The Atypical Mermaid: An Autistic Black Woman’s Autoethnographic Analysis of Disney’s “The Little Mermaid”

Authors

Abstract

Autism diagnoses continue to climb, but no autism epidemic exists. Instead, autism research gradually creates more awareness of the vast diversity of the autism spectrum, allowing clinicians to finally “see” autism in contexts and conditions where their fields and tools have not been tuned to detect autism before. Increased representation of autism in movies and TV shows may provide viewers with more opportunities to identify themselves or loved ones as potentially autistic. Recently, more women and children of color have been diagnosed with autism, but access to diagnoses, therapy, and accommodations fall behind their white male counterparts (Aylward et al., 2021; Jo et al., 2015). Cinematic representations of autistic-coded characters, largely portrayed by white male actors (Matthews, 2019), reify the erasure of autistic women and people of color, particularly Black women and girls. Taking a step towards illuminating the lived experience of non-white, non-male persons with autism, the current research will investigate how autism and autistic characteristics have been represented in film and television and how those representations could relate to the experiences of autistic Black women and girls. Specifically, through the lens of Disney’s The Little Mermaid (Clements & Musker, 1989), this study will examine the ways the film helped the author to make sense of her experience as an autistic Black girl.

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