We aren’t all cis straight white men: Expanding depictions of autism

Due to the proliferation of representations of autism on screen by neurotypical people, the tropes have sunk into our lives and become accepted as fact. Since South Africa consumes American and British TV in high volumes, audiences perceive autism as something that affects white cis boys or men, and makes them either savants and geniuses or near-incapable objects of pity. Currently, 1 per cent of characters on South African screens have to be disabled, with no consideration of what actors are portraying those characters or who is writing them. No wonder people tell me I don’t ‘look’ autistic, or parents who I encounter in my advocacy work tell me their families don’t believe that Black people can be autistic. A recent study by the Paramount Global Race and Equity Taskforce, found that 96 per cent of disabled South Africans felt underrepresented on screen. From the casting director who insisted that autistic people would be incapable of acting to the director who told me the character I had written was ‘not autistic enough’, I’m on a mission to put invisible autistic people – women, the LGBT community, Black people, older people – into my scripts. From my plays questioning what ‘normal’ is and what’s going on in the brains of autistic people, to my film focusing on an autistic person of colour and their gay father, to my TV series Resting Bitch Face, putting an older autistic woman front and centre, I am trying to challenge systems that see disability representation as a boring box-ticking exercise and remind people there ought to be nothing about us without us.

Keywords: autism spectrum disorder ; neurodivergence ; representations of autism ; South African television