Musings of an Aspie: Blogging, Gender and Affect
Abstract
The aim of this paper is to investigate how blogging creates opportunities for autistic women to resist against patriarchal medical epistemology that has long determined the profile for Autism Spectrum Disorder. Musings of an Aspie, which is written and managed by American autistic author Cynthia Kim, is one of many examples of how technology poses a way for autistic women to become legitimate and legible subjects by creating a kind of “digital” body that gives them access to a political sphere that is otherwise closed to them. While exploring two particular blogposts, this paper will take theories of affect into consideration. This paper draws upon a Spinozist conception of affect, one concerned not simply with emotion or structures of feeling, but with the capacity of bodies to relate and become. The paper’s analysis turns to Spinoza’s bodily ethics to think through bodily capacities as they are described by the autistic women in Kim’s online community.
Keywords
Blogging, Affect, Autism, Women, Technology
Author Biography
Susannah French
Susannah French is a PhD candidate in the School of Sociology at the Australian National University researching the female experience of autism. Her thesis argues that there is under- or mis-diagnosis of females with autism, rendering them invisible to the autism support community. Susannah’s thesis aims to explore how the social conditioning of females and conventional diagnostic practices contributes to the invisibility of autistic females. Through her research, she hopes to improve the understanding of clinicians and the public of the varied experiences according to gender that autistic individuals have.