UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA RIVERSIDE Autism as Metaphor: The Affective Regime of Neoliberal Masculinity A Dissertation submitted in partial satisfaction of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Philosophy in English by Daniel Michael Ante-Contreras June 2017 Dissertation Committee: Dr. Sherryl Vint, Co-Chairperson Dr. Keith Harris, Co-Chairperson Dr. Derek Burrill Copyright by Daniel Michael Ante-Contreras 2017 The Dissertation of Daniel Michael Ante-Contreras is approved: Committee Co-Chairperson Committee Co-Chairperson University of California, Riverside Acknowledgements This project was generously supported by a fellowship awarded from the University of California, Riverside Graduate Division for three quarters. Eternal thanks to Sherryl Vint, whose wisdom and willingness to help whenever and wherever were fundamental to shaping this project; many of the ideas in the following pages would not have existed without her insight and mentorship. With gratitude also to Keith Harris, whose suggestions about whiteness and violence were fundamental to the early stages of this project, and to Derek Burrill, who always knew the right time to check in on my writing and my personal well-being. For allowing me to know the fun, play, and love that exists in the world outside of academia, Dakota is owed so much for this project, even if she won’t realize it for many years. My love also goes to Denise, who does more good daily than exists in this entire dissertation and who has kept me accountable to life and reality. Both Dakota and Denise have showed me that this project is so much more than the sum of my ideas. Gratitude also to my friends and family, but especially to Raymond Rim, who has been a constant source of inspiration in my thinking about masculinity and neoliberalism and a constant friend over the last six years. iv For Denise and Dakota, Who have believed in the person I was, am, and will be, even when I haven’t v ABSTRACT OF THE DISSERTATION Autism as Metaphor: The Affective Regime of Neoliberal Masculinity by Daniel Michael Ante-Contreras Doctor of Philosophy, Graduate Program in English University of California, Riverside, June 2017 Dr. Sherryl Vint, Co-Chairperson Dr. Keith Harris, Co-Chairperson This dissertation explores cultural production about autism—from film, television, literature, and video games to United States legal documents—in order to define and analyze assumptions about white masculinity within the ideologies of neoliberal capitalism. In popular culture, characters with autism are generally limited to operating as either apathetic harbingers of dehumanizing presents and futures (as in science fiction with autistic characters) or as dependents who have a difficult time functioning in modern economies and who must ultimately “overcome” through personal initiative. In both models, autism presents problems of productivity, independence, and finances. In these ways, representations of autism are often intimately connected to neoliberal goals and expose how neoliberal subjects are made to perform. These texts present, then, a means of tracing the evolution of how neoliberalism has impacted culture, identity, and disability. Further, such representations of (primarily men) with autism were produced simultaneously to the idea that a “crisis of masculinity” has resulted from modern social and economic policies. Connecting David Savran’s concept of the “white vi male as victim” under late capitalism and Sally Robinson’s concept of the “marked man” to Stuart Murray’s notion of the “Hollywood logic of autism,” this dissertation argues that cultural definitions of autism have had key roles in furthering the privatized, enraged affects that sustain neoliberalism. Through this methodology, the dissertation seeks to further define the intersections of masculinity and disability as a potentially hegemonic coalition through which notions of self-financialization, rational self-interest, and rugged individualism are supported. By noting the relationship between autism and neoliberal subjectivity, the dissertation disentangles the mythologies through which disabilities and masculinities are made productive for regimes that create immense amounts of social, political, and economic suffering. It also furthers research on how affective and cognitive disabilities (as opposed to physical, the focus of most disability studies) are constructed through cultural discourse and, specifically, expands understandings of autism by putting different media in conversation with each other. vii Table of Contents Chapter One Autism as Metaphor: The Cognitive Logics of Capitalism 1 Chapter Two The Organization Man and the Cyborg: Autistic Masculinities in Science Fiction 65 Chapter Three The Neoliberal Lottery: Probability, Masculinity, and Recessionary Affects in Elliot Rodger’s My Twisted World 121 Chapter Four The Family Narrative of Autism: The Neoliberal Aesthetics of Disability from The Siege to Bates Motel 163 Chapter Five Autism and Economic Mobility in Digital Culture: Identifying with the White Male as Victim in To the Moon 221 viii Chapter One Autism as Metaphor: The Cognitive Logics of Capitalism In his case history about an autistic boy, titled “Joey: A ‘Mechanical Boy,’” Bruno Bettelheim claims that “[Joey’s] story has a general relevance to the understanding of emotional development in a machine age” (3). Joey’s journey from autism to “normalcy,” Bettelheim argues, reflects the boundaries of the human condition: “Feelings, Joey had learned, are what make for humanity; their absence, for a mechanical existence. With this knowledge Joey entered the human condition” (7). Bettelheim uses autism as a metaphor to articulate anxiety about the threat of “becoming machine” and losing humanity in the face of modern technologies. People with autism are not human, he argues; instead, they are unfeeling machines that need psychoanalysis to bring them back to the human condition. While Bettelheim published his case history of Joey in 1959—when understandings of autism, still a relatively new diagnosis, were in their infancy—these anxieties have remained relevant to representations of autism, even as new clinical information has emerged. This dissertation will explore representations of autism from the 1960s into the twenty-first century to show how the disorder continues to function as a metaphor that emblematizes the limits of human identity, especially in conversation with notions of economic productivity. Three decades after Bettelheim published Joey’s case history, the film Rain Man (1988), while representing the origins of a new, more sentimental, narrative mode of rendering autism, also recapitulated Bettelheim’s metaphors. In the film, Raymond 1 Babbitt (Dustin Hoffman), a man with autism, initially lives in an institution with a set routine of watching television and eating. This all changes, however, when his brother Charlie (Tom Cruise) gains custody of him. Unable to communicate effectively outside of his set routine, Raymond finds it impossible to operate within traditional economies, while Charlie eventually values him primarily for his utility as a card counter in Las Vegas. Raymond functions as a machine of wealth accumulation. Ultimately failing to enter into legitimate economic productivity and the “human condition,” Raymond is sent back to an institution at the end of the film, though not before helping Charlie recognize that he needs to reform his behaviors. Charlie’s development from greedy capitalist to slightly more warm-hearted capitalist operates as the film’s central narrative action; Raymond, on the other hand, is unable to follow Charlie’s footsteps into economic and emotional productivity, functioning as nothing more than a prop, a constant signifier of economic and personal stagnation. He fails to achieve the feelings necessary to be deemed fully human and capable of transformation. These two examples—Bettelheim and Rain Man—reflect the central concern of this dissertation: how autism, rendered as metaphor, expresses anxieties about “a machine age” of economic and social unfeeling. In both, the person with autism puts a focus, like a camera lens, on the issues of their contemporary worlds, even if the metaphor that results constructs that person as undesirably inhuman (Joey) or personally and economically stagnant (Raymond). Indeed, the distinction between the potential for and lack of personal transformation is the hinge on which autism is often made valuable culturally. Real people with autism, or their textual identity, disappear into narrative. In 2 Representing Autism, Stuart Murray directly addresses films like Rain Man and the transformational narrative offered by Bettelheim in order to critique how the savant and other representations of autism contribute to an ideology of capitalist life-making. Murray outlines what he identifies as a politics of “overcoming,” the idea that people with autism can navigate their deficiencies in the pursuit of social, political, and economic integration: For the majority, non-disabled audience of a mainstream Hollywood feature…such logic is in keeping with the wider cultural politics that utilize an idea of the “benevolent good” to connect individuals to communities and to the state. “Overcoming” autism…is a narrative that carries the national ideologies of promise and achievement. (132) If autism is an inherently dystopian condition outside of the human, the erasure of it as a disability, through narrative, signals the triumph of national health. To resist the