Reviewed by: Affect, Animals, and Autists: Feeling Around the Edges by Marla Carlson Jennifer A. Kokai Affect, Animals, and Autists: Feeling Around the Edges. By Marla Carlson. University of Michigan Press, 2018. Cloth $75.00, Paper $29.95, eBook $29.95. 259 pages. 15 illustrations. In November of 2020, outrage erupted on the internet over pop singer Sia’s movie Music. Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) activists took issue with both the plot, which replicated harmful stereotypes about ASD, and the casting of a neurotypical actor as the title character. Sia retorted that she had cast it in this way because autistic performers were “bad actors.” This went over poorly. Everything that happened in this exchange could have been avoided if anyone involved with Music had read Marla Carlson’s excellent and necessary book Affect, Animals, and Autists. In her book, Carlson takes up every problem Music recreates. Music falls squarely in the genre she labels the Autism Family Drama (AFD), which “elicits affective investment in the neoliberal happy family and cruel optimism with respect to the stated goals of its protagonist” (51). To provide the expected affective narrative, AFDs like Music often depict an empathy deficient, savant autist, [End Page 216] and are rarely made with the collaboration of genuinely neurodiverse individuals. This is because, as Carlson argues, autistic individuals challenge the accepted categorizations of what it is to be “human.” The question of what counts as human drives Carlson’s book, and is why it examines performances about, by, and with both ASD individuals and nonhuman animals. While a project that examines autists alongside animals could be extremely troubling, Carlson carefully states that they are not “equivalent but that examining the common grounds for exclusion can aid efforts at ending oppression” (2). She argues that “classification as an autist or as animal entails communication that differs from normate human language use” (2). Each of Carlson’s six chapters is structured to examine case studies that reinforce damaging cultural narratives and, after demonstrating why those narratives are toxic, to offer superior performance models. Chapter 1, “Locating the Human in Performance,” outlines the overlap in discourse surrounding animals and, historically, humans who do not communicate in “normate” (the term Carlson uses for neurotypical individuals) patterns. Carlson’s largest theoretical framework, as the title makes obvious, is affect studies, building upon work by Teresa Brennan, Silvan Tomkins, Sianne Ngai, and Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, among others. She argues that affect studies offers us a way to take embodiment and the lived experience of non-normate performers into account when thinking about performance creation, and more troublingly, to account for how the affective experience of the audience can be manipulated through performance choices to encourage harmful and reductive conclusions about these subjects. “Performing as Animals,” the second chapter, focuses on the 2007 hit production War Horse created by the UK’s National Theatre. Read in context with The Lion King (1997), Carlson argues that both performances rely on the visible workmanship of puppets to foreground human labor in concert with plots that reinforce a deeply held human commitment—that animals, such as horses, “love us and, furthermore, [are] better off under our loving control than they would be otherwise” (29). Carlson contrasts these conservative approaches with Deke Weaver’s Elephant (2010) which, like the other examples, uses a large puppet but for which, she argues “the affective hooks that keep the audience engaged are quite different” (42). Unlike the reassurance of the first two works, Elephant resists a tidy narrative of benevolent human sovereignty over animals and instead evokes emotional responses to elephants while making clear the cruelties humans inflict upon them. The third chapter, “Performing as Autists,” extends the argument of the second chapter from nonhuman animals to humans on the spectrum. Centered on Simon Stephens’s play The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time (2012), the chapter compares the play, based on a novel explicitly written with no research on ASD, with current understandings of autism. Particularly outstanding in this chapter is Carlson’s examination of the modes of staging (post-realist and hyper [End Page 217] technological) and acting (realist) in context with the narrative...
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Jul 1, 2022
Philippe Bédard 
Open Access