The Race of the Dis-qualified: Literary Representations of the Intersection of Racial and Neurological Otherness

Abstract

Historically speaking, autism has been severely pathologized as an undesirable developmental disorder, leading to the dehumanization of autistics. However, recent scholarship in the field of disability studies has sought to revolutionize the older biomedical understanding of autism, re-presenting it as an alternative neurological and sensory processing system rather than as a deficit. While several disability scholars have studied autistic autobiographical writing, research on autism has primarily focused on cultural productions from the Global North, privileging stories of white, urban, upper-class heterosexual men and women. This has led to the erasure and silencing of narratives of people of colour, queer people, and individuals from lower-income groups on the autism spectrum. This article critically analyses literary representations of the experiential reality of being autistic as recorded in self-narratives of autistic people of colour in the 2017 anthology titled All the Weight of Our Dreams: On Living Racialized Autism, edited by Lydia X. Z. Brown. Employing theoretical tenets from the interdisciplinary methodological frameworks of postcolonialism, race studies, disability studies, and feminism, this paper examines textual representations of the intersection of various aspects of selfhood such as race, class, gender, sexuality, privilege, access to diagnosis, resources, care, and relationality in the context of autism. Such an analysis explores the heterogeneity of autistic modes of living and self-expression generated by diverse socio-political positions, shedding light on the foundational discourses that construct the material reality of autism differently in different socio-political, cultural and economic contexts.