Tony Attwood's Minstrel Show

Yesterday, with help from Google News Alert, I came across this story from The Walrus magazine. The piece is entitled "The Anti-Socialite: Living with an Asperger's Child" and is written by a father of an adolescent boy with AS. I'm not going to discuss the entire piece, which is quite lengthy and seemingly self-contradicting at time. However, I do want to look at the role of "Asperger's guru" Tony Attwood within the piece.

Denis Seguin, the author, begins by discussing Attwood's appearance at a 2006 autism conference, and likens Attwood to a celebrity of sorts. He writes:

If Asperger’s syndrome has a patron saint, it is Tony Attwood. Born and educated in England, he now heads the Macgregor Specialist Centre in Brisbane, Australia; is an adjunct associate professor at Griffith University in Queensland; and is considered one of the world’s leading experts on AS. To many, Attwood literally wrote the book: The Complete Guide to Asperger’s Syndrome encompasses twenty-five-plus years of clinical experience and research. Having worked with more than 2,000 people (of all ages) with AS, he is a mentor to a generation of occupational therapists and a guru for parents

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So, Attwood isn't just a well-known mortal expert on AS--why, he's "a guru for parents" and the "patron saint" of Asperger's. Sounds downright messianic, though I would note that Attwood's credentials don't necessarily merit his huge celebrities. Many other professionals have worked extensively with AS individuals. Some of them actually spend time with autistic people rather than writing books and speaking at conferences. But let's look at what "blessings" this "saint" actually provides:

Onstage, Attwood is ideally suited to his audience, mostly professionals who deal with people on the autism spectrum, parents, and a few AS individuals. The information is dense but structured, the delivery spiced with pathos and humour, with mime and performance acts such as Spot the Aspy. For this routine, Attwood apes the carriage, ambulation, and focus of an adult AS male — back rigid but tilted slightly forward, arms and legs straight, laserlike eyes gazing at a point on the ground two metres in front of him. The laughter is rich with recognition.

I know many parents, including my own, have found Attwood's presentations to be quite helpful to them. But for him to incorporate impressions of autistic people into these "helpful" presentations is just unforgivable, even if these impressions were not intended to be malicious. Seguin interprets the routine as "humor," which makes it all the more troublesome from my perspective. Tropic Thunder has been quite rightfully criticized for portions of the film where a neurotypical actor pretends to be intellectually disabled for laughs. Attwood's "aping" is very much in this vain, even though his audience is quite familiar with autistic people. In fact, that makes the routine all the more unforgivable in many ways.

I consider myself to be far from humorless, but I, as an adult autistic woman with a best friend/partner who is an adult autistic man and several other friends who are autistic men, I don't find this very funny. I and the people I care about are not stereotypes, and any mannerisms which we do or do not have are not deserving of public mockery. Many autism "experts" posit that autistic people lack a sense of humor. I say that perhaps it is Attwood's sense of humor which could use some fine-tweaking. If aping an autistic man is the best way he can appeal for laughs, he needs to work on developing some better material.

Seguin said that only a few individuals with Asperger's Syndrome were present for this presentation. I wonder if anyone thought to ask those individuals how they felt about this little act. If the audience had been comprised of mostly autistic people, would Attwood have done the same? I doubt it.

If Attwood is the "patron saint of Asperger's Syndrome," then call me a heretic.