POST3: Symbolic Interactionism and Women on the Autism Spectrum

 Symbolic Interactionism and Women on the Autism Spectrum

As a woman on the autism spectrum, I am, naturally, very interested in the lives and experiences of other people on the autism spectrum, especially other women. Autistic people, as a rule, are often misunderstood and mistreated by society at large, and this is especially true for autistic women. Due to the historical assumption that autism is a condition that mainly affects boys and is best understood by the study of the behaviors of autistic boys, girls and women on the spectrum are constantly overlooked. We are more likely to go undiagnosed, more likely to only be diagnosed in adulthood, sometimes after years of bullying, and much less likely to be accepted by other people as "truly autistic". One of the most useful sociological frameworks for understanding the struggles faced by women on the autism spectrum is that of symbolic interactionism. 

Symbolic interactionism, at its core, is the idea that social interactions are based on a culture's recognized ideas and symbols. It seeks to study how our cultural ideas and symbols affect how we interact with people, the meanings and values we attach to certain conversations. Put more simply, it analyzes the way people's subconscious interpretation of people, objects, and events affect the way we view the world around us. When this theory seeks to explain inequality, it typically focuses on the meanings that people give to different groups of people. Implicit biases, for example, are usually related to people's subconscious ideas about certain groups of people, and can affect the way that they treat those people even when they are not fully aware of it on a conscious level. 

Many of the problems faced by women with autism can be attributed to this sort of unconscious bias. For example, many professionals have an unconscious assumption that the majority of people with autism are male. Thus, when they interact with girls and women on the autism spectrum, this subconscious belief leads them to overlook autistic behaviors or assign them to some other cause. As a result, women and girls with autism go undiagnosed, or are misdiagnosed with a condition that they do not truly have. Similarly, parents and teachers of girls on the autism spectrum may hold outdated ideas about autism, consciously or unconsciously, that led them to reject the idea that their daughter or pupil might be on the spectrum. While parents, teachers, and professionals may be unaware of their biases about the autism spectrum, the ideas about the condition that they have picked up from the wider culture still affect the way that they view the behavior of girls on the spectrum, often leading to negative results. 

However, symbolic interactionism doesn't just explain how difficult it is for girls to be recognized as autistic-it also cuts to the heart of the difficulty that autistic people have with broader society and the difficulty that broader society has with autistic people. All societies are governed by social rules that dictate how to act and behave in a given situation, and most children absorb these rules quickly and almost unconsciously. Autistic children do not do this. While most autistic people can read the body language and follow the social rules used by other autistic people quite easily, they struggle to understand the social rules that are followed by a broader society that is composed largely of people who are not on the spectrum. 

In fact, autism, as a condition, is typified by an inability to understand and properly follow social rules. From the perspective of symbolic interactionism, autism is a condition in which a person is born unable to properly understand the symbols and accepted interpretations that accompany social behaviors. While they have their own set of symbols and interpretations that they use to understand the world around them, it is incomprehensible to wider society. As a result, they are forced to use a foreign set of interpretations to understand social interactions, and, as a result, are often slow to understand what is going on in a particular conversation. Peers are usually quick to pick up on the inability of people on the spectrum to understand the symbols and social interpretations that seem self-evident to everyone else, and, as a result, often bully or ostracize children who are on the spectrum as punishment for violating these unspoken rules. The assumption that autistic people should be able to follow social cues is also responsible for the difficulties that some parents and teachers have in properly guiding children on the spectrum. Since most non-autistic people assume that the symbols and interpretations on which conversations are based are self-evident to everyone, it is easy for them to assume that children on the spectrum are just being difficult, rather than essentially speaking a different social language. The inability to communicate causes frustration for both autistic and non-autistic people, but since parents, teachers, peers, and employees generally have more power than one autistic person, the blame for the failure of the conversation is usually placed on the autistic person, leading to bullying, discrimination, or isolation. 

I have heard other autistic people compare the condition to being an alien on another planet or being a person from a foreign country; Symbolic Interactionism explains where this feeling comes from. People on the spectrum use a completely different set of interpretation and symbols than non-autistic people; in essence, they are speaking a different social language. However, since this fact is not readily apparent, most non-autistic people fall back on their basic assumptions about how people should behave and conclude that autistic people's inability to follow the social cues expected by broader society is the result of an inherent defect that needs to be fixed, rather than a difference that needs to be understood. The symbolic culture clash of these two different, albeit invisible, cultures is a major driving force behind the problems faced by autistic women.

https://www.autismempowerment.org/wp-content/uploads/2014/03/communicationandautism.png