Sonia Boué www.soniaboue.co.uk twitter.com/soniaboue ‘Mainstream’ media has not yet clocked the seismic cultural significance, for autistic audiences, of Hannah Gadsby’s newest show, Douglas. A lofty but quite oblivious New York Times review by Jason Zinoman misses the mark, because the reviewer seems to have no knowledge of autistic culture. Inkoo Kang of The Hollywood Reporter does better. Kang has been watching the conversation about neurodiversity online, and notes Douglas is a novelty for pop culture. Yes. It is novel, but it’s vital that we take this observation one step further: We need to consider the import of Douglas for autistic people, and what impact it might have towards much needed societal change and improving their lives. For this we need a more sophisticated analysis of Douglas as a cultural artefact, and a dissection of the failings of ‘mainstream’ critical reviews. The Guardian’s Brian Douglas gives the film a worthy four stars, but fails to…
Tag: Hannah Gadsby
Hannah Gadsby in the Netflix special Nanette [image: Australian comic Hannah Gadsby, speaking into a microphone. White text at the bottom of the image reads, “I identify… as tired.”] Emily Paige Ballou chavisory.wordpress.com I started wondering something explicitly for the first time recently (I don’t even entirely remember why), and that is: How many autistic kids who fly under the radar for years, or forever, present primarily to non-autistic observers as exhausted? I was wondering this as I was recovering from the end of a production a while back, and my main problem was just that I was so exhausted. If I got up at 10:00 AM, I needed a nap by 4:00 or 5:00, and not for having done all that much in my waking hours. I couldn’t exercise the slightest amount of group planning ability outside of work. It took my writing brain a couple of months to…