Narrating the Many Autisms: Identity, Agency, Mattering by Anna Stenning (Routledge: 2024)
Over the past few decades, narrative has become an increasingly popular medium for autistic people to share their experiences, but there remains an underdeveloped framework for interpreting such accounts. Dr Anna Stenning’s groundbreaking monograph addresses this theoretical gap, surveying a range of life narratives, media, and community knowledge to underscore the varied expressive practices that constitute autism. It critiques societal structures that deny autistic people agency, grappling with the central question, ‘what does it take for autistic people to participate in a shared world as equals with other people?’ (1).
The book is divided into three parts. The first, ‘On Autistic Intelligibility,’ addresses how autistic people understand themselves when their experiences are reduced to symptoms of neurological impairment. It is indebted to political philosopher Sarah Lucas’s concept ‘narrative agency,’ or the ‘tendency of all humans to make sense of themselves in time and in relation to others’ (22-23), which individuals must possess to feel they can risk sharing their opinions in public. Stenning explains that when autistic people narrate aspects of their lives, they face misrecognition or disbelief, because what they express does not align with dominant understandings. However, by analysing work by autistic individuals including Joanne Limburg, Amanda Forest-Vivian, and Anand Prahlad, who provide detailed accounts of their sensory and perceptual experiences and describe how autism intersects with other aspects of their identity (such as gender and race), she examines how autistic people, both individually and collectively, ‘draw on a wide tapestry of narrative understandings of their lives’ to challenge the status quo. Narrative offers autistic authors space to reflect on their experiences of asserting oneself in a dominant culture; for example, Limburg’s poetry collection The Autistic Alice explores how, prior to diagnosis, the eponymous narrator conceived of herself through others’ perceptions and beliefs. This, Stenning explains, affords the author space to reimagine and redefine the contours of her life.
Part Two of the book, ‘On Autistic Sensibility’, considers further the techniques, processes, and practices associated with autistic forms of expression. It proposes a ‘fictive kinship,’ a way of relating to others through shared sensory experiences, rather than language alone. Under current Western frameworks, belonging and community depend on a person’s ability to internalise a shared system of language, so those who do not communicate normatively are excluded from the social sphere. Here, Stenning surveys work by, among others, Prahlad, Jolene Stockman, and Daina Krumins, who describe how their sensory, attentional, and embodied habits lead to new expressive and discursive practices. Far from being manifestations of a ‘fixed and mechanistic’ (125) neurology, sensory orientations to the world can generate new aesthetic forms and expand ideas of what it means to communicate and be social. Stenning also considers nature memoirs by authors including Dara McAnulty and Chris Packham, to show that autistic social practices should be considered alongside ecological perspectives that view human subjectivity as part of a broader, open system shaped by history, culture, and environment.
This section’s most notable contribution is its cross-cultural considerations. It explores how the senses and language function across different contexts: for example, by the Belyuen community of Northern Australia, refuting the belief that all experiences can be encompassed under a singular framework for understanding human experience. It references Prahlad’s and Stockman’s writings to show how the authors’ sensory and relational experiences are not directly attributable to autism, but are part of a broader kinship network informed, respectively, by the African diaspora and Te Reo Māori cosmology. Rather than pushing for intersubjectivity or hegemony, Stenning advocates for an empathetic understanding of others’ habits and ways of life. The question remains, however, whether applying these narratives to a Western scholarly context would liberate the authors or risk further appropriation.
In the final section, ‘On Autistic Collaboration,’ Stenning examines how attention to local and collective (rather than institutional) forms of knowledge can aid recognition of narrative agency and lead to more emancipatory forms of research. Digital collectives such as AutCollab and Stimpunks, which offer a platform for community-based knowledge exchange, enable autistic individuals to share aspects of their experiences that are important to them, forming the basis of ‘counter-stories’ that ‘reinstate autistic people as moral agents’ (190). This echoes the sentiments of Jim Sinclair’s ‘Autism Network International: The Development of a Community and its Culture’ (2005), an account of how an online mailing list provided the foundations for a global neurodiversity movement. Discussing more updated forms of technological mediation as well as recent stories of autistic community building, the book complements this earlier work.
Narrating the Many Autisms marks a departure point in critical autism studies. Its theoretical scope is considerable, combining perspectives from a range of disciplines and applying them to critical autism studies, making it worthy material for those in anthropology, linguistics, critical psychology, sociology, and the medical humanities. Its constant introduction of new concepts makes it a challenging read, so undergraduates and those unfamiliar with the field may benefit from referring to specific chapters or excerpts.
Despite the book’s interdisciplinarity, the textual analyses provided throughout affirm Stenning’s training as a literary scholar. Through attention to form, prose, and prosody (such as in Chapter Four, in the beautifully articulated discussion of Krumins’s short films, and the analysis of cross-species communication in relation to autistic nature memoirs), Stenning encourages readers to pay as much attention to others’ words as she does her own. This pluriversality is at the heart of the book: ‘I do not intend to speak “on behalf of” all autistic people’, she explains, ‘but to overturn the assumption that autism can be identified with any singular subject position or discourse’ (24). Rather than providing a unitary account or proposing a new (albeit more liberating) master narrative of autism, Narrating the Many Autisms foregrounds the multiplicity of autistic experience. Doing so, it encourages others to share their stories, encouraging reflection on the various forms of knowing, communicating, and relating that enable ‘manners of living that are more convivial’ (121).
References
Sinclair, Jim, ‘Autism Network International: The Development of a Community and its Culture’, in Loud Hands: Autistic People, Speaking, ed. by Julia Bascom (Washington, DC: The Autistic Press, 2012), pp. 22-70
