Robert Chapman (philosopher)

Robert Chapman is an English philosopher, teacher and writer, best known for their work on neurodiversity studies and the philosophy of disability.

During a war where men were expected to express a 'soldier mentality' and to be part of the group, boys who failed to fit this economic requirement were singled out as pathological (it was mostly boys who got the diagnosis) and were baptized with a new name: autism. ... In this context, Hans Asperger and other medics began dividing autistics up into those deemed to have potential worth to the Third Reich given their purportedly strong logical capacities, and those who were to be sterilized or killed along with countless other mad and disabled targets.

Quotes

Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism (2023)

Chapman, R. (2023). Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism. Pluto Press.

• It was capitalism that allowed the body itself to go from being understood as a dynamic organism to being a working or broken machine. And it was not just the fact that new machines were increasingly part of daily life, making it seem natural to use machines as metaphors for the sciences of the age. It was also that the mode of production itself favored a reduction of people to living machines, since they were seen as working or broken in relation to their productive potential.
  • p. 30

• It was in Nazi-occupied Austria that autism was coined as a diagnosis. While the term had been coined by the eugenicist and psychiatrist Eugene Bleuler in 1911, Bleuler only meant it to refer to a temporary symptom of schizophrenia. It was only under Nazi rule, in the work of Hans Asperger in the 1930s and 1940s that those who came to be called autistic were singled out as having a unique way of being. During a war where men were expected to express a 'soldier mentality' and to be part of the group, boys who failed to fit this economic requirement were singled out as pathological (it was mostly boys who got the diagnosis) and were baptized with a new name: autism. Those women who were diagnosed were also singled out if they had intellectual disabilities, since they were not seen as fit to reproduce.
  • p. 62

• In this context, Hans Asperger and other medics began dividing autistics up into those deemed to have potential worth to the Third Reich given their purportedly strong logical capacities, and those who were to be sterilized or killed along with countless other mad and disabled targets.
  • p. 62