Document Type
Article
Author ORCID Identifier
Jason Gilmore https://orcid.org/0000-0002-3250-0590
Journal/Book Title/Conference
Communication Monographs
Publisher
Routledge
Publication Date
2-10-2025
Journal Article Version
Accepted Manuscript
First Page
1
Last Page
46
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 4.0 License
Abstract
For centuries, Autistic people have been portrayed in media through two dehumanizing stereotypes, the robot and the superhuman savant. Together, the robot and the superhuman savant combine into one of the most popular hybrid stereotypes to appear in media: the detective. Past detectives have been almost exclusively white male characters, a longstanding pattern that erases Autistic women and people of color, among others. In 2022, however, Netflix’s spinoff series of The Addams Family, Wednesday, brought to the screen the first-ever female Latinx detective. This study is a thematic analysis of Wednesday as a character, the autism stereotypes she reifies as a female detective, and the intersectional facets of her identity for an understanding of her significant contributions to autism representation.
Recommended Citation
Bassett, C., & Gilmore, J. (2025). Shifting the paradigm with Wednesday Addams: An intersectional analysis of the first (Autistic) female Latinx detective. Communication Monographs, 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/03637751.2025.2455715
Comments
This is an Accepted Manuscript version of the following article, accepted for publication in Communication Monographs. Bassett, C., & Gilmore, J. (2025). Shifting the paradigm with Wednesday Addams: An intersectional analysis of the first (Autistic) female Latinx detective. Communication Monographs, 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1080/03637751.2025.2455715. It is deposited under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.