Autism parents & neurodiversity: Radical translation, joint embodiment and the prosthetic environment

Abstract

It has become increasingly common to view and discuss autism as a form of difference, rather than a disorder. Moreover, the autism spectrum has generated new possibilities for personhood and social inclusion. These developments have typically been ascribed to the recent work of autistic autobiographers and autistic self-advocates associated with the neurodiversity movement, who are providing a sort of linguistic infrastructure to support autistic personhood. Drawing on historical and ethnographic research, this article makes the complementary and analogous claim that parents of autistic children have used autism therapies to create a technical infrastructure to support autistic personhood. The article follows an earlier genealogical thread to argue that parents have used the techniques and technologies of behavioral therapies (sometimes said to be incommensurable with neurodiversity’s philosophy) in ways that have actually helped establish this autism-as-difference view. They have done so by translating their child’s behaviors and utterances and engaging in forms of ‘joint embodiment’ with her to create enabling ‘prosthetic environments’ where her unique personhood can be recognized. Through an ethnographic focus on ‘prosaic technologies’ and the politics of everyday practice, the article also provides a thicker and more grounded account of what Ian Hacking calls the “looping effect of human kinds”.