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 color, queer people, and individuals from lower-income groups who live on the autism spectrum. This article critically analyzes literary representations of the experiential reality of being autistic as recorded in self-narratives of autistic people of color in the 2017 anthology titled All the Weight of Our Dreams: On Living Racialized Autism, edited by Lydia X. Z. Brown. This article employs theoretical tenets from the interdisciplinary methodological frameworks of postcolonialism, race studies, crip theory, disability studies, and feminism. The primary aim of this paper is to problematize the intersection of various aspects of selfhood such as racial passing and masking, class, gender, sexuality, privilege, access to diagnosis, resources, care, and relationality in the context of intellectual disability. By doing so, this paper scrutinizes the foundational discourses which construct the material reality of intellectual disability differently in different socio-political, cultural and economic contexts.

Authors:
Sinchan Chatterjee, Indian Institute of Technology, India

About the Presenter(s)
Sinchan Chatterjee is a Fulbright-Nehru Doctoral Research Fellow at the University of California, Berkeley and a UGC NET-qualified Senior Research Fellow in English at IIT Bombay.

Connect on Linkedin
https://www.linkedin.com/in/sinchan-chatterjee-66a20a114/

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