I would consider myself to have led a life mapped out with an inevitable outcome of disappointment and failure, that although having the dreams and aspirations of any individual starting off in life. My path was seemingly written on the adoption of my surname, as it had been by my mother on the day that she married my father. My childhood would have been my honeymoon period of a rosy view of possibilities in life, that would have reflected the joy and love that had been bestowed upon myself and my siblings within a loving home, headed by two parents that dedicated their very existence to the children that they created, Demonstrated by the sacrifice that they made in the pursuit of the happiness of each and every one of them, whilst being rewarded with nothing but sorrow and pain. This vision of a future that had been an idealistic road map to be repeated by myself, of happiness in a replication of what I had experienced as normality during my upbringing. Being married and being a parent, comparable to what I and my siblings took as what every home experienced very naively as standard procedure up and down the land, but was never to be, as life's rug was slowly pulled from underneath my feet, partly my own blame, but also by the cards dealt to me in life, in my fickle expectations of repeating my upbringing in a stable relationship of the past that no longer exists, to be experienced by my own children, only to find 'commitment' as being a word forgotten. The pain of rejection from the investments made without return upon relationship failures, only removes any further ability to improve life's outcomes. This has brought only pessimism and mistrust that led to a spiral of drug abuse and depression, and has brought me to this point in my life. I still hold on to the humour gifted to us by our parents that we all share and still binds us, and helps us to continue with whatever this existence throws at us next. But I shall march on and attempt to improve, and to be a parent and grandparent one day, hopefully to be dealt an ace from the pack and no longer the joker.

Introduction/ 1. Outsider Science and Literary Exclusion: A Reply to Denials of Autistic Imagination: Childhood Autism and the Psychiatric Imagination/Autism and the Machine/ Computer Coding and/as Literature: Douglas Coupland's Microserfs/ Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake: Autism and Literary Exclusion/ Inaccuracies in Baron-Cohen's "Minds Wired for Science" Narrative/ Bias in the Adult Autism-Spectrum Quotient Test (2001)/ Re-membering Autistic Imagination: Asperger, Wing, and Harro L./ Silberman's Neurotribes: Science, Science Fiction and Autism/ Autistic Responses to Atwood's Oryx and Crake/ The SySTEMizing Focus and its Implications for Autistic Diversity/ 2. Metaphors and Mirrors: The Otherness of Adult Autism/ Picking Up The Mirror: Enfreaking Normalcy/ Infantilizing Adult Autism in Diagnostic Observations/ Autism and Disorder: Foucault, Confinement and Cultural Fear/ The Screen as Mirror: The Office (UK) and the Neurotypical Gaze/ Post-Curious: Adult Autism as Cultural Spectacle in Big Bang Theory and The Accountant/ Autism, Metaphor and Metonymy/ Challenging the Myth of Autistic Narcissism/ 'Mirror Neuron' Theory and the Normative Stare/ Otherizing Autism Parents: Refrigerator Psychiatrists and their 21st-century Spectres/ The Who's Tommy (1969) and the Cultural Onset of Metaphorical Autism/ Autism and the Person: Les Murray's 'It Allows A Portrait In Linescan At Fifteen'/ Normativity Through the Looking-Glass: Joanne Limburg's The Autistic Alice/ 3. Against the 'New Classic' Adult Autism: Narratives of Gender, Intersectionality and Progression/ Patriarchy and Autism: The Cambridge Autism Research Centre and the 'Extreme Male Brain'/ The Extreme Male Gaze: Scientific 'Evidence' on Autism and Testosterone/ Fictions of the 'New Classic' Autism/ Neurodiversity, The Bridge and Autistic 'Adherence to Rules'/ Kay Mellor's The Syndicate: Class, Criminality, Race and Adult Autism/ Clare Morrall's The Language of Others (2008): Intersectionality, Autism and Womanhood/ Family and Phenotype: Meg Wolitzer's The Interestings/ Cultural Disability/ 4. 'Title' [sic]/ 5. Performing the Names of Autism/ Naming the Self Autistic/ Anger, Faith, and the Realization of Asperger Syndrome: Les Murray's 'The Tune On Your Mind'/ The Politics of a Name: Aspies, DSM-5 and the Psychiatric Retraction of Asperger Syndrome/ Autism, Performativity and Performance/ Autistic Criticism 1: Revisiting E. M. Forster's Howards End/ Autistic Criticism 2: Neurodiverse Meeting Points in 'Mad World'/ Bibliography/ Index