A Love Letter to Max Chapman: Autism and Race in A League of Their Own
By Elizabeth Maher
Content warning: references to anti-Black racism, racism, eugenics, ableism, queerphobia, and the threat of racist violence
In episode 4 of Amazon Prime’s queer baseball comedy drama A League of Their Own Max (Maxine) Chapman played by Chanté Adams, a talented pitcher who was prevented from trying out for the Women’s Baseball League due to the leagues policies of segregation, is asked how she is liking her new job at the screw factory (a job she got so that she could try to join the factory’s baseball team, this woman is determined). Max explains that she enjoys the work, noting that she enjoys doing repetitive tasks over and over again until she gets good at them. This line brought a smile to my face. I had already been playing around with reading Max as a neurodivergent, particularly an autistic, character and this line made an excellent addition to my growing list of evidence (additional evidence being Max’s deep love of baseball, her bluntness, and her struggles with emotional regulation). I did not expect Max to be “canonically” autistic, this was less because A League of Their Own was set in 1943 the same year that Dr. Leo Kanner first proposed autism as a stand-alone diagnosis to the English speaking world (after all Kanner did not invent autistic traits), and more because while autistic characters of any kind of are rare in pop culture, characters who are Black queer autistic women are virtually unheard of.
This dearth of representation is only one example of what autistic scholar and activist Morénike Giwa Onaiwu has described as autism’s “white privilege problem”. Despite work by autistic people of color (see here, here and here for starters), autism is still largely perceived as a white male middle class disorder primarily affecting children. These stereotypes have significant consequences for autistic people of color, who are often barred from accessing the resources and support that they deserve. The presumed whiteness of autism is not a coincidence, rather it is a product of the particular political and social work that autism as a diagnosis was designed to do. From Kanner’s initial paper, autism was meant to stand in contrast to more stigmatized diagnoses such as “feeblemindedness” and “childhood schizophrenia”, which the eugenic logic of the time associated with racial “inferiority”. Autism was meant to serve as an acceptable (although still deeply stigmatized) diagnosis for the children of white, educated, middle-class families. Autism was also often specifically associated with Ashkenazi Jewishness, with both gentile and Jewish psychiatry and psychology professionals drawing parallels between “curing” autism, and the push for Jewish assimilation. This brings us to the A League of Our Own character who I eventually realized I was supposed to be reading as autistic coded.
Later in the series Shirley Cohen (played by Kate Berlant), a character whose traits basically boil down to anxiety, homophobia, references to her Jewishness (her Rabbi warned her about lesbians guys, representation), and mathematical intelligence, confides to the main character Carson (played by series creator Abbi Jacobson) that she fears that some of their teammates may be *gasp*, lesbians. While Carson tries to assure Shirley that this isn’t the case Shirley begins repetitively moving her hands to sooth herself in a way that can be read as stimming. Until Shirley started stimming (a trait that is not unique to autistic people but is heavily associated with autism in the public imagination) I hadn’t particularly considered her to be an autistic coded character. That was partially because it was difficult to distinguish her autism coding from her general portrayal as the embodiment of the “neurotic Jewish women” stereotype (although I should have suspected something when Carson asked Shirley to calculate their teams’ chances of going to the championships – pop culture loves to confuse autistic people for human calculators). Shirley spends much of her screen time in a state of constant anxiety over perceived dangers ranging from dancing, to canned food, but her favorite fear is the threat that there might be lesbians in her midst. While Shirley eventually overcomes her homophobia for most of the series it is played largely for comic relief, because writers love to have autistic or autistic coded characters engage in “cute bigotry” that can be waved away with an aww shucks, they just don’t know what they are talking about (see Sheldon on The Big Bang Theory or Matilda’s fetishization of Black men on Everything’s Gonna Be Okay). Despite her age and gender, Shirley in many ways reflects common conceptions of what autistic characters should look and act like: she is white and is shown to have high analytical intelligence (neither of which actually correlate with autism). Yet, as an autistic coded character she falls flat.
In contrast, I believe there is a lot of value to reading Max as an autistic character. Max offers a more complex representation of the autistic experience than is normally found in popular culture. Her autistic traits, such as her deep love of baseball, bring her joy, something that is often missing in media portrayals of autism. Max also faces challenges trying to navigate a world that is already hostile towards her as a queer Black woman. Max is aware that many people around her find her, sometimes all-consuming, passion for baseball to be “weird”. What’s more, Max’s best friend Clance (played by Gbemisola Ikumelo) reminds Max that Max’s challenges with emotional regulation, her difficulty controlling her justified anger in the face of racial prejudice, at points increase Max and her loved ones’ vulnerability to white violence. An example of this is seen in the first episode when Max becomes visibly upset when she is turned away from try outs because of her race and Clance urges her to calm down lest they face violent backlash. Max and Clance can also be read as a rare example of autistic friendship, of two autistic coded characters who support and care for one another (our first introduction to Clance sees her info dumping about Wonder Woman, icon).
Max can also be seen as an example of autistic queerness. While many autistic people identify as queer media rarely portrays this queerness, assuming that one variation from the white heterosexual cis male able “norm” is more than enough. Like many autistic people, Max finds that she is unable to just accept the gendered norms that are thrust upon her (see this paper for more on that). Rather, throughout the series she works to explore her own relationship with gender presentation.
Max is an example of the type of fully realized, stereotype defying, autistic characters I would love to see moving forward. I hope that shows move away from simply coding characters as autistic (like Shirley) and begin to hire autistic and disabled creatives for roles both in front of and behind the camera.
And I very much hope that we get a second season of Amazon Prime Video’s A League of Their Own and more series with the characters like Max that multiply marginalized autistic and disabled people deserve.
Elizabeth Maher (she/her) is a PhD Candidate in U.S. history at the University of Illinois at Chicago. Her research is on the racialization of autism as a diagnosis in the mid-twentieth-century United States. She is passionate about working with others to make disability history more accessible. She is also passionate about finding (unintentional?) disability and neurodivergent representation in queer media. On any given day she can be found adoring her dog Truffle, attempting to cook, and getting lost in bookstores. She is autistic, gay, and white and knows nothing about baseball.
