"The Art of Stimming: Reconsidering Screen Performance and Autism"

This project focuses on the performance of autism in film and how neurotypical actors make this invisible disability visible through a series of physical behaviours. It will examine 'stimming' as central to the characterisation of autism, but will also investigate how its 'emotionless' inverse has become part of a culturally accepted repertoire in the performance of autism. Drawing upon theories of screen performance to rethink the representation of neurodiversity, it will also question, through autoethnography, what it means to recognise other modes of screen performance as resonating with the experience of autism- necessarily challenging traditional (normative) models of film spectatorship.