ABSTRACT
This chapter discusses how autistic girls might approach adolescence, and how teachers might build positive autistic identities. Adolescence can be a time of fluidity; of precariousness; of experimenting with the options available and weighing up the possibilities teachers are offered. The chapter explores the ways in which discourses are used in the shaping of socially situated identities. It shows that for young autistic girls and women, there is a lack of appropriate authoritative discourses on which to draw in order to construct their identities, both as ‘autistic’ and as ‘women’. The chapter suggested that this renders essentially ‘voiceless’ and vulnerable. In order to build their identity, young autistic women and girls need access to discourses that speak to our lives and our experiences. Teachers often struggle with the ‘hidden curriculum’ of womanhood – whether and how to apply make-up, whether and when to begin removing body hair, how to develop and maintain intimate relationships.
