"L'idiot de la famille, c'est moi". The 'neurodiversity' movement and literature

Abstract

Autism is an exponentially increasing diagnosis, and beyond the medical gaze, it manifests itself in the public discourse; it is a cultural event to which the endless amount of books, movies, TV series on the subject are testimony. Clearly, in the time of the centrality of communication, the forms of its nonconformity come to assume symbolic centrality. This is addressed by that sectoral field of Disability Studies that is emerging as Critical Autism Studies. In this article, the resonances between literary criticism and autism are analyzed from that theoretical perspective. In particular, a text will be analyzed that panders to the emancipatory intentions of CAS, Autistic Disturbances by Julia Miele Rodas, a book in which the expressive peculiarities that are given as critical in clinical discourse, as symptoms, are found as stylistic devices in a heterogeneous literary corpus, and therefore redeemed.