’s expectations? Sorry, Charlie — here’s your pink slip.
It’s dangerous and harmful to assume that all autistic people have extraordinary skills. Autistic spectrum disorder is called a spectrum for a reason. We are all different and blurring the line between autistic strengths and superpowers can create unreasonable expectations.
Amen.
We’ve come a long way from when the world only saw autism and disabilities through the lens of the medical model. But we’ve overcorrected and reinforced stereotypes that are paradoxically more aligned with the medical model.
In concluding this exploration of the complex narrative surrounding autism, it’s clear that while strides have been made in shifting perceptions, the journey toward a genuinely inclusive and realistic understanding remains fraught with challenges. The superpower narrative, while empowering for some, inadvertently echoes capitalist virtues of productivity and exceptionalism, creating a skewed representation of autism that fails to encompass the diverse experiences of those on the spectrum. This narrative risks overshadowing the daily struggles and achievements of many autistic individuals, pushing them into a corner of unrealistic expectations and tokenism.
Autism is not a one-dimensional trait defined by extraordinary abilities or deficits; it is a spectrum of experiences, each unique and valid in its own right. By glamorizing certain aspects and neglecting others, we not only misrepresent the reality of autism but also risk perpetuating a cycle where the worth of an individual is measured against their ability to fit into a narrow mold of societal expectations.
The medical model’s focus on conforming to normative standards and the superpower narrative’s emphasis on exceptionalism overlook the fundamental need for a society that adapts to embrace neurodiversity in all its forms. Actual progress lies not in swinging between extremes of perception but in finding a balanced understanding that recognizes the strengths, challenges, and, most importantly, the individuality of each person on the autism spectrum. It’s time to step beyond stereotypes and simplistic narratives, fostering a culture that values autistic individuals not for their perceived superpowers or their ability to conform but for their unique contributions as themselves. Amen to a future where autism is seen not through the lens of superpowers or deficits but through the diverse and rich spectrum of human experience.
