Autistici laboriosi, autistici pericolosi. Neurodivergenze mostruose e dove trovarle

The last years have been characterised by increasingly systematic attempts to “integrate” autistic people into the labour market both in the U.S. and Europe. On a more general social level, such attempts have been preceded and accompanied by a positive reassessment of the “autistic traits” and by the emerging necessity to discipline the rising “autistic labour-power” to make it a productive force fully able to fulfil its role within the capitalist system. In the history of the primitive accumulation and of the disciplinary institutions between the Eighteenth and Nineteenth century, it is well-known that analogous phenomena brought to the construction of a division between “labouring classes” and “dangerous classes”, opposed along the cleavage between integration and marginalisation. The present article aims at arguing that analogous processes are affecting autistic people and autism as a cultural object today: at the intersection between the heritage of changeling stories, the production of psychiatric concepts such as “Criminal Autistic Psychopathy” associated with mass shootings in the U.S., and the attribution of “autistic traits” to 2 figures such as Putin and Hitler, beneath the façade of integration the construction of a monstrous and radically other neurodivergence appears.