Occupying Autism: Structural Ableism and the Living Infrastructure of Pathology

The history of autism scholarship is traditionally narrated as a sequence of progressive clinical discoveries. The argument advanced here proposes an alternative genealogical framework, tracing how the pathology paradigm reproduces itself independently of its scientific validity through mechanisms of institutional inheritance. Informed by epistemic injustice theory and the DisCrit framework, the analysis demonstrates how early bidirectional understandings of autistic traits were actively displaced by five historical nodes of clinical authority: Kanner, Bettelheim, Asperger, Lovaas, and Autism Speaks. To explain the durability of this deficit-based orientation across paradigmatic shifts, the analysis introduces a transmission model comprising three recursive structures: interpretive prefiguration, credential monopolization, and administrative sedimentation. Together, these mechanisms transitioned the Autistic community from a state of hermeneutical lacuna into a condition of hermeneutical domination. This theoretical model is subsequently applied to the contemporary United States federal health apparatus, documenting how 2025 and 2026 executive branch funding allocations, rhetorical strategies, and judicial rulings on compliance-oriented interventions function as convergent instruments of epistemic severance. Dismantling this living infrastructure ultimately requires accountable research governance that untethers federal grant eligibility from normative institutional affiliation and centers the intersectional knowledge produced by the Autistic community. Keywords: critical autism studies, epistemic injustice, hermeneutical domination, DisCrit, federal health policy, structural ableism, Double Empathy Problem, neurodiversity