Diagnosis and Diversity: Feminism, Autistic Identity, and the Possibilities for Neurodiversity

In this qualitative study, we analyse autistic women's accounts, drawing on the notion of performativity to examine the role of diagnostic identities, gender, and the interplay between them in the storying of women's self-hood. We explore how their accounts both utilise and challenge the binaries around diagnosis and gender. We analysed data from 32 autistic women, either interview transcripts ( n = 9) or their own publicly available testimonies ( n = 23). We drew on thematic and discourse analysis approaches to interpret their accounts, which we organised into three themes: ‘Autistic Authenticity’, ‘Gender is Fluid’, and ‘Conflation of Autism and Gender’. We found that although women considered their ‘autistic’ selves as essential and core to their identity, they considered their gender to be fluid and socially framed (performative), but still within binary understandings of gender. We situate this work as part of the critical diagnosis literature, arguing it may be productive to disassociate the concept of autistic identity from autism neurotype and diagnosis, just as gender has been disassociated with biological sex. Lay Abstract Quite a few academic articles have been written about autistic women, and from the perspectives from different disciplines. Some feminists have written about how gender is ‘performed’ but autism instead of being performed is usually considered to be masked. In this study, we were interested in how self-identified autistic women described themselves both in terms of gender and autism. To do this we analysed autistic women's writing and conducted interviews. We found although women considered their ‘autistic’ selves as core; in contrast, they considered their gender to be fluid and socially framed (performative). We are arguing it may be productive to disassociate the concepts of diagnostic identity, biology/neurotype and performance, just as performativity theory casts aspects of gender identity as distinct from biological sex, and performance. Such a disassociation could widen the framework of possibilities for neurodiversity.