Narratives of Distinction: Personal Life Narrative as a Technology of the Self in the Everyday Lives and Relational Worlds of Children with Autism

Abstract

Over the years, children with autism have often been portrayed in the professional literature and the popular media as asocial creatures bereft of words and subjective worldviews. Alternatively, I examine the lived contexts in which children with autism spectrum disorders actively engage with family members in coconstructed narrative recountings of personal life events, and are apprenticed into culturally consonant genres of life narrative as a technology of the self. Employing naturalistic video‐ and audio‐taped data documenting the everyday lives of 17 U.S. children diagnosed with high functioning autism and Asperger's syndrome, I demonstrate how everyday narratives of personal experience offer a vehicle for expression of the children's subjective life worlds and a venue for self‐presentation and intersubjective attunement in which social and moral distinctions of normativity and difference are at stake. These deeply interactive self‐fashioning processes highlight and make visible the dynamic intersubjective practices that contribute to human subjectivity. [autism, children, narrative, self, sociality]

Memory integration in the autobiographical narratives of individuals with autism

“…During dinnertime conversations, youth with autism are more likely to spontaneously recount a pre-existing narrative they read or viewed, than a personal event they experienced, compared with their TD interlocutors (Solomon, 2004 ). Furthermore, ASD individuals' personal interests in finance, dinosaurs, and religious narratives, or even their tendency to hoard, can become woven into their identities and sense of self (Nickrenz, 2007 ; Sirota, 2010 ; Brezis, 2012 ; Skirrow et al, 2014 ). Returning to Ben Shalom's hypothesis, spared semantic memory in individuals with high-functioning ASD may indeed serve them as a compensatory mechanism for episodic AM.…”

“No One Has to Be Your Friend”: Asperger's Syndrome and the Vicious Cycle of Social Disorder in Late Modern Identity Markets

“…As a number of scholars have recently observed (Choudhury et al ; Luhrmann ; Rose , ), the current trend in psychiatry is to define mental disorders as biological pathologies, best conceptualized at the level of the individual body or below (see, for example, Insel and Quirion ).This phenomenon is particularly pronounced in the case of autism. While a growing body of work within the fields of sociology and anthropology attends to the social, cultural, and historical contexts of autism (i.e., Bagatell ; Cascio ; Daley ; Eyal et al ; Grinker ; Nadesan ; Ochs and Solomon ; Orsini ; Silverman 2001; Sirota ; Sterponi ), this work constitutes a small fraction of the broader field of autism research (Daley ). As Solomon and Bagatell have observed, “there is less and less attention in autism research to phenomena that cannot be studied at the neurobiological or molecular level, such as human experience, social interaction, and cross‐cultural variation” (:2).…”

“Then I Learned about Positive Thinking”: The Genre Structuring of Narratives of Self‐Transformation

“…Narrative, whether in casual conversation or in more formal, institutional activities, is thus a sense‐making activity, both for individuals (Daiute and Nelson ; Linde ; Ochs and Capps , ) and for institutions (Collins ; Linde ). Within the intimate setting of the family, narrative functions as a technology for shaping children's understanding of their actions and identities and for developing a self‐evaluating stance (Aukrust and Snow ; Ochs and Taylor ; Perregaard ; Sirota ). This power of narrative to shape and reconstitute the self is also drawn on in psychotherapeutic interactions and self‐help groups in which the use of narrative to (re)interpret past events and enact new identities is seen as central to the reconfiguration of a healthier self (Cain ; Ferrara ; Gubrium and Holstein ; Irvine ).…”