{"id":7724,"date":"2014-04-21T02:56:55","date_gmt":"2014-04-21T07:56:55","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/college.unc.edu\/?p=7724"},"modified":"2024-07-02T14:37:30","modified_gmt":"2024-07-02T14:37:30","slug":"jordynn_jack","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/collegearchive.unc.edu\/?p=7724","title":{"rendered":"Refrigerator mothers and computer geeks"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"jack_jordynn_440\"<\/a>
Jordynn Jack<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Jordynn Jack, associate professor in Carolina\u2019s Department of English and Comparative Literature, looks at these subjects and more in Autism and Gender: From Refrigerator Mothers to Computer Geeks. This second book for Jack, who also directs the department\u2019s writing program, is scheduled for publication this year by the University of Illinois Press.<\/p>\n

Jack says that autism was initially portrayed as a disorder caused by emotionless \u201crefrigerator mothers.\u201d Today, autism is recognized as a neurological disorder that is itself highly gendered. The Centers for Disease Control in America reports that boys are seven times more likely than girls to develop the disorder. The book examines how scientific and public discussion of autism includes and is influenced by gender ideas, as well as gendered positions used to establish expertise and authority in debates about autism.<\/p>\n

Jack answers some questions about her research and the book:<\/p>\n

Q: What did your research tell you about parents of autistic children?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Jack:<\/strong> Part of the book looks at high-profile mothers of autistic children talking about autism. Mothers are under a lot of pressure in general to produce perfect children, to be in charge of their health in different ways whether they have a child with autism or some other medical or psychiatric condition. Mothers get a diagnosis and they feel like they have to do something; they have to act. That means lining up therapies, managing diet, administering medications (if prescribed), and so on. That all seems to fall on mothers. I look at how that position evolved. Mothers with autistic children are not alone in this. A lot of it has to do with the kind of advice mothers get in books and other places from the moment they get pregnant\u2014don\u2019t eat this, don\u2019t do that or it will affect the baby. Then if the child does have some kind of condition, they look to books for more advice \u2014 what can they do to help? And, with the advent of the internet, it\u2019s only gotten worse. They think, \u201cIf only I do all of these things, I can help my child.\u201d Of course, everyone wants to help their child. But it seems like it\u2019s a gendered position.<\/p>\n

I also look at fathers in another chapter, and they go through a different struggle. They seem to feel, especially if the child is a son, that they\u2019ve lost a vision such as \u201cI\u2019m going to play sports with my son or he\u2019s going to take over the family business or he\u2019s going to follow in my footsteps.\u201d Maybe it\u2019s to be a pro football or engineer or doctor. I read biographies of fathers who went through this. Mothers will take over and be manager, but fathers may withdraw because of this loss of vision, and they have to learn to be a different kind of father.<\/p>\n

I looked at pamphlets and websites for treatment and therapy groups. They don\u2019t really target fathers. Not only are they visually constructed so they will appeal to women with features such as feminized colors, but very seldom is there a picture of a father with a son. The programs themselves don\u2019t necessarily have activities that appeal to fathers such as physical play. Even the timing of programs does not consider fathers \u2013 they are often scheduled during the day when most fathers work outside of the home. It seems they\u2019re missing opportunities to get fathers involved and to market therapy programs to fathers.<\/p>\n

Fathers often do find some way to connect like a love of horses or horse training. Rodney Peete, who was an NFL quarterback, eventually connected with his son through sports and lots of persistence.<\/p>\n

Q: What questions were you trying to answer?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Jack:<\/strong> I started off interested in the public controversy about autism and vaccines, questioning why people were persuaded that vaccines played a role despite scientific evidence to the controversy. My research path has been about gender, so one of my advisors said, \u2018What about gender?\u2019 I started seeing gender playing into all of these things. I saw that autism research in its early phases centered on the mother as the idea of the \u201ccold\u201d mother, the refrigerator mother. From there, it became a process of invention (and questions). What about fathers? How are autistic people themselves are figured? For instance, there\u2019s a chapter about how the figure of computer geek has come to represent autism. It\u2019s pretty strongly linked to the high-tech world. You see that in a lot of films, lot of books.<\/p>\n

What about women with autism? Women were research orphans, aside from a few figures such as Temple Grandin, who is usually masculinized in terms of how she is presented. There wasn\u2019t lot of attention to women.<\/p>\n

How do autistic people understand their gender or their identity? I found that they often have a more fluid sense of gender. Whether or not it\u2019s because gender is social and there\u2019s an idea. . .. maybe neurodiverse thinking offers a more fluid way to understand gender. Maybe it\u2019s an alternative way of thinking of things.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s part of my gender lens to look at how male and female children are depicted and to ask what about adults? I read a lot by autistic people and that was the most valuable part, and that\u2019s when I started hearing a greater variety of voices.<\/p>\n

Q: What\u2019s important for people affected by autism to do?<\/strong><\/p>\n

It\u2019s important to to get an adult autistic perspective. Autistic people can be dismissed as not having insight or dismissed, as in \u2018you were able to write this text, so obviously you\u2019re different than my child who has trouble communicating .\u2019 But increasingly there are people using different technologies to communicate \u2013 some books written by people who use technology that allows them to point at letters or type. They have problems verbally but are very fluid when they use these technologies. It\u2019s really unfortunate that those perspectives are often dismissed because they challenge caregivers to reconsider the idea that they need to \u201ccure\u201d their child. Instead, autistic people might explain how autism brings a different perspective, a different way of thinking, that should be valued, even if autistic people need supports for some activities.<\/p>\n

For autistic girls, sometimes there are therapies focused on feminizing them and there\u2019s an emphasis on popularity and fitting in. There\u2019s a lot of focus on making friends by adopting mainstream gender practices. The goal is problematic if it\u2019s to fit into society through matching the way they dress, fashion, makeup and other interests to others instead of allowing girls to embrace their own interests. Autistic people often say that they made friends not by conforming, but by coming across people with whom they share a common interest, whether that\u2019s anime or horses or knitting.<\/p>\n

Q: You mentioned the autistic perspective. What are some books offering that?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Jack:<\/strong> Yes, some useful texts written by people with autism include:<\/p>\n

Dawn Prince-Hughes, Songs of the Gorilla Nation<\/p>\n

Tito Rajarshi Mukhopadhyay, How Can I Talk if My Lips Don\u2019t Move?<\/p>\n

Donna Williams, Nobody Nowhere<\/p>\n

Naoki Higashida, The Reason I Jump<\/p>\n

Unfortunately, most narrative texts written by non-autistic people tend to \u201cspeak for\u201d autistic people in problematic ways.<\/p>\n

The Autistic Self-Advocacy Network<\/a> offers more resources.<\/p>\n

Q: What\u2019s next?<\/strong><\/p>\n

Jack:<\/strong> Often, when a neuroscientist publishes research, you\u2019ll read about the claim in the media in a way that gets people interested in why we behave the way we do. Like there\u2019s a God button or shopping button in our brains. I\u2019m interested in a question about the brain that the humanities can answer: why are neuroscience claims so popular and where do the claims come from?<\/p>\n

Interviewed by Scott Jared, University Relations.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Jordynn Jack, associate professor in Carolina\u2019s Department of English and Comparative Literature, looks at these subjects and more in Autism and Gender: From Refrigerator Mothers to Computer Geeks.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":4,"featured_media":7944,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"site-sidebar-layout":"default","site-content-layout":"","ast-site-content-layout":"default","site-content-style":"default","site-sidebar-style":"default","ast-global-header-display":"","ast-banner-title-visibility":"","ast-main-header-display":"","ast-hfb-above-header-display":"","ast-hfb-below-header-display":"","ast-hfb-mobile-header-display":"","site-post-title":"","ast-breadcrumbs-content":"","ast-featured-img":"","footer-sml-layout":"","ast-disable-related-posts":"","theme-transparent-header-meta":"","adv-header-id-meta":"","stick-header-meta":"","header-above-stick-meta":"","header-main-stick-meta":"","header-below-stick-meta":"","astra-migrate-meta-layouts":"default","ast-page-background-enabled":"default","ast-page-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-4)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"ast-content-background-meta":{"desktop":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"tablet":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""},"mobile":{"background-color":"var(--ast-global-color-5)","background-image":"","background-repeat":"repeat","background-position":"center center","background-size":"auto","background-attachment":"scroll","background-type":"","background-media":"","overlay-type":"","overlay-color":"","overlay-opacity":"","overlay-gradient":""}},"footnotes":""},"categories":[21],"tags":[2221,2222,604,36],"class_list":["post-7724","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news","tag-autism","tag-computer-geeks","tag-jordynn-jack","tag-unc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/collegearchive.unc.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7724","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/collegearchive.unc.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/collegearchive.unc.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/collegearchive.unc.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/4"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/collegearchive.unc.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=7724"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/collegearchive.unc.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7724\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":46604,"href":"https:\/\/collegearchive.unc.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/7724\/revisions\/46604"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/collegearchive.unc.edu\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/7944"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/collegearchive.unc.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=7724"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/collegearchive.unc.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=7724"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/collegearchive.unc.edu\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=7724"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}