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  • Multiple Autisms: Spectrums of Advocacy and Genomic Science by Jennifer S. Singh
  • Rebecah Pulsifer (bio)
Jennifer S. Singh, Multiple Autisms: Spectrums of Advocacy and Genomic Science. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016, 296 pp. $94.50 cloth, $27.00 paper.

Autism, as Jennifer S. Singh demonstrates in Multiple Autisms: Spectrums of Advocacy and Genomic Science, is an experience with competing meanings for a range of stakeholders, including biomedical researchers, parents of people with autism, and people with autism themselves. Despite this array of perspectives, scientific research on autism has historically focused on the search for one or more "autism genes," which are imagined as genes responsible for the behaviors and cognitive styles associated with autism. Multiple Autisms shows that this fascination with genetic—as opposed to, for example, environmental or social—explanations for autism is partially guided by the demands of parent advocates. In other words, through the case study of autism, Multiple Autisms reveals how biomedical research responds to the pressures of its social and political contexts. At the same time, Singh argues that this dominant research focus on genetics and, subsequently, genomics often has little meaning for people with autism and their families; furthermore, she suggests that this biomedical emphasis has foreclosed other forms of knowledge production in relation to autism. Incorporating interviews with parent advocates and people with autism into her analysis, Singh offers glimpses of "stories of resistance to the biomedical model of autism, which narrowly focuses on finding a 'cure' for autism, and of the positive life attributes people with autism bring to our shared experience" (p. xiv). As a whole, Multiple Autisms untangles the processes and practices of biomedical science in the case of autism research, suggesting that while these processes and practices emerge from and respond to specific social contexts, they do not always speak to the concerns and needs of stakeholders who are not themselves scientific researchers. A core issue in Multiple Autisms, therefore, is the relationship of biomedical research on autism to the publics affected by such research. Although it prioritizes a medical model of disability, Multiple Autisms successfully communicates the contributions of biomedicine and science more broadly to public understandings of autism.

Multiple Autisms' opening chapters historicize autism research and locate the contemporary moment of autism research as one of flux, as methods for conceptualizing autism are beginning to shift "from genetic to genomic lenses" (p. 1). Singh aptly situates the field of genetics, which has focused on "the inheritance of single genes from one generation to the next" (p. 5), in relation to genomics, a field that examines the relationships among "entire sets of genes that for humans exist on twenty-three pairs of chromosomes" (p. 6). Singh points out that in some ways, the shift toward "genomic styles of thought" has transformed autism research from a focus on individual genes to "the identification and investigation of an estimated one hundred to one thousand genes and their interactions with each other" (p. 8). This transformation, Singh claims, has created new forms of "genomic citizenship," or "biosocial communities" that "support or are in opposition to autism genomic science" (p. 10). One of the implications of genomic styles of thought, in other words, is that they dislocate autism research from the genes of an individual and transfers it to genomic databases supplied by biosocial communities, which are formed through their biological proximity to autism. But, in other ways, genomic styles of thought replicate the effects of genetic research on autism by "subjugating other kinds of knowledge that could be productive for those living with autism" (p. 10). For this reason, Multiple Autisms analyzes but does not celebrate the emergence of what Singh terms the "genomic gaze" in autism research. Drawing from Nikolas Rose's "molecular gaze,"3 which itself [End Page 560] draws from Michel Foucault's "clinical gaze,"4 Singh claims that the "genomic gaze" signals how "many people, institutions, and tools define autism"; these, in turn, shape how "autism is constructed in scientific interpretations and meanings" (p. 7). Singh's genomic gaze is never sharply distinguished from Rose's molecular gaze, which also foregrounds the body as a complex system comprised of ever-smaller parts and their...

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