“There’s No Constant”: Oxytocin, Cortisol, and Balanced Proportionality in Hormonal Models of Autism

ABSTRACT

Autism is a fluid category with sensory difference recently emerging as a key aspect of the lived experience of the condition. In concert with the “fight or flight response”, sensory sensitivities are used to articulate chronic stress caused by “sensory overload” from living in sensorially “toxic” environments. Based on long-term participant observation in the UK and USA with practitioners and participants of an autism-specific horse therapy method I offer an ethnographic window onto this ecological model of autism that entangles material flows, embodiments, and environments. I detail a novel hormonal understanding of autism, in which oxytocin and cortisol act as material-semiotic messengers of sociality. I ask what is at stake and show how notions of hormonal “balance” and proportionality provide a means of comprehending simultaneities of behavioral, diagnostic, and material fixity and flow in autism.

KEYWORDS:

• Autism
• balance
• equine therapy
• hormones
• proportionality
• therapeutic ecology

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to my interlocutors who kindly gave their time and shared their experiences so generously. My gratitude goes to Tom Boylston, Jacob Copeman, Stefan Ecks, and Martyn Pickersgill for their comments on various iterations of these ideas and this article. Many thanks to the Economic and Social Research Council for supporting this research. Ethical approval was granted by The University of Edinburgh.

Correction Statement

This article has been republished with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Notes

1. Whilst neuroplasticity is of importance in some of my interlocutors’ models of efficacy, it is beyond the scope of the article to explore the full import of this notion.

2. Only the AM Ranch had access to such gymnastic horses, the other centers studied used traditional riding school horses.

3. The gendering of relatedness in the context of autism being enacted here via reference to oxytocin in particular is of importance and is taken up in a forthcoming article on gender and hormone models of autism.

Additional information

Funding

This research was funded by the Economic and Social Research Council [grant number: ES/J500136/1]. The author has no financial interest or benefit arising from the direct applications of their research to disclose.

Notes on contributors

Roslyn Malcolm

Roslyn Malcolm is Assistant Professor in Social Anthropology in the Anthropology Department at Durham University. She is a medical anthropologist working at the intersections of feminist technoscience, human-animal studies, and critical disability studies. She researches autistic lived experience and sensory difference, stress and the exposome, and relatedness and kinship.