ABSTRACT
What would it mean to develop a ‘community oriented’ research strategy? I propose that a focus on the macro-political level of communities pushes against the ‘divided medicalization’ (Fein 2020) that underpins rhetorical recognition of positive and negative qualities in autistic individuals but which simultaneously homes in on ideas of impairment and suffering as though they may stand in for the whole. This means that characteristics that are presumed to underlie autistic suffering – struggles with symbolic language, sensory sensitivities, hyperfocus, and pleasure in repetition – are seldom allowed to perform critical cultural work. I argue that it is necessary to trace these characteristics as they manifest in key areas of social and cultural life – in aesthetics and patterns of affiliation – without letting go of the normative constraints on participation in cultural practices. While practices established by and for autistics are typically regarded as failing to intervene in the disorder that autism represents, we might consider instead what is it that dominant representations of autism and their proposed treatment interventions inhibit at the level of both individuals and communities? I argue that existing ‘structural’ understandings of autism undermine the potential for the designation to improve cultural agency for individuals and communities.
