Turning the Camera Around stems from something that will be familiar to most autistic people: a lifelong experience of traumatic alienation and suffering in a world designed by and for people of a totally different neurotype.
But there’s more to it than that. In all these years, I have never felt my experience reflected in the dominant narratives of autism and neurodiversity. Neither autism as disorder nor autism as difference really represent my story; and whenever they tried to do so, as they often have, it felt as though my true voice was being written out of the picture.
My story, and its erasure under those terms – that is where this tract begins. And what that erasure reveals, it takes up thereon as the true problem: societies built by and for the belief in normal, and its violent infliction on others.
Let us give it a name: Normalism.
The normal violence of adults towards children. Normal education, designed to exclude or dispose of any child who will not be broken into compliant factory fodder. Normal men, normal women, normal sexuality, normal relationships – why is it anyone who does not conform to these absurd and abusive expectations, rather than the expectations themselves, who are at worst pathologised and punished, at best still marked as ‘different’; ‘divergent’; the other?
It is not autistic people, after all, who have heaped up piles of corpses over the centuries, disembowelled truth and love on the altar of naked power, and now threaten the very ecology and climate of the Earth itself.
Is not the violent obsession with normal the true pathology? Is it not time to turn the camera around, and reverse the terms of this discussion – so that instead of problematising natural human diversity, we rather name, identify, and confront the actual driver of so much pointless suffering?
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