1. Introduction
[1.1] Surveying the literature on autistic representation in popular media reveals two common variations. In the first type, the story specifically names and calls out autism as a confirmed neurotype for one or more characters. These explicit representations often center on the way an autistic individual makes the lives of their friends and family more difficult. Explicit representation mirrors the medical model of disability where "disability is perceived as an impairment in a body system or function that is inherently pathological" with a "goal […] to return the system or function to as close to 'normal' as possible'" (Olkin 2022). The second type of representation involves autistic people noticing familiar traits in a quirky, alien, or nerdy character and adopting that character as unofficially autistic. This second type of representation corresponds with the social model of disability where "disability is seen as one aspect of a person's identity, much like race/ethnicity, gender, etc." (Olkin 2022). This second type is a purely audience-side phenomenon, rising from viewers themselves.
[1.2] This creation of positive representation where it was not intended by the creators is a phenomenon that is common in both literature on autistic representation and in autistic fan spaces. Studies of fandom largely focus on the ways that fan communities take mass media produced for the broadest audience possible and communally create alternative meanings that better satisfy their specialized interests (Jenkins 1992; Bacon-Smith 1992). Drawing heavily from the work of cultural theorist Stuart Hall (1999), fandom studies relies on the idea that a hegemonic message is defined, transmitted, and enforced by an elite encoder—typically the producer of a television series—and then decoded by the audience in a way that either aligns with the intended message, negotiates an alternate reading, or is entirely oppositional to the message. "Fan scholars' job has traditionally been to point to the ways in which fans enter into negotiated or oppositional positions," which allows fans agency in the way they interpret works and insert their own personal interests into the text (Clemons 2019, 261). Christa Mullis (2019) identifies the practice of "numerous characters in […] shows who are never confirmed, or thought, or made to be explicitly autistic, but which autistic fans claim as such," identifying the practice of creating "'headcanon'—an idea about the text that only exists inside the head of the fan creating it" (48). This type of meaning-making and the liminal space between encoded and decoded messages allows the autistic community to engage in what I am calling "constructed representation"—a type of representation that is painstakingly created, investigated, and provided with supporting evidence by the fans who engage in the behavior. This constructed representation does not neatly fit into the existing paradigm of Hall's model of decoding dominant, negotiated, or oppositional readings but manifests as an adjacent message within the dominant reading of the text—a message neither intended nor opposed by the encoder but coherently assembled from incidental textual evidence by fans upon decoding.
[1.3] No fandom is better suited to explore the act of constructing representation than the Star Trek franchise, known for both its outsider characters who can easily be read as autistic and for its singularly devoted and well-studied fan base that has been active since the original television series began airing in 1966. I first look at the history of autistic representation in media and then provide examples of constructed representations that are found in fandom for each Star Trek series through the 1990s.
2. Autistic experience and explicit representation
[2.1] When investigating autism in media, it is common to see it discussed through a clinical pathological lens with a focus on "functioning deficits" and "the assumption that there is one 'right' style of human neurocognitive functioning" (Walker 2021a). The lived experience of autism tends to be neglected in clinical practice, instead focusing on the external behaviors of autistic individuals. Nick Walker's definition of autism from an autistic perspective is a useful tool, describing autism as a neurotype in which "autistic brains are characterized by particularly high levels of synaptic connectivity and responsiveness. This tends to make the autistic individual's subjective experience more intense and chaotic than that of non-autistic individuals: on both the sensorimotor and cognitive levels, the autistic mind tends to register more information, and the impact of each bit of information tends to be both stronger and less predictable. […] One analogy that has often been made is that autistic individuals have a different neurological 'operating system' than non-autistic individuals" (Walker 2021b).
[2.2] Some examples of autistic differences can include sensitivities to sensory stimuli like strong scents, bright lights, or loud sounds; difficulties processing strong emotions; difficulties understanding implicit social rules; and an intense focus on special interests. The experiences of each autistic person are highly unique and variable from individual to individual.
[2.3] When autism is explicitly included in a narrative, it is traditionally presented as an affliction associated with the stereotypical presentation involving a young white boy who interacts with others in an aloof way and has narrow special interests (Varndell 2022). Typically, when autism is explicitly represented in media it is presented as a debilitating condition that is burdensome to the friends and families of the autistic individual. This is readily apparent in the 1988 film Rain Man, a famous representation of autism in media, which "drew on the trope of the autistic savant, an autistic person with extraordinary skills in a specific, limited area, often corresponding with significant difficulties in other areas of life" (Aspler et al. 2022, 326). More recent representations are only marginally better. Christine Becker's (2022) examination of autistic representation in the 2017 television show Atypical notes that "autism in film and television fiction has consistently been represented by a mere handful of key signifiers, such that characters tend to be collections of quirks rather than fully dimensional beings. These markers, traditionally classified under a so-called triad of impairments, include 'communication problems, lack of self-awareness, missing of social cues, no eye-contact and avoidance of emotionality, both mentally and physically'" (160).
[2.4] These representations are almost always created by neurotypical writers and producers based on their perceptions of autistic children (Aspler et al. 2022). Beyond the problematics of non-autistic people defining autism for a broad audience, basing the behaviors of adult characters on the behaviors of children further infantilizes the autistic population for a neurotypical audience.
[2.5] There is a broadening understanding of what autism looks like—or rather, how people of every race, age, and gender experience the symptoms of autism and the different ways that an autistic neurotype can present in different populations. Autism diagnosis in adults—particularly in people of color and people who were assigned female at birth—has been on the rise for several years. The growing awareness of what autism is actually like as a subjective experience has been helped by autistic people spreading information about autism via social media (Walker 2021b).
[2.6] The disconnect between popular stereotypes of autistic behavior and the lived experience of autistic people has given rise to an autistic-led phenomenon that I am calling constructed representation. The vast majority of articles and audience members that discuss autistic representation in media need to expressly lay out why the unlabeled characters could and should be perceived as autistic. This communal diagnosis of fictional characters is the core of constructed representation. The autistic self-advocacy community, feeling a paucity of authentic and positive representation in media, constructs their own representatives from characters who are well loved for their positive traits but not stigmatized or restricted by inaccurate stereotypes. That is, because characters in media who are explicitly labeled as autistic are often based on inaccurate and harmful stereotypes, autistic viewers often construct autistic representation from awkward, quirky, or outsider characters who were not intentionally written as autistic but who the autistic audience feels embody their experience more accurately than explicit representations.
[2.7] The scholarship on autism representation in media is limited; however, the book Autism in Film and Television: On the Island is a compilation of twenty-one essays on the subject of which 52.4 percent extrapolate autism from a text where it was not originally intended. This act of construction is common not just in academic literature but across autism self-advocacy spaces on social media platforms. Given the growing frequency of adult diagnosis where autistics commonly recount that learning about autism "made my whole life make sense" (Harris 2016), the common occurrence of (seemingly) undiagnosed autistic fictional characters is hardly surprising.
3. Star Trek, the outsider, and constructed representation in fandom
[3.1] To examine the phenomenon of constructed representation more closely, it is helpful to narrow the focus of this study to one particular fandom. Henry Jenkins's (1992) seminal work on fan communities, Textual Poachers, explores fandom as a group of media viewers who actively repurpose mass media texts as source material for expressing their own interests. Jenkins further explains that "fans assert their own right to form interpretations, to offer evaluations, and to construct cultural canons" (18). Because of the long (and very active) history of the Star Trek fan community, the vast majority of early scholarship on fandom focuses on the communication, coordination, and community practices of Star Trek fans (Jenkins 1992; Bacon-Smith 1992; Penley 1997). Star Trek first began airing as a weekly science fiction television series in 1966 and has grown to encompass over ten individual series and multiple feature films for a total of nearly 700 hours (and counting) of material. Star Trek is a particularly interesting subject to examine constructed representation as the diagnosis and perception of autism between the 1960s and the 2020s has changed dramatically, which resulted in changing perceptions of the characters over time. Because these characters are unfettered by the medicalized symptoms of autism from the times of their production, they remain fresh, accessible, and realistic to the autistic community.
[3.2] Each Star Trek series deliberately includes one or more outsider characters who allow the audience and other characters to reflect on humanity or to explain the science fiction conceits of the stories. The outsiders' struggles with human foibles, emotions, and sociality are commonly read as autistic by the large contingent of autistic Star Trek fans. This outsider is an integral element of each series as they tend to provide opportunities for exposition that help ease the audience into the world of the show. By their nature as outsiders, they typically struggle with understanding social situations and must learn how to interact with humans in their own individual way. Star Trek's various outsider characters have been a springboard for fandom activities since the beginning of the series, attracting many outsiders to the fandom ranks—many of whom have been autistic. This fertile fandom ground provides multiple opportunities for Star Trek fans to construct a more nuanced autistic representation. The following examples of fans constructing representation were collected by searching for Star Trek and Star Trek–related keywords, such as character names, within autism community spaces on Reddit, YouTube, and Tumblr. These posts often serve as a nexus of information by providing links or references to additional examples of autistic Star Trek fans constructing various characters as autistic, many of which were included in the sample set for this work.
4. Vulcans and Spock
[4.1] The original outsider within the Star Trek franchise is Spock in Star Trek: The Original Series. Spock, played by Leonard Nimoy, is a Vulcan (note 1), an alien who is relentlessly logical, stoic, and represses his emotions. This is well demonstrated in the episode "Galileo Seven" (1.13), where Spock is in command of an away mission that goes awry and is repeatedly castigated by his human subordinates for being too logical in making life-or-death decisions and having no human feeling when disregarding human death rituals. Vulcans are a whole species that fans read as autistic, with their lack of emotional reactivity and strict adherence to logic persisting through the entire franchise. Vulcans are shown to be deeply feeling and compassionate but in ways that are not demonstrative or overt. Importantly to the autistic community, Vulcans are also valued members of their crews, and all have close, accepting, non-Vulcan friends (Earl 2021). The world of Star Trek is one that accepts and values the types of difference inherent to Vulcans (and therefore to autistics).
[4.2] In fact, Spock achieved such popularity among Star Trek fans during the series's first run that it led to decades of contention between Leonard Nimoy and the series's lead actor William Shatner (Gross and Altman 2016). Fandom scholars Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse "place the beginnings of media fan fiction with the 1967 mimeographed fan zine Spockanalia," which, as the name suggests, focused on Spock (2014, 75). Spock was particularly attractive to early fandom because Star Trek fans often felt themselves to be outsiders. Early fandom scholarship primarily focuses on the gendered nature of participatory fandom practices (Jenkins 1992; Bacon-Smith 1992); however, they all mention the otherness that the women fans felt within their society. This otherness frequently drew fans to Spock. Henry Jenkins, in 1992, felt it necessary to explain the multiple negative stereotypes associated with fans at the time, including that they were "social misfits," "infantile," and "unable to separate fantasy from reality" (10), which are all stereotypes that are often leveled at autistic adults (Ellis 2024). In Camille Bacon-Smith's Enterprising Women, an ethnography of participatory Star Trek fandom in the 1980s, she describes her subjects as women "who found themselves outsiders [because they] were unwilling or incapable of masking their intelligence" (100). The women Bacon-Smith studied were particularly fascinated with Spock, extrapolating Vulcan society as one that valued egalitarianism and intelligence. The majority of early studies of Trek fandom focus on the fandom fascination with Spock. It would be inappropriate to speculate on the neurotypes of the fans involved in these early practices; however the repeated focus of fandom scholars on the otherness that these fans felt and how that drew them to the othered Spock at least lays the groundwork for understanding both Spock as a character and Star Trek fandom as a practice that opens space for those who feel out of place in their regular lives. For decades, fandom has been a community that is defined by the alternate readings that its participants bring to the mass media products they enjoy.
[4.3] Spock is often a touchstone for understanding autism both inside and outside of autistic spaces, with prominent scientists, researchers, and autism advocates claiming Spock as a member of the autistic community. Famous autistic Temple Grandin (2015) has long identified with Spock, writing after Leonard Nimoy's death, "Many autistic people have identified with Spock [because] Mr. Spock always controlled his emotions and used logic." Science communicator Jen Allerton (2021) explains that she related strongly to Vulcans growing up because of their logical nature and that she "did what any good Vulcan would do" when confused by strong emotion "and tried to factor the underlying causes of emotion into some kind of logical algorithm." In Allerton's case, Vulcans became a lens through which she could cope with the confusion of living in a neurotypical world, taking the traits presented as alien in the series and reconstituting them into a blueprint for an autistic mode of living. Spock—in not attempting to represent the prevalent ideas of autism in the 1960s—is inadvertently an example of autistic behavior that a large proportion of the autistic community can relate to. The official Star Trek website frequently features fan writers as guest contributors, with one search of StarTrek.com for "autism" in March 2025 returning 177 results. One such article begins, "Ask anyone about an autism relevant Trek character, and the answer is usually Mr. Spock" (Longstaff 2022). For the autistic community who are often forced to see themselves represented in media only as a burden, Spock's lack of emotional reactivity, strict logical worldview, and acceptance by his community make him an autistic icon.
[4.4] This reading of Spock—whose lack of emotionality is attributed to his alien status—is neither an intentional encoding on the part of the creators nor is it one that is contrary to the character as presented. Spock's "autism" is constructed by fans by mining the source material for existing traits like his use of logic and his lack of emotionality and repackaging them into a coherent reading outside of the series's original context. This reading becomes neither dominant, negotiated, or oppositional to the intended message of the work but is an adjacent meaning, always present in the text but neither intended nor wholly refutable, using the source material to construct autistic representation.
5. Next Generation and Data
[5.1] Constructed autistic representation is not limited to Vulcans nor only to the original series. Characters who can be interpreted as neurodivergent exist in every iteration of Star Trek by the nature of the outsider character's function within the structure of each show. The 1987 series Star Trek: The Next Generation is set nearly a century after the original series and features the android Data in the outsider role originally inhabited by Spock. The best single example of Data's perceived autistic traits is the episode "Data's Day" (4.11), which includes a constant narration from Data as he moves through a particularly interesting day. In this episode, Data explains his struggles with understanding human emotion while helping two of his friends with their wedding and simultaneously uncovering a spy plot through his use of logic. Throughout the series Data is relentlessly logical, bluntly states facts, and spends the majority of his free time attempting to learn what it means to be human. Data's explicit attempts to better understand emotions and integrate himself into human society are almost always met with understanding and inclusion by his friends and coworkers.
[5.2] Data is frequently cited as highly relatable by autistic people, perhaps even more so than Spock. Data is the subject of the first essay in Autism in Film and Television: On the Island, presenting constructed representation as both valid and essential in studying representations of autism in media. Ina Rae Hark (2022) explains not only Data's traits, which audiences can read as autistic, such as "misread[ing] social cues, speak[ing] with undiplomatic candor, and speak[ing] in a stilted manner" (37), but also many examples of autistic people relating strongly to Data—again including Temple Grandin. Katherine Taylor writes in a feature on the Star Trek website that Data's differences such as his "machine-like…repetitive movements, often overly formal speech, and need for routine" resonated very strongly with her as an undiagnosed autistic child who had no understanding of why she was treated so differently by her peers (2023). Law scholar Casey Broughton also engages in constructing Data as an autistic subject, describing his various "autistic" traits such as "sensation-seeking behavior," "sensory overloads," and "stimming" (2022). Hark, Taylor, and Broughton all take elements of Data's character and reconstitute them into a reading of Data as not just an android (as intended) but autistic.
[5.3] Data is perhaps read as autistic so easily because autism awareness was on the rise during the original airing of The Next Generation between 1987 and 1994. In 1987, the diagnostic criteria for autistic conditions were properly standardized and dramatically expanded with the publication of the American Psychological Association's Diagnostic and Statistical Manual, 3rd Edition, or DSM-III (Silberman 2015). A further revision of the autism diagnostic criteria in 1988 roughly coincided with the release of Rain Man, which only further publicized the condition (Silberman 2015). "In 1991, autism was included in [the Individuals with Disabilities Education Act] for the first time," which led to another boom in diagnosis as clinicians more readily diagnosed children to help them receive necessary accommodations (Silberman 2015, 393). Data was not intentionally written as autistic, but the growing awareness of autism in the context of a medical condition made it more likely that people who knew they were autistic or knew an autistic person could see themselves or their loved ones in Data on screen. This creation of alternative but inherent meaning-making is an activity that ranges from the most casual to the most engaged fans, as it requires nothing more than personal identification with the character, which stems from the unintentional confluence of traits seen in the text.
[5.4] Data actor Brent Spiner often speaks anecdotally of the pervasiveness of fans constructing representation in this way. In an interview moderated by an autistic fan, Spiner recounts his experience at conventions, saying "so many people have told me about the experiences that they had" relating to Data, and he is "glad that [he] didn't know too much about it at the time, because [he] would have pushed the writers to address it more head-on and it could have ruined the entire thing" (JLGB Virtual 2020). In a media environment where Rain Man—a film about the overwhelming burden of caring for an autistic individual—was the predominant media representation of autism, having Data as a character with autistic behavior who was not a burden but an asset to the crew was a direct contradiction to the common perception of autistic people. Spiner himself recognizes that, in Data's case, the fan-constructed representation that codes Data as autistic is superior to anything that the creative team could have written if they had attempted to address Data's autistic traits more directly. The superiority of fan-constructed special interests is a persistent ideology from fandom scholar Henry Jenkins's early work. For Jenkins (1992), the commercial nature of television requires that stories be comprehensible to as wide an audience as possible, which often excludes the narratives and interpretations that fans most want to see. Fans, then, in creating the representation that they desire, create a more coherent and nuanced vision of their subject than commercially produced television ever could.
6. Changelings and Borg
[6.1] In contrast to the more mainstream popularity of Star Trek: The Original Series and Star Trek: The Next Generation, the remaining Star Trek series from the 1990s—Star Trek: Deep Space Nine and Star Trek: Voyager—have less broad exposure (Zappone 2019). Where The Next Generation experienced a "remarkable crossing over into the mainstream," both Deep Space Nine and Voyager remained niche programs that were watched almost exclusively by existing fans of the franchise (Leeder 2020). Perhaps then it is fitting that two of the most nuanced examples of constructed representation in Star Trek are found first in Odo, the shapeshifting security officer of Deep Space Nine, and then in Seven of Nine, the former Borg drone who joins Voyager in the fourth season.
[6.2] Deep Space Nine features the shapeshifter Odo, whose natural state is a gelatinous nonhumanoid goo. Odo cannot adequately mimic humanoid faces, must revert to his gelatinous state after prolonged attempts to "mask" in a humanoid form, has a strong sense of justice, struggles connecting to others, and feels deep, strong emotions but struggles to express them. "Masking" in autism spaces is a term that refers to behaviors that autistic people use to "attempt to hide the signature characteristics" of autism (https://www.henryford.com/blog/2023/04/autism-masking). One episode that distills these elements of Odo's character is "The Alternate" (2.12), which features Odo's overbearing father figure repeatedly denigrating his imperfect attempts to mimic humanoid appearance, express his emotions, and interact with others. Unlike Spock, who must repress his emotions or face physiological consequences, or Data, who literally is incapable of emotions until he is granted an emotion chip in the post-series feature films, Odo is a unique biological being who must contend with his own ethics, emotions, and physical differences in a messy and complicated world.
[6.3] Where Spock and Data are widely cited by prominent autistic figures as relatably autistic, Odo—by virtue of being in a less widely known series—is primarily constructed as autistic by individual fans through personal internet posts. There are a myriad of blogs and social media posts describing Odo's autistic traits with comments such as "I've always identified pretty strongly with everyone's favorite werepudding" (https://www.reddit.com/r/DeepSpaceNine/comments/gaej0v/is_it_just_me_or_is_odo_on_the_spectrum/). Eric Heveron-Smith (2022) is an autistic adult who lays out Odo's autistic traits in a brief blog post, particularly noting how the way Odo's father figure "was speaking to and about Odo reminded me of the way some neurotypicals speak about what they might term 'high functioning' autistic people." He ends his post with, "I'm not sure if any of the writers deliberately coded him this way, or if it was subconscious, but I really appreciate seeing the story of his struggles and triumphs portrayed this way." Given the understanding of autistic traits in the 1990s, it's virtually impossible that Odo was intentionally written to be autistic.
[6.4] Where Data's lack of emotion and literal thinking were identifiably in line with the medical model of autism during the 1990s, Odo's presentation better mirrors the more recent understanding of the autistic lived experience rather than a set of pathologies. As Spiner noted about Data, addressing the autism in the room would likely have "ruined the whole thing." However, through constructing their own representation, more recent autistic fans find themselves strongly and positively represented in Odo. AmyLea Clemons focuses on this type of meaning-making in her study of disability and fan fiction, stating "headcanon-based texts (sometimes narrative, sometimes not) may help scholars explain the affective and bodily modes of interpretation" in which the race, gender, disability, and so on of a fan determines how they will react to and "decode a text along one of Hall's three positions" whether accepting the dominant reading, negotiating a similar one, or opposing it all together (2019, 270). In the case of Odo, whose autism is a purely fandom-side invention, the interpretation seems to be neither dominant, negotiated, nor oppositional. Odo's autistic traits are obvious to those who know to look for them yet were carried unintentionally in the dominant reading. In Odo's case, the constructed representation could be viewed as a hitchhiker within the canonical text exactly as presented.
[6.5] There are a variety of neurodivergent characters on Voyager, but one of particular note is Seven of Nine. Seven is the first woman outsider in the franchise and was added in the fourth season explicitly to bring sex appeal to increase the show's flagging audience share (Zappone 2024). Seven is a former Borg drone, a species that assimilates other lifeforms into a hybrid biological/technological hivemind. The Borg seek perfection, and every drone is given a specific discrete function within the collective. Seven was assimilated by the Borg as a child and is removed from the collective as an adult woman. Thrust into a life among humans, she struggles with social cues, not understanding human emotion, being overly blunt, and feeling ostracized from her peers. In the episode "Someone to Watch Over Me" (5.22), Seven's friends attempt to teach her human mating rituals—none of which she understands or successfully achieves. While Seven is often coerced into human behavior, she typically fails in her attempts to behave more human and is ultimately accepted by her peers for her unique individuality. While Seven was initially created explicitly to be a babe, the overt objectification of her skintight catsuits frequently underscores her lack of social understanding.
[6.6] Seven provided a mirror for neurodivergent girls and femmes, showing both her struggle with fitting into society as well as the acceptance by her peers for who she is. Writer and YouTuber Jessie Earl (2021) explores a huge range of characters that she perceives as autistic within the franchise but specifically mentions that, as a woman, Seven was the one with whom she identified most and who helped her feel seen. Many of these acts of constructed representation feel similar to the self-diagnosis process, where an individual will catalog their own autistic traits in an effort to understand why they are so different from others. Similar to Brent Spiner, Jeri Ryan, the actress who played Seven of Nine, reports autistic fans frequently approaching her with this interpretation of the character, saying, "I've heard from so many people who are on the autism spectrum, that they appreciate seeing a character who has the same struggles that they did. Because she didn't have social skills. She didn't know personal space boundaries. She didn't understand social norms. So she had to learn all of that" (quoted in Yehl 2019). Seven's intended role as sex appeal coupled with her status as the show's outsider likely meant she was written as an ice queen archetype; however, that inadvertently provided many autistic people with a positive role model that they could decode as autistic, adjacent to the dominant textual reading of her as a frigid cyborg.
[6.7] Both Odo and Seven are less well-known than Spock and Data but provide more nuanced portrayals of what could be considered autistic characters in the Star Trek franchise. Neither of them were created with autism in mind, nor are they explicitly labelled as autistic, but the autistic community constructs their own representation from their observations of the characters' struggles, behaviors, and interactions with others, discovering a readily apparent yet unintentional meaning within the dominant reading of the text.
7. Pitfalls in the sample
[7.1] There are a few potentially problematic elements with the sample of characters presented in this article—most of them are played by men, all of them are white, and all of the characters are aliens, robots, or enhanced in some science fictional way. It is striking that, even accidentally, the autistic representation in Star Trek is so heavily white, as autism is still largely underdiagnosed in people of color due to economic, institutional, and systemic barriers (Mandell et al. 2009). Autism is also historically seen as a condition of "extreme male brain" (Baron-Cohen 1999) and remains underdiagnosed in women and girls (Vromen 2025). That these trends hold true even in unintentionally autistic representation is likely an artifact of the production process, where women and people of color are already seen as other, and it is therefore more legible to a wider audience to construct an other—alien, robot, or otherwise—out of a white male actor.
[7.2] In the more recent entries into the Star Trek franchise, there is an intentional variety of outsider characters, logical humans, or characters who can otherwise be read as autistic, which is a consequence of Star Trek's efforts to represent a more diverse future (Thomas 2017). It is straightforward to lay out the autistic traits of many of these characters. What's more crucial to the concept of constructed representation is the frequency with which Star Trek fans have engaged in this same act of recognition. Anecdotally, Star Trek fandom itself is disproportionately autistic compared to the average population (Moss 2020). Trek fans are stereotyped as intensely devoted to the franchise and focused on world-building minutiae to the exclusion of anything else, as infamously pilloried in the Saturday Night Live sketch featuring William Shatner exhorting Trekkies to "get a life!" (12.8). But, as I have shown, Star Trek is particularly friendly to the autistic neurotype, which may explain why so many autistic people feel drawn to the franchise in the first place. No series may ever say outright that a character is autistic, but autistic people feel seen all the better for the lack of a clinical label.
8. Directly represented neurodivergence in Star Trek
[8.1] Star Trek is rife with autistic representation—of a kind. Where thousands of autistic people have seen themselves in Spock, Data, Odo, Seven, and a myriad of other Trek characters, the word "autism" is never mentioned in the entire franchise. All of the representation is inherent in the viewer; it must be constructed. In contrast to the characters that are perceived as neurodivergent by fandom, there are a handful of guest appearances by characters who are explicitly noted as having a neurological difference, and these differences are rarely treated with nuance.
[8.2] In the Deep Space Nine episodes "Statistical Probabilities" (6.9) and "Chrysalis" (7.5), station doctor Julian Bashir volunteers to work with a group of institutionalized patients who have been genetically engineered to have something akin to savant syndrome. Their behavior is presented as an exaggerated—and pathological—version of Bashir's own genetically engineered genius intellect (note 2). These characters experience issues ranging from nymphomania to pathological lying and primarily exist to reinforce that Bashir is not disordered, whereas these demonstrably abnormal people are. Aside from this group of savants, there are few other characters with explicitly stated neurodivergence. Star Trek: The Original Series makes a point of emphasizing that all mental health issues have been cured except for a handful of criminally insane people who live in an isolated facility in "Whom Gods Destroy" (3.16). Even so, whenever neurodivergence is explicitly referenced, it is always as a problem that needs to be solved—a typical understanding of disability as a medical problem that needs to be corrected.
[8.3] By contrast, the outsider member of the main cast is generally fully accepted by others and is helped and accommodated when they struggle in an area that can be perceived as autistic. This type of negative explicit representation, even in the supposedly accepting and utopian future of Star Trek, underscores why the autistic community gravitates more toward constructing their own representation from characters who have unintentionally autistic traits. When the explicit representation is negative, it fails the entire community. In that void, the community makes its own representation, an act that "resist[s] the norming that our stories have traditionally based their logics on" (Clemons 2019, 273). Constructed representation, rather than defying or agreeing with the original intent of a series, recognizes familiar patterns in the text as presented and provides additional context to the dominant reading in a manner that is neither intended nor oppositional but adjacent.
9. Conclusion
[9.1] While constructed representation is readily evident in the Star Trek fandom, it is not limited to one particular franchise. The online autistic communities on a myriad of social media sites have identified characters from Disney movies, television sitcoms, romance novels, and video games as positive examples of autistic representation where none of these characters are stated or originally intended to be autistic.
[9.2] Media that focuses on specific disabilities is often stigmatizing, demeaning, or wraps an entire character's arc solely in their disability. For autism, and potentially other invisible disabilities, the possibility of fans constructing their own representation by noticing relatable traits and behaviors in characters not explicitly written as having a particular disability is an opportunity not just for representation but to reframe how one's disability is portrayed to a larger audience.