| Since its addition to the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in 1994, Asperger's Syndrome has become one of the most intriguing and controversial mental diagnoses in contemporary public health. Defined as a disorder of the individual brain but manifesting most often in disordered social interactions, bringing both valued gifts as well as debilitating impairments, Asperger's Syndrome complicates dividing lines between individual and sociality, and between personality and pathology. This research sought to explore and unpack the broader cultural models of disease, identity and self through which individuals affected by autism spectrum disorders such as Asperger's Syndrome make sense of this condition, through eighteen months of participant observation in settings where the meaning of these conditions were being negotiated and put into practice.;In each chapter, I explore how a different community defines and responds to autism spectrum disorders: professionals learning to diagnose autism; parents seeking alternative medical explanations and treatments for autism; autistic self-advocates in the neurodiversity movement; teachers and parents in a rural school district negotiating access to a program for students with Aspergers; psychologists working within a psychiatric clinic at a medical center; and researchers presenting work at a national autism conference. In the process of determining what is and is not autism, each community draws upon, maintains and enforces other distinctions as well: between individual and culture, between human and inhuman, between self and other, and between brain and mind.;In each case, these attempts at separation are reactions not only to autism itself, but also to the increasing standardization, routinization, and technologization of social and cultural life---patterns that people on the autism spectrum, with their "restricted and repetitive behaviors" clearly manifest. Attempting to resist such standardization, each of the groups chronicled in these chapters posit and privilege an ideal of the "pure self", unaffected by sociocultural input that is, in many cases, seen as threateningly homogenizing. In doing so, however, they collude in the concealment of social structures and their power; ironically, they thus often wind up playing into the very social imperatives they seek to resist. The final chapter explores an alternative perspective from teenagers coming of age with an autism spectrum diagnosis, who contest the ideology of a pure self embedded deep within medical language. Instead, they draw upon shared mythologies from comic books, video games and roleplaying games to express and work through their experience of hybridity, multiplicity and permeability. |
