A mask for masking
Autism masking or camouflaging is a common enough practice to disguise or suppress specific autism traits or behaviors in social situations such as1:
- camouflaging sensitivities to sound or other sensory difficulties
- reducing self-regulating behaviors such as stimming e.g. hand flapping
- covering up expressive and receptive language challenges
I’ve been masking for so long that I no longer know what is real or learned behaviour. The other night in a pub, my friend thought I was bored of all the reminiscing. I was trying to listen and contribute but there was a football match on the TV in the background, a steady flow of comings and goings to the loos and smoking yard past our table, some simultaneous conversations within the group, a rather rowdy group at a table a few metres away and let’s not forget why we were there, to grieve so a busy internal dialogue too. I wasn’t bored, I was overloaded and no doubt zoned out a few times. The verbal continuum in the last project was my attempt at visualising the story of expressive language challenges i.e. being too verbal but I probably struggle more with receptive language. Often, I have no idea what is being said if there is too much nuance or politic so I play along. Autie kids do this, laughing along with jokes they don’t get. My father used to whine about me not getting his jokes and I’d say, I did get it but it just wasn’t funny, poor Dads and their jokes. Anyhu, here I am boring myself again but how does this relate to printmaking?
Since I’ve already made the zipped mouths, I thought I could use them along with something else to capture the concept of masking.
Masking is often thought to be more common among autistic females than males but that’s not strictly true. It’s a bit like how we were so good at masking cervical cancer and other women’s medical issues in a patriarchial healthcare system. Much of the early autism research focussed on observations within the male population and the diagnostic measurements were derived from same so our view of what autism ‘looked like’ meant that autistic females were often overlooked. Further research2 found that “to be a female with an ASC [autism spectrum condition] is to be twice excluded: once from the neurotypical female population, and once again from the [autism] community”. Autustic males mask too to fit in whereas maybe females masked because they simply had to.
So what motif should I use to depict females masking? A masquerade ball face mask of course. I’m lucky to live in a town that has one of those shops that sells literally anything you could ever possibly need so in there I picked up two.
So my initial lazy plan was to glue and varnish the mask onto the plate but that didn’t work and realistically would have probably been crushed to smithereens in the press. Instead, I ended up using the mask to trace out the shape and then glued remnants from a ghastly sequinned beret that I never wore. Instagram reel of shenanigans here.
So we’re all set for the print room on Tuesday. I wonder will the ink get all mushed and lost in the sequins. I’m under pressure so no time for testing. It’ll either work or it won’t. If you’re like me and like to be able to read the original sources cited earlier in this blog post, the references are below.
- Drake K, (2022). Masking in Autism: The ‘Why’ Matters. PsychCentral. Available online here.
- Cage E, et al. (2019). Understanding the reasons, contexts and costs of camouflaging for autistic adults. Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders. Available online here.
- Shefcyk A. Count us in: addressing gender disparities in autism research. Autism. 2015;19(2):131–132. [PubMed] [Google Scholar]