Idiosyncratic and Non-Unitary

In this article, I argue for an antinormative bioethics based in disability experiences drawn from memoirists’ accounts of idiosyncratic needs and desires that are obscured by normative impulses in mainstream bioethics. Bioethics has long been shaped by a commitment to the normal, which often casts disabled people and the category of disability as anterior to bioethical concerns about individual rights, protections, and property. Focusing on disability experiences and the category of disability—as developed by disability studies scholars and supported by materialist feminist science and technology studies—provides a grounding for an inclusive bioethics that creates livable lives through careful and creative alliance building in and beyond the contexts in which bioethics has traditionally operated. I focus herein on the non-unitary experience of autism and the facilitation of people who identify as autistic to develop this inclusive and responsive bioethical praxis.