Bibliographic record
Abstract
This dissertation investigates the cultural production and lived meanings of the identity ‘autism mother’ from its emergence in 1943 to the present day. Drawing on critical and interpretive methods and theories within disability studies, informed by philosophical sociology, poststructuralist and phenomenological philosophies, cultural and maternal studies and feminist philosophies of science, my project explores the shifting emergences, historical traces and cultural meanings of this new mother identity. The analysis addresses psychoanalytic understandings of the ‘cold’ mother thought to cause autism in her child during the 1940s-1960s; the ‘mother therapist’ of the 1970s-1990s who must utilize scientifically guided techniques to achieve a ‘normal’ child; and today’s ‘mother warrior’ who must intensively fight against the so-called rising threat of autism. I take up the identity ‘autism mother’ as a way to explore, and offer an alternative to, Western patriarchal, racist, scientific and capitalist modes of power, knowledge production and subjectivities that are captured by cultural understandings of autism as an undesirable neurodevelopmental difference, non-autistic life as the only life worth living, and mothers as culpable for the remediation of their autistic child. The historical and social significance of everyday text and talk during 1943-2015 by and about autism mothers in the mass media and popular science, as well as focus groups held with autism mothers in Toronto in the fall of 2013, are analyzed. This work reveals the identity ‘autism mother’ as a key cultural contradiction through which scientific, bourgeois, white understandings of autism, and a contradictory femininity have come to regulate the good/bad mother in new ways, alongside the ever-present complexity and meaning of caring. Emerging from my analysis of everyday texts and focus group dialogues with mothers, I propose pedagogic care as an important alternative that embodies a creative critique of and resistance to exclusionary, and sometimes violent, biomedical and professional regimes. Critically pursuing questions of the meaning of ‘autism’ and ‘autism mother’ as culturally produced, lived identities integrally linked to knowledge production and power opens space for new meanings.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.007 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.012 | 0.074 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.009 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.002 | 0.011 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".