ABSTRACT
How do we come to make sense of our lives when how we experience ourselves is at odds with what we are told about ourselves? This chapter considers the difficulty of communicating experiences that do not conform to stereotypical understandings of autism or to a culturally sanctioned matrix of ideas about personhood more generally, with reference to identity narratives by autistic authors from Britain and North America and biomedical constructions of autism from the last few decades. When autistic people intervene in public discussions about autism, they are typically subject to similar forms of misrecognition, but with the further issue of institutional constraints on the types of knowledge about autistic lives that are regarded as worth pursuing. I argue that normative demands for self-disclosure within the West place unhelpful demands on autistic people who struggle with symbolic verbal communication and pose particular hurdles for those who experience a more porous or diffuse sense of their identity. At the same time, autistic narrators, both individually and collectively, and in public and private spaces, draw on a wide tapestry of narrative understandings of their lives, and in so doing resist master narratives that undermine moral recognition for autistic and otherwise neurologically atypical individuals and groups.
