I wrote this essay for my disability module of a class I attended at the University of Cape Town called Art, Theory and Society. It was run by Dr. Portia Malatjie (who was just amazing). We would spend each week deconstructing coloniality by learning how colonialism has fabricated what we call 'normal.' I had to use a case study to unpack how these norms are created and whether they are subverted or mirrored back by my chosen piece of art. I chose to unpack the ableism I saw in Netflix's Love on the Spectrum as I was grappling with my own diagnosis at the time and the show had just come out. My partner at the time had showed it to me with good intentions, they found it to be a sweet show, cute, but I found it deeply unsettling. I am so grateful for the language this class provided me with in understanding those feelings. Thank the gods for those that have overthought so that I may not be alone in my overthinking today. Thank the gods for words like normativity and infantilisation.
Recently comedians Delilah Orizaba and Victoria Flynn posted an amazing skit about how the aspects of autistic people that aren't cutesy or sexless have to be curated out of the show in order for the producers to create the kind of narratives they want. This video made me so happy, as I was horrified to realise that Love on the Spectrum has continued to chug along, and reached it's fourth season just this month. It was just nice to know people were still thinking and talking about the ways this show fails autistic people. I felt excited enough to comment and said I'd written an essay about this show and how much it grates me and there seemed to be some people interested in reading it so here it is. I wrote it when I was 21 and it's a little fancy schmancy, but it was a university course and I had to make out like I knew what I was talking about. Thank you to Delilah Orizaba for her comedy and her work in renewing my desire to revisit this topic and in encouraging me to share my essay. I'm so grateful to the autistic people whose art make me feel comfortable in identifying as autistic, especially when shows like this one make me want to hide away forever.
In this essay I will be discussing autism and its relations to the conditions of normalcy. I will use my own experiences as an autistic person, the dynamics of ableism, and the conditions under which autism is stigmatized in order to construct a sense of normalcy for neurotypical people and the social norms that they have established. Using interviews, shot choices, editing and scoring of the first episode of the Australian documentary Netflix show Love on the Spectrum (O’Clery, 2020), I will identify how the show summatively misunderstands Autistic individuals in its very structure. I will also use this show as a way to interrogate the norms of heterosexual dating practices and how unwritten scripts in the dating world are what restrict autistic and neurotypical individuals from finding happiness in romance. It is not autism which holds back autistics from love, but rather it is the structural norms themselves that misconceive love.
In the words of Lennard Davis, “the ‘problem’ is not the person with disabilities; the problem is the way that normalcy is constructed to create the ‘problem’ of the disabled person.” (Davis, 2016: 1)
Ableism is a broad concept which tries to delineate “disabled” people from “able-bodied” people using ever shifting definitions of mental and physical well-being. It is closer to an ontological theory than to any lived experience of human bodies. The label of “disabled” is applied to people who are perceived as lacking certain fundamentals of a preconceived and poorly defined “normal” human. Sensory differences, like blindness or deafness, mental health experiences such as bipolar disorder or autism spectrum disorder, or physical experiences such as limps or a missing limb, are all grouped under the umbrella of disability. These and other supposed disabilities differentiate the normal body from the disabled body.
This definition is arbitrary, as these are aspects of life that affect nearly every living person at one point or another. The mere passage of time and the effect age has on every human body can be seen as a disabling factor. Every human individual exists upon a scale of visible and invisible traits of wellness. Everyone struggles at some point in their life to viably relate to a publicly defined capacity of efficient, workable, productive happiness. The loss of a limb, or a sense, can happen at any moment due to trauma, be it psychological or physical. The label of “disabled” therefore means almost nothing, and instead points to a nebulous underclassing of certain kinds of thinking and experiencing the world by people who wish to be classified as “normal”. Watermeyer, McKenzie and Swartz posit, “being considered a “fully qualifying” human—is to strive for inclusion in a typology which is set up to exclude disabled people and, indeed, has been used in systematic efforts to eliminate disabled people altogether” (Watermeyer, 2019)
The language and rhetoric of ableism also asserts that all people of different ability should wish to be “cured” or brought closer to a state of “normalcy” as defined by the in-group of “able-bodied” scholars, advocates, friends and family. In the case of autistic people, we must be trained - or train ourselves in private - to mask our autistic traits. We do not take comfort in performing “normal” social skills in formal environments such as restaurants and workplaces, and we use greater energy than most in order to follow unspoken scripts that we must tirelessly research and practice. This is especially pertinent in the case of dating and relationships.
Claiming to be mentally unwell is a state of freedom from the norm. It is an embrace of the discomforting associations that the human world makes with feelings, pain, and expressing pain honestly. Saying that I am mentally-unwell, that I am autistic, means that I embrace the stigma associated with that term, for I accept that many tendrils of modern society are constructed upon a condition of constant and deliberate unhappiness over which most of us have no control. Claiming autonomy over my autism means that I can validate my personhood and all the extreme discomforts and lessons that I have gained from experiencing life through my lense. Autism informs my formation of self, and I continually unlearn what I practiced as being normal in order to rediscover this authentic self. My autism describes my interactions with humans and the current state of humanity in the year 2021. My autism is an unquiet voice which reasons and debates the normalcy of the supposed natural order of the world.
Masking is a form of assimilation whereby autistic people train themselves to manage and suppress their behaviors which are deemed unconventional or unusual by neurotypicals. This may be instructing them when it is socially appropriate to smile, how much they should talk about their special interests, and reminding them to pull out a chair for their partners when sitting at a dinner table. These social scripts are tiring and not always applicable, even in neurotypical dating spheres. Why is it not mandatory for neurotypicals to have unconventional dates? Or to bond over shared loves or unfamiliar subjects? Or to forgo out-dated rituals like pulling out chairs? All this teaches them is that the secret social scripts that are ascribed to human relationships are binding and unchanged. It concretises what autism so powerfully subverts, that there is a right and a wrong way to bond with someone.
Love on the Spectrum (O’Clery, 2020) is a show about autistic people made for neurotypical viewers. The first episode of the show introduces us to a cast of Australian twenty-somethings on the spectrum and asks each of them questions about their dating experiences. The show makes many attempts to display a broad variety of autistic people, but its lense remains an ableist one which serves to other the cast of individuals who make attempts to enter the dating world under the watchful eye of a neurotypical director and producer named Cian O’Clery. The cast members do not feel like main characters, but perform like subjects within a social experiment to see how they may endure the producer’s proposals and matches. The show successfully normalizes formal, heteronormative dating rituals that remain unquestioned, while highlighting the daters’ inabilities to quickly adapt to these rigid rules. In the words of Charli Clement who reviewed the show for Metro UK, “this show feels like autistic people being used as inspiration for neurotypical people to reflect on themselves. It’s for them to think, ‘at least my dating life isn’t like this’, or ‘if they can do it, I can’.” (Clement, 2020)
One of the cast members is named Michael. He expresses great concern at having not been in a relationship ever in his twenty five years of life. He says that his greatest dream in life is “to become a husband.” Michael is quick-witted, passionate and allows himself to be vulnerable. He is often quite charming. It seems that much of his difficulties with dating don’t stem from his neurodivergence but hinge on inexperience and on his being ignorant of interacting with women. He still lives with his parents, which is normal for today’s twenty-year-olds. What is strange is how his family seem to infantilize and baby him despite his clear intelligence and emotional capacity. His worst habits of stereotyping and idealising women are unchallenged and used as a source of comedy in the show.
Michael has many guidelines for what he believes a woman he dates should follow. In a conversation with the producers, Michael, and his mother, she is asked why she thinks Michael is “finding it hard to meet someone?”
She replies that she believes he, “just needs to find someone,” a pause, “like-minded. I don’t think he wants anybody...loud.”
Michael cuts in, “or gothic...or tomboyish...or practically any girl that acts like she’s still in high school.” His mother “mm-hmms” in agreement, as if having heard it all before, then looks to the camera and laughs at his comment about high school girls. It is clear that Michael harbours a small amount of resentment towards women, however fascinated he may be with them. None of the producers nor his family say anything to the contrary of his outdated conceptions of women.
He goes on to say that he has “already decided on the perfect wedding ring for [his] partner,” the camera cuts to his mother grimacing in embarrassment over his words, “in the form of a crown,”
His mother bites her lip to stop herself from laughing, sensing his seriousness, “ To signify she is my queen, per se.” This would be a great opportunity to gently point out that a relationship is about building trust slowly over time, and that such high expectations, for a partner to be your queen, establish shaky grounds for him to be disappointed, and for his potential girlfriend to feel pressured and romanticised beyond her capacity. A study published in 2011 showed that satisfaction within a relationship declines dramatically over three years of marriage in newlyweds who overly idealise their partners at the onset. (Murray, 2011). This may seem obvious to some, but it isn’t obvious to many neurotypicals and autistics alike, who are fed grandiose imagery of love from TV shows that establish such tactics as stalking, obsessive crushes and fixation as the prelude to a long and successful relationship. These perceptions are not unique to autistic people, but are based on a larger societal misunderstanding of healthy love. It is something his mother seems to understand, as a wife herself, but she does not bring it up, rather she breaks the fourth wall, looking at the camera, then back at her son, laughing at him with the audience.
He seems not to perceive women as people like himself. His misogyny is played up as amusing and harmless aspects of his autistic personality, when they are unacceptable stereotypes and ideations that any autistic person can unlearn, because they have little to do with autism. He could always learn more through TV and movies, so his understanding of women should not be contingent upon the difficulties he has with speaking to them. If he saw them as a larger, more complex group, if he saw women as people, he would have women friends. Instead, he discusses his women friends as failures at romantic love.
This bonding of tradition, heteronormativity and autism becomes even more apparent when relationship specialist Jody Rodgers is brought in to ostensibly couch the protagonists on “how” to date. She does not use this opportunity to lovingly interrogate or challenge Michael’s more outdated conceptions of women, but instead teaches a masterclass on masking. (Clement, 2020)
When asked why he thinks he has had trouble finding a partner in the past, he replies that “a lot of girls that [he’s] been friends with in the past, well...a lot of those friendships have turned out to be quite...disappointing.” He seems not to understand the difference between friendships and romantic relationships, but this isn’t interrogated on the onset, it is brushed away. This is a fundamental problem in heteronormative romance, whereby women and men do not platonically befriend one another to better understand themselves and potential romantic relationships in the future. Instead, every attachment is a potential romance. Jody asks Michael what the difference between a girlfriend and a friend is directly. This is a valuable question and is something I have had difficulties understanding with regards to boundaries and expectations. Michael says that, “Girlfriends [are] more serious, it’s more intimate, and there’s no hands-to-yourself business.” His parents, who are problematising this intimate conversation by standing and staring at the two of them, break out into uproars of laughter. This is almost certainly a joke on Michael’s part, but if it is not, the tenuous and dangerous assumptions of consent and expectations are concerning. It is hard to see this as a joke because of the way Jody treats Michael with such kid gloves. This conversation abruptly ends, and we move to Jody telling him to find “common interests” with people he likes in order to see if he wants to date them again. It is a terribly obvious piece of advice, and ignores the gravity of the proposed previous encounter and what boundaries constitute romantic and platonic intimacy, something which would have actually been useful for both autistic and neurotypical people alike who watched this show from all over the globe. This is especially in the wake of newfound understandings of consent and what constitutes assault. This would, however, shatter the illusion of cutesy othering that distances autistic people from the neurotypical gaze that captures them.
These rules also enforce the outdated mindset that is apparent in the dating life of a character like Michael. He has perhaps seen how television or film has portrayed women and romance to be, and has taken these limited gendered performances as factual and fixed. Studies have shown that children use television to understand complex interpersonal social scenarios, as the simulated space allows for rehearsal and repetition. Narrative spaces also provide comfort for the autistic individual, as patterns of human behavior are more easily drawn when tropes, writing structure, acting styles, actor faces, editing techniques, framing, colour, music and other such aspects of TV and film language can be studied and learned. Obsessive knowledge absorption - which is what characterizes a special interest - is a habit that autistic people are highly adept at. This would mean that a more constructive way of coaching Michael through his relationship struggles may be to dismantle his preconceptions of women as seen through TV shows, movies, cartoons or anime, or to introduce him to media made by women, queer people, by autistic people, black and indigenous people of colour, and of people who navigate these intersections.
Ignoring what he says, or writing his perspectives up to disability infantilizes his abilities of perceiving and communicating with women, as well as his abilities to understand and grow as a person. On top of this, a comedic tone is created when the camera cuts, unchallenged, between Michael and his mother, as he describes the perfect woman and she looks at him bemused while washing dishes and glancing at the camera. The comedy is created by a supposedly romantically undesirable and supposedly unchangeable man speaking about women with the same depth of perception and pickiness as a shallow alpha-chad-misogynist who has a patriarchal society at his fingertips. It is as if his mother, the camera and the audience are all privy to his undesirability being inherent in his autism, whilst he is not. These aren’t perspectives we would find endearing in a cis heterosexual man who was not autistic, so why do they become amusing and cute when coming from a neurodivergent man? This plays up autistic people as intolerant and bigoted, when the reality is that autism exists in all forms of human life. As Sara Luterman points out for Spectrum News, autistic people are more likely to be queer and will exist more comfortably outside of heteronormative conceptions of love and relationships that were established by the neurotypical majority. (Luterman, 2020)
Autism is thereby linked to the harmful stereotypes of masculine and feminine people, and positioned as an intrinsic misunderstanding or inability to comprehend such “fundamental” dating rules as normal and natural. This perspective is ableist, no matter how unintentional.
The camera work and editing goes on to reinforce that this is most likely intentional, however.
Another subject of the docuseries is Chloe. She is nineteen and tells the camera that she has never been in love. Her interview begins with an awkward cut of her sitting and getting comfortable in front of the camera. The experience of being filmed would be strange for any neurotypical person who is not used to it, especially when this Netflix production most likely uses large, high-definition camera equipment. The choice to keep in footage of her settling down, stretching her face muscles and widening her eyes, in front of what I assume to be bright studio lights set up inside of her bedroom, emphasizes a subtle narrative that she is a naturally strange and easily discomforted person.
She explains seeing people kiss and hold hands and is sad that she didn’t experience those things herself. She tells the camera that she had “all these ideas in [her] head, and none of them happened. Life is not a movie.” Up until these last few sorrowful sentences, plucky xylophones and staccato strings play in the background as she explains being broken up with by a partner for disclosing her autism. Sara Luterman writes, “The musical cues would be more appropriate for a documentary about clumsy baby giraffes than for a reality series about adult humans.” (Luterman, 2020) Chloe describes her anger and confusion and the camera cuts to an abrupt close up of her face. It is almost comical. These choices are unsympathetic and don’t reflect the underlying cruelty of such an act and how it can traumatize a neurodivergent individual.
Love on the Spectrum is a strange and misguided attempt by a neurotypical production team at making a voyeuristic docuseries about neurodivergent people and their dating lives. It does this by boxing the protagonists into uncomfortable dating-show style scenarios which are publicised, turning already complex social scenarios into minefields of anxiety and miscommunication. The subjects are explicitly framed to appear incapable at adapting to what is made contextual as normal, despite the contextualised normal being a framework of misogyny, an encouragement to mask and pretend to be neurotypical, and a hyper-focus on outdated ideas about love popularised by television and movies.
References
Clement, C. 2020. I want to tell you why Netflix’s Love on the Spectrum isn’t inspirational. Available: https://metro.co.uk/2020/08/02/autistic-person-netflix-love-spectrum-let-13066129/. [Accessed: 18 June 2021]
Davis, L J., ed. 2016. The Disability Studies Reader. 5th ed. London, England: Routledge.
Luterman, S. 2020. Review: ‘Love on the Spectrum’ is kind, but unrepresentative. Available: https://www.spectrumnews.org/opinion/reviews/review-love-on-the-spectrum-is-kind-but-unrepresentative/
Murray, S. L., Griffin, D. W., Derrick, J. L., Harris, B., Aloni, M., & Leder, S. 2011. Tempting fate or inviting happiness?: unrealistic idealization prevents the decline of marital satisfaction. Psychological science, 22(5), 619–626.
Watermeyer, Brian, Judith McKenzie, and Leslie Swartz. 2019. The Palgrave handbook of disability and citizenship in the global south. Cham, Switzerland : Palgrave Macmillan.
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