Autistic Autobiographies and More-Than-Human Emotional Geographies

Abstract

This paper draws on an analysis of forty-five published autobiographical accounts of individuals with an autistic spectrum disorder (ASD) to highlight the important role of their, often intense, emotional relations to ‘natural’ things and places. In doing so, it offers a partial corrective to clinical and popular views of people with autism as almost entirely asocial and unconcerned with the beings and doings of others. A textual hermeneutic of the phenomenal insights reported by authors reveals instead that their personal geographies are characterized by rich, rewarding, and meaningful relationships with the wider more-than-human world, and that aspects of their lives can be undeniably, agreeably, ‘social’ in this broader sense. Such an analysis may offer important, albeit methodologically limited, insights into experiences of ASD while also challenging dominant understandings of ‘sociality’—in the sense of ‘being-with-others’—and of emotional involvement, that focus entirely on interactions between human beings. Indeed, to some extent, these emotionally charged experiences of the ‘natural’ world resonate with the feelings of many more neurotypical individuals.