(Re)conhecimento, diagnóstico e mascaramento: narrativas de si e modos de subjetivação de sujeitos autores

Abstract

More and more autistic people are sharing their own narratives and conducting their own research, recording knowledge. These experiments are as heterogeneous as the condition of being autistic. In addition to theorizing about autism, they write about their observations and readings of other peers, putting on stage multiple types of texts written first-hand. The experience of autism, together with theorizations on neurodiversity and theorizations from the field of Foucauldian studies in education, mobilized the research that gave rise to this Doctoral Thesis, whose research problem is: What operations on themselves do the authors mark in their narratives? Based on the problem and the early handling of the material, the main objective of the research was defined, which is to problematize the self-narratives produced/written/published by people who recognize themselves as autistic, based on the reading, systematization and analysis of the concepts of neurodiversity, subjectivation and selfnarratives. As far as the theoretical field is concerned, I present it as another path, not that of the clinic, of the psychologization and symptomatization of individuals, but that of the singularity of being autistic as part of human life. In the field of neurodiversity, there are philosophers, sociologists, educators and neurologists who defend autism as one more variety of the existence of plural and diverse lives. To this end, 31 books written by autistic authors constituted the research material. Of the total, 26 were analyzed because they are written in the first person singular or because they contain their authors' self-narratives. Through the analytical modus operandi, which sought to be guided by the forms of subjectivation present in the self-writings, it was possible to visualize three major forms of subjectivation of the subjects: (Re)knowledge, diagnosis and masking. Each of these allows us to conclude that the diagnosis marks a common point for all of them, as they say that it initiates a process of self-recognition and they begin to question the discourse on being normal. The thesis defended in the paper is that the diagnosis itself is not a bad thing; however, it is the uses of it that subjectivize in different ways. The diagnosis becomes a defining factor for them, because by recognizing themselves as autistic, they can resist the practices of normalization. After all, this is yet another form of life that cannot be eliminated or pushed aside. The main contributions of this work to the field are the tensioning of the concept of normality based on autistic writing.