Building Mechanical Boys: A Raced and Gendered History of Autism in the United States

A study of how discourse around autism served as a means of espousing changing views on race, gender, class, disability, intelligence, productivity, potential, and ultimately the definition of humanity in the mid to late 20th century United States. Beginning in the 1940s with the earliest writing on autism as a discrete diagnosis and continuing to the eve of the purported “autism epidemic” in the 1990s, I trace how autism became known as a white, male, middle-class disorder associated with technocratic intelligence in both the clinical and popular imagination. In doing so, I explore how medical professionals, clinicians, researchers, parent advocates, educators, and writers made arguments about the “humanity,” “worth,” “educability,” and “potential” of autistic people in ways that challenged or reified mid-twentieth century U.S. conceptions of race, gender, and disability.