{"title":"The Autism Literary Underground","authors":"J. Rose","doi":"10.5325/RECEPTION.9.1.0056","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Though most physicians and public health officials deny that vaccination can cause autism, many autism parents believe there is such a link, and many of them resort to alternative treatments. This article takes no position on these controversies, but it uses the methods of reception history to explain how this “underground” movement has gained traction in the face of fierce opposition from the medical establishment and the mass media. The movement belongs to a long tradition of do-it-yourself medicine, which urged patients to read medical literature and treat themselves. Large-scale surveys of vaccine-hesitant websites and parents, and an intensive study of the reading done by six autism parents, reveals that these parents read extensively and critically both refereed medical literature and Internet postings by other autism parents. They are not “antiscience,” but they are producing and consuming literature about autism and interacting with each other on social media.","PeriodicalId":40584,"journal":{"name":"Reception-Texts Readers Audiences History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":0.1000,"publicationDate":"2017-07-10","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"1","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Reception-Texts Readers Audiences History","FirstCategoryId":"1085","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.5325/RECEPTION.9.1.0056","RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":null,"ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"0","JCRName":"HUMANITIES, MULTIDISCIPLINARY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 1
Abstract
Though most physicians and public health officials deny that vaccination can cause autism, many autism parents believe there is such a link, and many of them resort to alternative treatments. This article takes no position on these controversies, but it uses the methods of reception history to explain how this “underground” movement has gained traction in the face of fierce opposition from the medical establishment and the mass media. The movement belongs to a long tradition of do-it-yourself medicine, which urged patients to read medical literature and treat themselves. Large-scale surveys of vaccine-hesitant websites and parents, and an intensive study of the reading done by six autism parents, reveals that these parents read extensively and critically both refereed medical literature and Internet postings by other autism parents. They are not “antiscience,” but they are producing and consuming literature about autism and interacting with each other on social media.
期刊介绍:
Reception: Texts, Readers, Audiences, History is a scholarly, peer-reviewed journal published once a year. It seeks to promote dialog and discussion among scholars engaged in theoretical and practical analyses in several related fields: reader-response criticism and pedagogy, reception study, history of reading and the book, audience and communication studies, institutional studies and histories, as well as interpretive strategies related to feminism, race and ethnicity, gender and sexuality, and postcolonial studies, focusing mainly but not exclusively on the literature, culture, and media of England and the United States.