Autism and Classical Myth: What I've found out today about the gender in the middle with implications for autism and myth

Why classical myth and autism?

Why classical myth and autism?

The idea for this project started to take shape at a meeting in 2008 with a special needs teacher, who mentioned that, in her experience and those of her colleagues, autistic children often enjoy classical myth. I began to wonder why this might be the case, and whether – as a classicist who researches, and loves, classical myth – there was anything I could contribute. I started this blog to report on my progress which was often sporadic until the launch of the Warsaw-based European Research Council-funded project Our Mythical Childhood (2016-22) to trace the role of classics in children’s culture.

My key contribution to the project is an exploration of classics in autistic children’s culture, above all by producing myth-themed activities for autistic children. This blog shares my progress, often along Herculean paths, including to a book of lessons for autistic children focusing on the Choice of Hercules between two very different paths in life. The image above, illustrating the homepage of this blog, is one of the drawings by Steve K. Simons, the book's illustrator, of a chimneypiece panel in a neoclassical villa at Roehampton in South West London. The lessons centre on this panel.

Friday 15 October 2021

What I've found out today about the gender in the middle with implications for autism and myth

As I have mentioned previously, each week (or so...) this term, I am planning to do what I'm asking students on a mythology module I'm teaching to do - namely to blog on an aspect of the module, based around our weekly topics, ideally by taking a particular focus, with my focus being autism and myth.

Hula from c. 1915 - image details here.Why I have begun with a
photograph of the hula should come clear further down this posting...

I went into today's class, 'Myth and Gender' which was taught by my colleague Dr Jose Magalhaes, with particular ideas in mind - where I would look at how autism is very often regarded as associated with boys and men, leaving many girls and women undiagnosed, and at how autistic people can find that myth resonates with a sense of gender that does not fit a male-female binary.

I was going to bring in the reflections of Alis Rowe in her The Girl with the Curly Hair: Asperger's and Me (p.32) where she discusses 'all the confusion [she] felt about her gender' from the age of around 11. I probably WILL do this further down the road, while also sharing insights from other autistic women, including those diagnosed as adults.

But for now, as the session raised some issues that have taken me aback, I am gong to get some of what came up down - not least as what came up included an examination of cultures where the terms for sexuality and gender in Western vocabulary do not map. Asked how to define 'gender' and 'sexuality' and 'sex' one student, a study-abroad student who usually studies in Hawaii, mentioned a broarder spectrum in Hawaii.

Fascinated by what he said about the gender, māhū, 'in the middle', I have done a very, very initial dive and learnt about how, across Pacific islands, there is a gender neither male nor female, and both male and female.

I am also at the very early stages of finding out about where Polynesian gods might come in including the Hawaiian goddess Laka - who perhaps comparable with an Athena who danced the Pyrrike into being with her birth - bore the hula.

More to follow... on all this I hope.