This post was originally published at Autistic Academic.
Yesterday, I stumbled across a listicle at My Aspergers Child, titled “Married to an Aspie: 25 Tips for Spouses.” As you might expect from a title containing the word “Aspie” and the improbable number “25,” this list was terrible (and did not, in fact, contain 25 tips). Emma and I unpacked several of its varied problematic assumptions here; I spoofed it on Field Notes on Allistics here, and The Digital Hyperlexic did some more unpacking here.
What I’d like to do now is to discuss the intersection of gender, assumptions about emotional labor, and the erasure or overlooking of autistic women that results. This is a topic I’ve discussed more than once on this blog in various ways, although I’ve never quite gotten to the heart of the emotional labor question.
What is emotional labor?
Emotional labor is the work done to organize, remember, prioritize, sort, and structure daily lives and relationships. In short, it’s the effort put into giving a fuck about other people’s thoughts, needs, and desires. There’s an excellent introduction to emotional labor and the ways it manifests (as well as ways to do it) at Brute Reason here.
The problem with emotional labor, of course, is that generally speaking it is not considered “work” at all. Rather, women in particular are expected to provide it “out of the goodness of our hearts.” Emotional labor is actively cast as not-work by being cast instead as a natural urge women simply have – as if, rather than calling on women to generate effort, we’re actually doing them a favor by foisting the world’s give-a-fuck duties onto them.
In cishet relationships in particular, women are raised to, are generally expected to, and frequently end up doing a disproportionate amount of the emotional labor, as this massive MetaFilter thread on the topic attests. (The days – literal days – it will take you to read the entire thread are wholly worthwhile.) We cast emotional labor not only as “women’s work,” but as not even work. Women who fail to put up with “affirmation, forbearance, consultation, pacifying, guidance, tutorial, weathering abuse,” as Jess Zimmerman sums up emotional labor (at the link in the above paragraph), are not only punished for it socially but are in a sense not considered women at all – and the enforcers of this, as N.I. Nicholson also points out (at the Digital Hyperlexic), are frequently other women. Certainly, as Nicholson also points out, failing to do the emotional labor “correctly” is cast as social and romantic suicide: “no man will ever want you.”
What does this have to do with autism?
Consider, first, how autism in general and Asperger syndrome in particular are portrayed as deficits in emotional labor, specifically. The DSM-IV criteria for Asperger Syndrome (which differ from the criteria for autism only in their willingness to allow for a broader range of features in speech development) specifically target certain differences, difficulties, or absences in expected displays of emotional labor:
- marked impairments in the use of multiple nonverbal behaviors such as eye-to-eye gaze, facial expression, body posture, and gestures to regulate social interaction,
- failure to develop peer relationships appropriate to developmental level,
- a lack of spontaneous seeking to share enjoyment, interest or achievements with other people (e.g. by a lack of showing, bringing, or pointing out objects of interest to other people)
- lack of social or emotional reciprocity.
The last criteria in this section, “lack of social or emotional reciprocity,” is a demand for emotional labor, full stop. Emotional reciprocity is the one thing all forms of emotional labor have in common. The other three are more specific examples of emotional labor: using nonverbals that make the other person feel noticed and attended to, energy invested in “appropriate” relationships, and “sharing” (the ambiguous construction “of interest to other people” in the list of examples, implying “of interest to the patient, pointed out to other people” and “of interest to the other person”, is particularly telling).
It is the lack of “appropriately” displayed emotional labor that leads researchers like Simon Baron-Cohen to cling to the notion of a “theory of mind” deficit in autism and similar developmental disorders. In In a Different Key: The Story of Autism, authors Donvan and Zucker accuse ASAN founder Ari Ne’eman of “unmistakably” having autism and of possessing no Theory of Mind because, in a conversation with “autism parent” Liz Bell, Ne’eman expressed disagreement with Bell’s position on autism, but did not do the emotional labor of making that disagreement palatable to Bell.
And, of course, “25 Tips for Spouses,” many of which boil down to assumptions that the “Aspie” half of an Aspie-NT marriage is failing to do his (always his, according to “25 Tips”) fair share of the emotional labor, and that this is somehow autism’s fault:
3. Although he genuinely loves his spouse, the Aspie does not know how to show this in a practical way sometimes.…12. Because the Aspie does not have the same relational needs as the NT partner, he may be unable to recognize instinctively or to meet the emotional needs of his partner. Marriages can thus form some dysfunctional relationship patterns.13. For NTs who had normal expectations of the mutuality of marriage, there may be a sense of betrayal and a feeling of being used and trapped while in a relationship with an Aspie.…15. In the privacy of their relationship, the NT partner may become physically and emotionally drained, working overtime to keep life on track for both of them.…
18. NT partners may begin to feel that they are entirely defined by the role they fill for their Aspie partner. There can be a sense that there is little mutuality, equality and justice.19. NT partners may feel that they are daily sacrificing their own sense of self to help fulfill the priorities of the Aspie partner.20. NT partners may resent the reality of living on terms dictated by the needs and priorities of the Aspie partner.
Insofar as Asperger syndrome is understood as a deficit of emotional labor, these statements make a certain amount of sense. But notice how “Aspie” and “man” are perpetually conflated – not only here, but in most dating guides for people with Asperger syndrome (as Emma and I have discussed in previous posts), and in the literature on so-called “Cassandra Syndrome.” The overwhelming majority of people who claim “Cassandra Syndrome” are non-autistic women married to autistic men, and the fundamental claim is that the man in question has so terribly neglected the emotional labor of the marriage that it has caused actual trauma to the woman.
How Autistic Women Get Lost
Emotional labor is a demand we place primarily on women. We expect men to do far less emotional labor than women; socially, we tend to punish men who do “too much” emotional labor as excessively “effeminate.” We expect autistic people to do even less emotional labor – to the point of doing none at all – and we pathologize this lack of emotional labor-doing as both a tragedy and a fault. Meanwhile, autistic girls and women get lost, both before and after diagnosis.
We know that girls and women don’t get diagnosed with autism as frequently as men and boys. There have been a spate of articles in recent years on why this might be happening and how to address it.
One answer that has been floated in several circles is that we “miss” autistic girls and women in diagnosis because girls are taught and socialized, from birth, to perform emotional labor. When the diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorder still emphasize deficits in emotional labor, clinicians are looking for lack – not for difference, which is more likely to appear in girls who have been socialized to perform emotional-labor rituals without being given any insight as to their meaning or purpose.
(This, by the way, has nothing to do with whether girls are “innately better” at emotional labor than boys. It has everything to do with how both girls and boys are raised. Girls are expected to at least make the effort; boys are not. Girls, therefore, show up in clinicians’ offices making the effort; boys do not. While no studies exist yet, I suspect that a study of boys who are raised in households that demand more emotional labor from them also “fly under the radar” of diagnosis more easily than boys who are raised without such demands.)
What of the girls and women who are diagnosed – who are, as I was, probed by clinicans until our difference in emotional labor’s performance becomes apparent? Well, if you ask the authors of “25 Steps,” we don’t exist – or we don’t marry NTs, or our marriages are never affected by our autism.
(If this last one were true, one would expect a crusade to demand equal emotional labor from boys and men. Emotional labor “cures” autism! Except, of course, it does not.)
I’ve written about this question before. Long story short, autistic girls and women are subjected to the continued demand, attached to our (actual or perceived) gender, to do the emotional labor, no matter what it is, and certainly no matter whether or not we have a developmental disability that specifically lists deficits in emotional labor ability in its diagnostic criteria. What becomes a convenient scapegoat for men in emotional-labor-lopsided marriages (it’s not him, it’s his autism!) becomes a whiny excuse for women.
This is also why creepy male behavior is excusable with the reasoning “but he might be autistic!,” while curt female behavior is not. His autism is a reason to pity and excuse his lack of emotional labor; our autism is no excuse to skip out on our expected over-share of the emotional labor.
And this is why there are no “25 Tips” for autistic women married to non-autistic men (like me). I’m presumed not to need them. As a woman, I’m presumed to have the (innate or trained) ability to do a disproportionately large share of the emotional labor, to absorb my husband’s disproportionately small share. (It is also assumed that the shares are lopsided in exactly that way; no one asks how my husband and I have negotiated the emotional labor in our own marriage.) It is presumed that he will never feel “betrayed,” “used,” or “trapped” by me and my autism, or that he will never need to turn to an Internet listicle for help if he does. Because I’m a woman, and disproportionate unpaid emotional labor is my birthright.
Thus autistic girls and women get overlooked before diagnosis and erased after it. Our cultural presumptions about who is able and equipped to do emotional labor make it easy to both diagnose and dismiss autistic men as “just like that,” while blaming and burdening autistic women with “doing it anyway.” When autistic women don’t “do it anyway,” they’re de-feminized in countless ways. It’s a lose-lose game. Crone Island beckons.
Dani Alexis 
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