ABSTRACT
Anthropologists have come to explore how institutional arrangements support or constrain the communicative capacities of disabled individuals (Wolf-Meyer 2020), including institutions built by and for disabled people (Fein 2020; Friedner 2014). Crip theory encourages us to bring atypical forms of communication based on gestures, images, or sounds, into the realm of the specifically human by highlighting the ideology of normative language within existing neoliberal institutions (seem, for instance, Henner and Robinson 2021). While crip theory focuses on those strategies to resist the exclusion of disabled individuals from dominant social practices within the West (focusing on experiences of dehumanization and resistance to such), I argue that some contemporary autistic narrators focus on strategies for survival within a more-than-human realm. While an older generation of autistic life writers has explored how autism is compatible with ‘self-sufficiency, authenticity and integrity’ (Valente 2016), a newer wave connects any desire for ‘self-sufficiency’ to the acceleration of neoliberal social practices. In contrast to the impulse to rehumanize disabled people's lives, I am interested in how texts may ‘re-animate’ or reclaim disabled people's lives so that they are no longer regarded as lacking the qualities that typically define human life.
