Ebook: The Autism Industrial Complex: How Branding, Marketing, and Capital Investment Turned Autism into Big Business

Autism―a concept that barely existed 75 years ago―currently feeds multiple, multi-billion-dollar-a-year, global industries.

In The Autism Industrial Complex: How Branding, Marketing, and Capital Investment Turned Autism into Big Business, Alicia A. Broderick analyzes how we got from the 11 children first identified by Leo Kanner in 1943 as “autistic” to the billion-dollar autism industries that are booming today. Broderick argues that, within the Autism Industrial Complex (AIC), almost anyone can capitalize on―and profit from―autism, and she also shows us how. The AIC has not always been there: it was built, conjured, created, manufactured, produced, not out of thin air, but out of ideologies, rhetorics, branding, business plans, policy lobbying, media saturation, capital investment, and the bodies of autistic people. Broderick excavates the 75-year-long history of the concept of autism, and shows us how the AIC―and indeed, autism today―can only be understood within capitalism itself. The Autism Industrial Complex is essential reading for a wide variety of audiences, from autistic activists, to professionals in the autism industries, to educators, to parents, to graduate students in public policy, (special) education, psychology, economics, and rhetoric. “This is such a smart book, one that I and so many others have been seeking. Exhaustively researched, The Autism Industrial Complex: How Branding, Marketing, and Capital Investment Turned Autism into Big Business brilliantly lays out the onto-epistemological stakes of the entwinement of autism and capitalism. Broderick historizes the how and why of the commodification of autism, providing a jarring critique of the neoliberal logics of inclusion and intervention. The AIC is a tour de force; I cannot wait to teach it.” -- Jasbir Puar, author of "The Right to Maim" and "Terrorist Assemblages"