In this Master’s thesis we sought to examine the historical conditions under which autism emerged and expose the normative assumptions underlying past and current understandings of this condition and thereby denaturalize and debiologize the currently dominant conceptualizations of autism as a neurodevelopmental ‘disorder’. Drawing on Foucault, disability studies, and autism studies, we revealed that autism is constituted as a disorder because it is defined as a deviation from normality. Rather than a timeless concept, ‘normality’ emerged in the nineteenth century and became central to medical and psychiatric knowledge, where deviations from various norms are medicalized and constructed as pathologies, ‘impairments’. The thesis further demonstrated that impairments, commonly treated as natural and universal, are themselves products of power. Consequently, autism as a disability should be understood not as a natural category discovered by psychiatry, but as a historical artefact produced through techniques of power. Its emergence as a psychiatric category depended on specific historical conditions, including the expansion of psychiatric classifications and psychiatric power. Since autism is entangled in power relations, we sought to determine how it is governed and showed that governing unfolds through the interaction of disciplinary and biopolitical norms. We showed that the dominant pathologizing approach to governing autism is challenged by the autistic community and the neurodiversity movement. Interpreting these as a productive form of counter-conduct, we highlighted the potential to reconceptualize autism beyond the logic of pathology.
|
