ABSTRACT
Children born with developmental disabilities have historically been framed as monstrous. Troubling the expected trajectory of ordered childhood development, their appearance and behavior affords a disturbance to "normality." Representations linking developmental disability with monstrosity circulate in various forms today. Although autism is often described as an "invisible" disability. In this chapter, the author reverses the usual representational connection between autism and monstrosity by looking at a set of primary school drawings by the author's son, Oscar. Oscar was diagnosed with autism at age 3. In the following years, he spent much of his free time at school drawing monsters. Historically, autism has been characterized as an impairment of imagination with research on children's art contributing to this view. One well-known British study by Scott and Baron-Cohen (1996: 376), for example, concluded that children on the autism spectrum have "a deficit in the domain of imagining unreal entities compared to matched controls".
