This study explores the portrayal of Sam Gardner, a fictional adolescent character canonically diagnosed with Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD), in the first season of the Netflix television series Atypical. Adopting a transdisciplinary Child Studies perspective, the analysis focuses on how the social categories of disability and age intersect in the representations of adolescent characters with ASD in popular media.

The research questions guiding our study are: i) How is ASD portrayed through the character of Sam in the series Atypical?, ii) What role does ASD play in constructing notions of adolescence in Atypical?, and iii) How does Atypical reinforce or challenge portrayed stereotypes of ASD? Grounded in social constructivist ontology, we use Visual Discourse Analysis (VDA) to analyse how socio-cultural discourses construct and reproduce notions of adolescence and ASD, and how they intersect. Through a transdisciplinary approach, we include the theoretical frameworks of agency from Child Studies and ableism from Disability Studies to inform our epistemological positioning.

Two key themes emerged in the coding process: disorder and (in)dependence. The key themes and their respective subthemes demonstrate that multiple notions of adolescence and ASD intersect, complexifying ableist ideologies and doubly marginalising adolescents with disabilities. Sam is ‘othered’ and socially excluded due to his ASD, causing him to be reduced to his disability and thereby oversimplifying and stereotyping ASD. Our findings address a research gap by applying a transdisciplinary Child Studies perspective, revealing how ageist and ableist notions intersect, further marginalising adolescents with ASD.