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

Within capitalism, the Autism Industrial Complex (AIC) produces both autism as commodity and the methods of intervention to deal with it. Comprised of ideological, rhetorical, material, and economic infrastructures, the AIC is not only a variety of businesses and industries that capitalize and profit from it. In the production of autism as commodity, the AIC also produces that commodity's market, its consumers, and its monopoly control of that market through production for consumption of need for, consent to, and legitimacy of interventionist logics. Given this, almost anyone can capitalize on and profit from autism. And within the AIC, autistic people--their very bodies--function as the raw materials from which this industrial complex is built, even as their very identities and selves become unwitting, and often unwilling, products of the AIC. Autism, Inc. is essential reading for a variety of audiences, from healthcare providers to educators to parents. Perfect for courses such as: Introduction to Critical Autism Studies; Disability Studies--Theory, Policy, Practice; Disability & Rhetoric; Disability & Cultural Studies; Doctoral Seminar in Disability Studies; Cultural Foundations of Disability in Education