| Since Leo Kanner first suggested the diagnosis "infantile autism," a set of discursive practices has emerged from the institutions of science and medicine that defines what autism is and how best to treat it. Through these discourses autism has been represented in specific ways, most often as a disorder that needs treatment and normalization. Popular media has to a large extent reproduced these discourses, significantly shaping popular understandings of autism. In this interdisciplinary dissertation I explore the social response to autism. In my analysis I draw on discourse analysis, symbolic interactionism, postructuralism, and science and technology studies (STS) to better understand the relationship between knowledge practices, autism discourses, bodies, and subjectivity, and the roles each of these play in the social enactment of autism. Drawing on historical and current medical and popular texts on autism, 40 interviews with parents and therapists of autistic individuals, and three years of participant observations in two special education classrooms, I examine: the historical construction of the discursive diagnosis autism; how autism is presently represented in therapeutic and popular texts, and how the discourses that produce these representations are bound up in a mutually constitutive relationship with the disorder they define and treat; the practice of "self crafting" in autism therapy, in which autistic children are immersed in therapy to reform their selves; and attempts by mothers of autistic children, and autistic activists and their allies, to (re)articulate the dominant discourse of autism, thus carving out a space for alternative autistic identities. Despite being subject to the power of medical, therapeutic and educational institutions and practices that aim to enforce normality, people with autism and their families are never powerless: they can and do speak back, engaging in acts of agency and resistance. In studying the responses to autistic embodiment, the discursive practices of folk and clinical knowledge, and autistic subjectivities/identities, this thesis illustrates the production of autistic personhood as a sociocultural phenomenon, produced in the connections between lived experiences, social institutions, and cultural meanings. |
