‘There is Beauty in the Way that I Think.’ Exploring Autistic Life Narrative in Cultural Texts of Hannah Gadsby

ABSTRACT

Representations of autism in popular culture usually rely on stereotypes about autistic people rooted in clinical discourse of pathology, reproducing gendered, racialized and classed images of white, cis male exceptionalism. The dominant circulating narratives often ignore lived autistic experience and position autism either as a spectacle or as the unknowable other. Personal narrative allows autistic people to ‘story’ autism in its many different forms and create a space of critical interrogation. This article examines two cultural texts of Tasmanian comedian and author Hannah Gadsby, who addresses their late-life diagnosis of autism in their stand-up comedy show Douglas and their memoir Ten Steps to Nanette. By drawing on queer and feminist disability studies, critical autism studies and theories of life writing, this article analyses how Gadsby employs autistic life narrative as a form of ‘diversity work’ [Ahmed, Sara. 2017. Living a Feminist Life. Durham: Duke University Press] and tells their story in its tense relation to social and medical notions of normality as well as medical discourse of diagnosis. By doing so, this article argues that Gadsby’s use of life narrative contributes to a more diverse representation of autistic lives and offers a critical interrogation of what is considered social normality.

KEYWORDS:

• Life narrative
• autism
• neurodiversity
• feminist disability studies
• queer disability studies
• Hannah Gadsby

Introduction: Narrating Autism

In recent years, there has been a significant increase in depictions of autistic characters in popular cultural and media domains like films, novels and television series. However, these representations usually rely on one-dimensional portrayals and often reinforce stereotypes about autistic people. Popular discourse about autism is often associated with images of white, cis male exceptionalism that illustrates an inherent racial, gender and class bias in its depictions of autistic lives. As a result, most autistic protagonists in popular culture are portrayed as white cis men and boys who deviate from normative social behaviour and commonly have above-average skills in STEM-related fields of knowledge (Freeman Loftis 2014; Jones 2022; Moore 2019). These gendered, racialized and classed images of autism not only persist in popular discourse, but also in educational and medical spaces. This makes it more difficult for autistic girls and women, trans and genderqueer individuals as well as Black, Indigenous (and) People of Colour (BIPoC) to seek and receive an official diagnosis, if wanted. Thus, children from these groups are more likely either to be misdiagnosed or to be older than their white cis male peers at the time of diagnosis. In addition, autism is generally associated with childhood, so that adults seeking a diagnosis are often confronted with surprise or even disbelief (Begeer et al. 2008; Green et al. 2019; Kelly et al. 2019; O'Nions et al. 2023). While the downside of diagnosis is that it always medicalises certain ‘bodyminds’¹ and behaviours, the upside is that it might make it easier for autistic people to discover disability culture and autistic community. Moreover, an official diagnosis is often necessary to access specific health care and support infrastructure. Diagnosis and its appropriate timing can have a substantial impact on the well-being and material living conditions of autistic people. Thus, it is crucial that cultural, medical and educational discourse about autism reflects the diversity of autistic bodyminds (Kelly et al. 2022; Yergeau 2018, 155–160).

In addition to the persistent gendered, racialized and classed stereotypes about autism, cultural texts often rely on portrayals of autistic people as ‘at once so extraordinary yet so epistemically distant and critically impaired’ (Yergeau 2018, 2–3). Frequently, autistic characters are reduced to either embodying a plot device due to their exceptional capacities, as in the medical drama The Good Doctor, or being a burden to nonautistic main characters, as in the family TV series Parenthood (Jones 2022; McGrath 2017; Yergeau 2018). These kinds of representation are structured by an inherent ‘neurotypical² gaze’ (McDermott 2022; McGrath 2017, 78–80) that positions autism either as a spectacle or as the enigmatic and unknowable other (Yergeau 2018, 2–3). Critical autism scholars have argued that autism and autistic lives are primarily ‘authored’ (Yergeau 2018) and ‘named’ (McGrath 2017) by narratives stemming from nonautistic perspectives that ignore lived autistic experience. The ‘stories’ told in cultural, but also in scientific, medical and educational texts substantially shape autistic subjectivities and their place in society. Yet, they are predominantly rooted in a clinical discourse of deficit and deviance, while fundamentally lacking autistic perspectives and desires (McGrath 2017; Yergeau 2018). There is, however, a growing field of critical autism and neurodiversity studies, often lead by autistic and neurodivergent researchers (see, e.g. Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, Chown, and Stenning 2020; Milton and Ryan 2023). This scholarship rejects deficit-oriented perspectives and centres the needs and experiences of autistic and neurodivergent communities. In addition to its main disciplines of psychology, health care and education, a wide range of specialised research areas is emerging within the social sciences (e.g. social work, sociology and political science) and the humanities (e.g. cultural and literary studies).³

Although these developments contribute to an ongoing shift in the production of knowledge about autism, the public discourse is still often shaped by nonautistic perspectives that frequently describe autistic people in terms of pathology and deviance. Hence, Remi Yergeau critically notes, ‘[d]espite autistic people’s increased visibility […], autistic stories are not the autism stories that circulate, dominate, or permeate.’ On the contrary, ‘the arguments structuring public knowledges, understandings, and felt senses of autism are grossly ableist, powerfully violent, and unremarkably nonautistic’ (Yergeau 2018, 4–5). For Yergeau, at the core of these narratives lies the question of what is considered to be normal, intelligible and ultimately human (2018, 20–21). The question of ab-/normality structures narratives about disability in general, but also narratives about other intersecting categories of difference such as gender, sexuality and race. Forms of self-representation and self-narration in political and cultural domains try to intervene in prevailing narratives about difference and interrogate the social normality established by them. Thereby, autobiographical writing and performance not only allow autistic people to ‘story’ autism and neurodiversity in its many different forms, but also provide a mode of self-advocacy and political community building (Van Goidsenhoven 2017).

In my article, I examine two cultural texts by Tasmanian comedian and author Hannah Gadsby⁴, who addresses their late-life diagnosis of autism in their stand-up comedy show Douglas (2020) and their memoir Ten Steps to Nanette (2022). I am particularly interested in how Gadsby employs personal narrative to tell their story in its tense relation to social and medical notions of so-called normality as well as medical discourse of diagnosis. For this purpose, I conceive of both of these texts as forms of ‘autistic life narrative’ (Rose 2008; Smith and Watson (2001) 2010) that ‘exceed the individualisation of autobiography, asserting a communal response’ to disabling conditions of society (Rose 2008, 44). Gadsby's intersectional positioning as a genderqueer lesbian who has experienced excessive body shaming and survived sexual violence will form the analytical focus of the article. As a nonautistic researcher, I will approach the close readings from a position of listening and learning that seeks to treat the explored cultural texts with care (Murray 2008, 212). Drawing on queer and feminist disability studies (Garland-Thomson 2011; Kafer 2013), critical autism studies (Rose 2008; Yergeau 2018) and theories of life writing (Gilmore and Marshall 2019; Smith and Watson (2001) 2010), I will conceptualise Gadsby use of ‘autistic life narrative’ (Rose 2008) as a form of ‘diversity work’ (Ahmed 2017) that not only contributes to a more diverse representation of autistic lives, but also offers a critical interrogation of what is considered to be social normality.

Hannah Gadsby’s Autistic Life Narrative and Diversity Work

In 2017, Australian stand-up comedian Hannah Gadsby reached immense international and commercial success with their ninth stand-up comedy show Nanette, which was recorded and first aired on the streaming platform Netflix the following year. In Nanette (2018), Gadsby tells their personal story of growing up queer and gender non-conforming in a small town in northwest Tasmania during the aggressive and heterosexist public debate over the decriminalisation of homosexuality in the 1990s. It is a show about experiences of shame, heterosexism and sexual violence. Throughout the show, Gadsby interrupts the expected humorous storytelling to address these painful aspects of their life and exposes the conventions of stand-up comedy as contributing to a climate in which harmful humour is not only tolerated but even enjoyed. The use of meta-reflexivity, the shifting of affective modes and the employment of personal narrative are crucial elements of Nanette, but also of Gadsby’s work more generally. This article focuses on two cultural texts by Hannah Gadsby that followed the immense success and impact of Nanette: On the one hand, Gadsby’s tenth stand-up comedy show Douglas, which premiered as a live show in 2019 and first aired worldwide as a recorded Netflix special in 2020. On the other hand, Gadsby’s debut book Ten Steps to Nanette, published in 2022 and described in its subtitle as a ‘memoir situation’. While these two texts differ significantly in their performative, narrative and affective modes, they both make considerable use of personal and autobiographical storytelling, which I consider a form of life narrative. Sidonie Smith and Julia Watson ((2001) 2010, 4) use life narrative ‘as a general term for acts of self-presentation of all kinds and in diverse media […], whether written, performative, visual, filmic, or digital.’⁵ This term includes both the written form of the memoir and the embodied performance of stand-up comedy. In Ten Steps to Nanette and Douglas, Hannah Gadsby explicitly addresses their autistic experience for the first time in their career and explores how it intersects with other aspects of their identity. This allows us to specify these two cultural texts as autistic life narratives (Rose 2008) (Figure 1).⁶

Figure 1. In their work, Hannah Gadsby uses personal narrative, meta-reflexivity and shifting affective modes to interrogate the impact of social norms and power relations on individual lives. Image: Alamy.

The first personal narratives written by autistic people themselves, rather than by nonautistic parents or medical professionals, were published in the late 1980s. Since then, such accounts have become increasingly popular with a wide audience and have recently also been considered a potential sub-genre of disability life narratives (Bergenmar 2016; Stenning 2020; Van Goidsenhoven 2017). Similar to how autobiographical writing about disability has provided ‘a medium for counterdiscourse’ (Couser 2000, 305) against marginalising misrepresentations, autistic life narratives have been the ‘touchstones for building an autism-culture [and have] fundamentally alter[ed] the autism-discourse on different levels’ (Van Goidsenhoven 2017, 88) by contributing to what Ian Hacking (2006) calls a ‘looping effect’. Leni Van Goidsenhoven (2017, 89) emphasises the importance of autistic accounts for the ongoing conceptual shift in academic and popular discourse from thinking about autism as deficit to understanding autism as neurological difference. For Irene Rose (2008, 44), autistic life narratives ‘exceed the individualisation of autobiography, asserting a communal response’ to disabling social conditions. These narratives ‘work at a connective emotional level to resist the pathologisation of difference’ and ‘collectively work to redefine normal as they erode the perceived boundaries of discursive normality’ (Rose 2008, 46). Such stories hold significant potential for individuals to articulate their autistic identity, create an autistic community and engage in political acts of self-advocacy (Van Goidsenhoven 2017, 89). Nevertheless, autobiographical discourse also bears certain ambivalences.

Thomas Couser argues from a disability studies perspective that autobiographical accounts, on the one hand, offer important opportunities to challenge one-dimensional and stereotypical representations (Couser 2000, 305). On the other hand, they are also limited by market demands and audience expectations, which ultimately determine in commercial contexts what kind of lives are likely to be told and what stories are likely to be published. As a result, the predominant plot structure within the marketplace of disability life narratives is one of triumph and overcoming obstacles, offering inspiration and comfort for its primarily able-bodied audiences instead of speaking to their disabled readers (Couser 2000, 307–308). Stuart Murray observes similar narrative patterns in both fictional and autobiographical discourses of autism, in which autistic experience is often portrayed either as overcoming challenges or as having exceptional skills, favouring the figure of the supercrip or, in the case of autism, the savant (Couser 2000, 308; Murray 2008, 38–39). Leigh Gilmore (2017, 85) locates narratives of triumph more generally within the broader phenomenon of the 1990s ‘memoir boom’ and the genre’s growing proximity to self-help culture. During this period, the memoir genre increasingly began to draw on neoliberal notions of self-reliance and self-improvement, often individualising and depoliticising struggles against social inequalities (Gilmore 2017, 85–117). These kinds of plot structures are likely to become bestsellers, which is why publishing houses specialising in autism stories have frequently based their publishing policies as well as their marketing strategies on the optimism of triumph narratives (Van Goidsenhoven 2017, 86–88). Jenny Bergenmar adds, however, that autistic writers might also appropriate the overcoming narrative to reject an objectification by neurotypical readers and to promote a better understanding of autistic experiences (Bergenmar 2016, 71). Nevertheless, such a ‘translation of autism’ (Bergenmar 2016, 71) often reiterates a neurotypical gaze by primarily addressing a neurocognitive majority, practising what Hanna Bertilsdotter Rosqvist and Anna Nygren (2023, 121) term ‘NT editing’ or neurotypical editing.

In Douglas and Ten Steps to Nanette, Hannah Gadsby (2022, 266) addresses a neuromixed audience, sometimes adopting an explanatory position because they feel they have to ‘bring many of [their neurotypical audience members] up to speed.’ As a nonautistic researcher who reads and analyses Gadsby’s cultural texts, I am also part of this neuromixed audience and not entirely free from the mechanisms of the neurotypical gaze. This means, for example, that Gadsby's cultural texts most probably resonated with me precisely because they speak to a neuromixed audience and thereby also to me as a nonautistic reader. The situatedness of my perspective informs, but also limits my understanding and analysis of the selected material. This is why I want to approach Gadsby’s cultural texts from a research position of care that takes into account existing power relations and is eager to learn. For Stuart Murray (2008, 212), such an ‘idea of care’ has to ‘demand that interventions are made, voices are listened to and […] that texts are re-read in a fashion that has justice as its ultimate goal.’ At the level of my theoretical framework, taking up a practice of listening means working with the wide range of autistic perspectives in critical autism and neurodiversity studies that challenge pathologising concepts of autism. At the level of analysis, it means foregrounding the cultural texts of Hannah Gadsby themselves, ‘allowing their expertise to guide the thematic findings and discussion’ (Toft 2023, 230). For this purpose, I will remain close to the text material and take a descriptive rather than a dissecting approach in my analysis. To do so, I will apply a ‘reparative lens’ to my close readings of Hannah Gadsby’s autistic life narrative. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick (2003, 123–151) uses the concept of ‘reparative reading’ in contrast to the most commonly used critical perspective of ‘paranoid reading’. A paranoid reading treats cultural texts with a certain suspicion and tries to expose their entanglement with hidden power relations. A reparative reading seeks to recover ‘the many ways selves and communities succeed in extracting sustenance from the objects of a culture – even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them’ (Sedgwick 2003, 150–151). In this sense, a reparative approach to analysis echoes my idea of a caring scholarship. It aims ‘to value, sustain, and privilege the object’s worldly inhabitations and needs’ (Wiegman 2014, 7).

Therefore, I will focus in my analysis firstly on what Gadsby’s life narrative can tell us about how social and medical notions of so-called normality significantly affect individual autistic lives and structures an unsustaining environment of neuronormativity. Secondly, applying a reparative lens, I will examine how Gadsby uses life narrative to interrogate these normative frameworks and open up spaces for being and flourishing. Although Gadsby’s story easily can be read as one of triumph and success, I argue that their personal narrative represents the political and ethical stance of what Sara Ahmed calls ‘diversity work’ (Ahmed 2017, 91). For Ahmed, diversity work is the work that is done when attempting to transform an institution that is structured by social inequalities and/or not quite inhabiting the norms of this institution (Ahmed 2017, 91). Being located outside these norms might put one’s existence into question, so that ‘existence as such becomes a form of political labor’ (Ahmed 2017, 115).

Not to inhabit a norm […] can be experienced as not dwelling so easily where you reside. You might be asked questions; you might be made to feel questionable, so that you come to feel that you do not belong in the places you live, the places you experience as home; you might turn up and not be allowed in or find it too uncomfortable to stay. […] To be in question is to try to be; to be in question makes being trying. (Ahmed 2017, 115)

The state of ‘being in question’ (Ahmed 2017, 115) might result in questioning the social conditions that produce this state, ultimately inspiring a desire for social change (Ahmed 2017, 132–134). Ahmed (2017, 43) argues that in this process, the ‘hardest work can be recognizing how one’s own life is shaped by norms in ways that we did not realize’ (Ahmed 2017, 43). Based on this argument, I conceptualise Hannah Gadsby’s employment of autistic life narrative in Douglas and Ten Steps to Nanette as a form of diversity work. They recognise and situate their life within the forces of neuronormativity, articulating ‘an implicit or explicit critique of the cultural and social norms of the neurotypical world’ (Rose 2008, 49). In their personal narrative, Gadsby also exposes how neuronormativity, heteronormativity and normativities regarding the body type intersect in the construction of what is conceptualised as social and medical normality. While the concept of normality affirms some bodyminds and validates their belonging to this world, it positions certain bodyminds as deviating and ‘other’, often medicalising and pathologising them within the frameworks of diagnosis (Garland-Thomson (1997) 2017; Kafer 2013). In the following analysis, I examine how Hannah Gadsby employs life narrative to tell their story in its tense relation to social and medical notions of so-called normality as well as to engage with the medical discourse of diagnosis and its normalising impetus.

Troubling Normality

Rosemarie Garland-Thomson ((1997) 2017, 8) coined the term normate to describe ‘the veiled subject position of cultural self, the figure outlined by the array of deviant others whose marked bodies shore up the normate’s boundaries.’ This notion ‘designates the social figure with which people can represent themselves as definitive human beings.’ Using this concept, Garland-Thomson gives a name to the mostly unnamed idea of the ‘normal’ bodymind, which exists only in differentiation from its marked ‘others’. She adds that it is in fact ‘a very narrowly defined profile that describes only a minority of actual people’ (Garland-Thomson (1997) 2017, 8). On the one hand, the normate position emerges in relation to gendered, sexualised, racialized and ableised otherness; on the other hand, this relation also constitutes and marks certain bodyminds as different or deviating from certain norms. This conceptualisation not only emphasises the relational and constructed nature of normate and other, but also allows us to examine the intersecting markers that position certain bodyminds as different (Garland-Thomson (1997) 2017, 8). Throughout their memoir Ten Steps to Nanette, Hannah Gadsby often describes their sense of somehow being different to their social environment, which leads to an intense fear of not belonging. In this regard, Gadsby recounts especially the transition into adolescence and particularly into puberty and high school as a formative, challenging change in their life. They point out that this period in life is demanding and often frightening for most teenagers. For Gadsby, however, puberty meant an intensified struggle with their queer sexuality and gender performance. From a young age, Gadsby felt they were more like their brothers than their sister. Preferring shorts to skirts, football to gymnastics, a BMX to a pink bike with a floral basket, they struggled with being addressed as a girl or the kind of gender performance this address entailed. Gadsby (2022, 85–86) describes this struggle as a ‘rupture between who [they] felt [themselves] to be and who others thought [they] ought to be.’ They ‘wanted to be a boy so bad it hurt’ (2022, 86). But as they grew into a teenager, Gadsby was increasingly confronted with gendered address by their social environment that demanded a more consistent embodiment of certain gender norms, or more precisely, the embodiment of normative femininity.

[S]ince becoming a teenager, it had been impressed upon me by everyone – my family, my teachers, my peers, my culture and the whole zeitgeist of my existence – that I was not allowed to be boy-like anymore. So, driven by my deep desire to belong, I’d been studying the ways of the ‘natural’ woman for years, both in real life and on television. (Gadsby 2022, 107)

Embodying femininity, or perhaps more generally a gendered way of being in this world, did not feel ‘natural’ to Gadsby. On the contrary, Gadsby even felt that they ‘behaved wrong[ly]’ in some way (2022, 108). Therefore, they adopted the position of an outsider-observer who studied the persistent idea and ideal of the ‘natural’ woman, while at the same time keeping an inner distance. Gadsby’s engagement with the notion of ‘normal’ female behaviour and appearance was mainly motivated by the desire to belong to the social world around them. In order to achieve this, they found it necessary to pick up on the unwritten rules of the ‘correct’ gender performance and find a way to apply them to their own life. Gadsby ‘did the only thing [they] knew how to do: copy the behaviour of other girls’ (2022, 109). They call this approach to their gender performance in a bittersweet ironic gesture ‘reverse-engineering normality’ (2022, 109). By observing the other girls at school, Gadsby noted that the embodied normality of the girls around them was also closely linked to ‘lots and lots of feelings about boys’ (2022, 109). Gadsby did not share these feelings about boys, but found that they rather ‘had lots and lots of feelings about girls’ (2022, 109). At this point, Gadsby realised that embodying the ‘correct’ gender performance actually meant embodying a heteronormative gender performance including the ‘correct’ sexuality, which seemed impossible for Gadsby to achieve. As a result, they felt they had to suppress and hide their queerness in order to belong (2022, 109).

During this time, Gadsby describes the transition from primary school to high school as another challenge. The new school brought with it many new social dynamics and significant changes in daily routines. Both turned out to be difficult for Gadsby to cope with. They approached the social cliques in school in a similar way to the struggle with their gender performance: they observed their peers and started ‘collecting clues on how to behave’ (2022, 108). Gadsby recounts that their ‘effort to navigate school [often] resulted in a complete collapse at the end of the day,’ caused by ‘the layers of both written and unwritten rules’ surrounding them (2022, 99). They recall their increasing exhaustion due to ‘trying to subtly navigate a sea of hypercritical teens’ and all the new routines and contexts that began to impact their learning (2022, 118). The varying teachers and classrooms, the overwhelming mixtures of sounds and smells, the more extensive homework after school, as well as the increased chores expected to be done at home made focusing difficult and the school environment distressing for Gadsby. They began to go home during lunch to be alone for a while and recover from stressful situations at school. To do so, they often sat in a pile of wood next to the shed of their house, talking to themselves. Although this habit soothed Gadsby and made them feel at ease, at the same time they felt they were not behaving appropriately for their age. Describing one of these episodes, they turn to a narrative mode that Leigh Gilmore and Elizabeth Marshall term ‘accompaniment’ (2019, Introduction). Recounting the episode, Gadsby inserts their adult authorial self into the narrated scene to ‘accompany’ their younger self through this distressing time in their life (Gilmore and Marshall 2019, Gender Pessimism).

I knew that I was too old to be talking to myself, and I was becoming self-conscious about it as I felt the expectation of maturity bite into my flights of fancy. […] ‘What is wrong with you?’ was all I could manage to ask myself that day in the wood heap. ‘What is wrong with you?’ I asked, again and again. If I could go back in time, I would love to have a cup of tea and a chat with my sad and sorry self in that wood heap. I’m not sure what we’d talk about, but I wouldn’t bring any hindsight-born wisdom from the future to share. I’d keep it light, natter about nothing at all, just so I would know that we would never lose the habit of talking to ourself, and that young me shouldn’t waste any more energy trying to fight it. (Gadsby 2022, 98–99)

This use of life narrative allows Gadsby to revisit their childhood, and give their younger self in a moment of pain the compassion and comfort that they would have needed at that time in their life. By employing this mode of ‘accompaniment,’ Gadsby recognises their childhood behaviour not only as a form of caring for themselves, but also as their own ‘normal’ way of being in this world (Gilmore and Marshall 2019, Gender Pessimism). Looking back on this time, Gadsby is able to reframe their memories of high school with a deeper understanding of their autistic identity, which they consciously came to know much later in life.

I used to fret about fitting in at school, not because I wanted to, but because I knew I was supposed to. I was at my happiest in my own company, which I took to be an abnormality. It never occurred to me that it could be the epitome of normal behaviour – for me. I was a ‘girl’, and girls were expected to be masters of the mingle, so I tried really hard to be a normal girl […]. So, the best I could do, and continue to do, is to observe, guestimate and imitate, which is often referred to as ‘masking’ in autistic circles. (Gadsby 2022, 271)

For Anna Stenning (2022), ‘[l]ife narrative can aid the process of re-interpreting one’s experience in the light of new conceptual frameworks that produce a more affirmative identity.’ In this sense, Hannah Gadsby uses life narrative to re-visit and re-interpret situations from their past with the knowledge they now have about their autistic experience. This allows them, on the one hand, to reframe their sense of being different and, on the other hand, to approach their younger self in a manner of affirmation. Moreover, by using life narrative in this way, Gadsby (2022, 271) can recognise their ‘coping mechanism[s]’ at school and later in life as a form of ‘masking,’ i.e. imitating neurotypical behaviour. In the passage cited above, we can see that for Gadsby, successful masking meant not only to pass as neurotypical, but also to pass as a ‘normal’ girl. This account shows how notions of heteronormative gender-conformity and rigid neuronormativity intersect in the construction of what is called ‘normality’. Gadsby’s use of masking is a response to the normalising and correcting impetus of their social environment. However, Gadsby employed masking not only to navigate the social context of their peers, but also to compensate for material barriers they encountered in the educational institution of high school. Like Stenning (2022), I would like to take up Garland-Thomson’s (2011) terms of ‘fitting’ and ‘misfitting’ to examine both the social and material barriers recounted in autistic life narratives.⁷ Garland-Thomson (2011) introduces mis-/fitting as a concept to add the perspective of bodily materiality to the social model of disability. It focuses on the relational and dynamic nature of the interaction between bodies and their material environment, which ‘come together in either harmony or disjunction’ (Garland-Thomson 2011, 592). For Garland-Thomson it is ‘[t]he degree to which that shared material world sustains the particularities of our embodied life at any given moment or place [that] determines our fit or misfit’ (Garland-Thomson 2011, 596).

In Gadsby’s case, the educational system creates considerable misfits by, for instance, demanding gendered school uniforms as clothing or by requiring multiple classroom changes for different subjects throughout the day. Adaptive behaviour like masking ‘allows a person to navigate the world in relative anonymity, in the sense […] of satisfying its requirements in a way so as not to stand out, make a scene, or disrupt through countering expectations’ (Garland-Thomson 2011, 596). In such a scenario, the individual is trying to compensate for the barriers they face in their environment and conform to expected behavioural norms, even though both cause exhaustion and distress. The constant navigating and compensating meant for Gadsby that ‘[b]y the time [they were] middling [their] thirties, [they felt like they were] no longer living [their] life [but rather] merely coping with it’ (Gadsby 2022, 271). Many autistic women and genderqueer people with later diagnoses tell ‘stories of closeting, masking, passing, fakery, burnout, and self-governance’ that significantly affect their life and well-being (Yergeau 2018, 123–124; Pearson and Rose 2021). From the perspective of mis-/fitting, the individual should not have to adapt their bodymind to create a fit, but the social and material environment should be structured in a manner that sustains all kinds of bodyminds. Even though Garland-Thomson (2011) specifically highlights the materiality of fitting and misfitting, I would like to understand the rigidity and corrective impetus of certain social norms as another significant source of an unsustaining environment. The sections cited above have shown that a neurotypically structured social world often produces both material and social situations of misfitting for autistic people. Yet, by exposing the contingency and rigidity of certain norms, autistic life narrative might employ ‘either an implicit or explicit critique of the cultural and social norms of the neurotypical world’ (Rose 2008, 49). It can ‘stand out, make a scene, or disrupt’ (Garland-Thomson 2011, 596) the assumed social normality, and thereby demand a society that does not pathologise difference, but accommodates it.

Reaffirming, Reworking and Rejecting Diagnosis

In public discourse, disability is often understood through clinical descriptors or more specifically in terms of the medical model of disability. Such a medicalised approach to disability ‘frames atypical bodies and minds as deviant, pathological, and defective’ and implies that disability is a problem to be solved by ‘correcting, normalizing, or eliminating the pathological’ (Kafer 2013, 5). Queer and feminist disability scholars like Rosemarie Garland-Thomson (2005; 2011) and Alison Kafer (2013) reject such individualising and pathologising perspectives, and rather adopt a social or a ‘political/relational model of disability’ (Kafer 2013, 4–10). Such an approach locates ‘the problem of disability […] in inaccessible buildings, discriminatory attitudes, and ideological systems that attribute normalcy and deviance to particular minds and bodies’ (Kafer 2013, 6). This perspective aligns with the neurodiversity paradigm, which understands neurodivergence not as an anomaly or pathology but as a variation in human neurocognitive functioning (Walker 2021, 32–33). Autism is thus not described as deficit, but as neurological difference that often faces significant barriers in neurotypical structured contexts. Perspectives that adopt the political/relational/social model of disability emphasise the ‘nonnegotiable value of body–mind difference’ (Clare 2017, xvii) and reject the normalising impulse that medical notions of cure entail. Yet queer disability scholars like Alison Kafer (2013) and Margaret Price (2015) also caution us against neglecting the realities of pain that can accompany disability, like for instance, in the cases of chronic illness or depression. This might lead individuals to desire diagnosis or medical intervention. For Kafer (2013, 6), ‘the political/relational model neither opposes nor valorizes medical intervention; rather than simply take such intervention for granted, it recognizes instead that medical representations, diagnoses, and treatments of bodily variation are imbued with ideological biases about what constitutes normalcy and deviance.’ Thus, within the fields of critical autism studies and critical disability studies, diagnosis holds an ambivalent position. On the one hand, diagnosis medicalises difference and treats it as pathology; on the other hand, diagnosis can lead to a better understanding of one's own needs and facilitate access to certain support infrastructures and resources. Kafer argues for a ‘multi-strategy approach’ that focuses on ‘critiquing, rejecting, using, and desiring diagnosis, often all at the same time’ (2020, 97).

In Douglas and Ten Steps to Nanette, Hannah Gadsby approaches their official ADHD and autism diagnosis with a sense of relief and affirmation because it gave them a better understanding for themselves and the struggles they faced in their life. In their memoir, Gadsby describes their feelings of distress and isolation during their high school years, their difficulties in finding and maintaining employment after school, and their experiences with several meltdowns and depressive episodes in their twenties and thirties. During their adult life, Gadsby found ‘it more and more difficult to make [themselves] understood,’ which eventually affected their relationships to friends and romantic partners (2022, 271). This led Gadsby to seek medical and psychological support at several points in their life. Throughout the book, they employ clinical terminology or diagnostic categories to describe their experience, allowing and affirming a certain medicalisation of their bodymind. Gadsby expresses a desire for medical intervention to gain ‘control’, and at the same time they recognise the vulnerability of their bodymind within this clinical framework.

I’d been trying so hard all my life to control my moods and I knew it was impossible. I didn’t know how to tame them. I’d made so many efforts all throughout my adult life. More often than not, it led to misdiagnosis and inappropriate, sometimes dangerous, medication. Premenstrual dysphoric disorder, psychosis, borderline personality disorder, bipolar, irritable bowel syndrome, too much fat, etc., etc. (Gadsby 2022, 245–246)

In this account, we see that Gadsby decided to enter the health care system in order to seek support but they did not find the resources they needed. Yergeau points out that stories of misdiagnosis or reclassification are not unusual in ‘autism’s diagnostic politics’ (2018, 156), emphasising that ‘[s]ocioeconomic status, age, gender, race, and ethnicity all impact the likelihood of one receiving [an official diagnosis]’, if desired (2018, 165). In Douglas, Gadsby explains how popular assumptions also influenced their own understanding of autism. As a result, they did not believe that they themselves could be autistic for a long time: ‘Because what we popularly understand autism to be is just something that only affects young boys that like maths a lot’ (Gadsby 2020, 00:53:48–00:53:52). When they received their formal diagnosis, they felt a certain relief but also a sense of grief. On the one hand, Gadsby wished they had already known about being autistic when they were a child, so they could have ‘learnt how to look after [their] own distress, instead of assuming [their] pain was normal and deserved’ (Gadsby 2022, 272). On the other hand, they realised that they ‘had always worked under the impression that [they] would eventually find [their] way to the starting line of normal’ (Gadsby 2022, 268). In these references to what Gadsby calls ‘normal,’ we can see how they experienced the difficulties and barriers they grew up with as their own failures and therefore their own fault. For Gadsby, this led to the feeling that they had to change in order to live a ‘normal’ life. Ironically, their diagnosis did not reinforce the normalising impetus Gadsby had felt growing up, but rather gave them a tool to find self-acceptance and compassion for their own needs.

I have learnt how to advocate for my own experiences instead of being ashamed of my pain and confusion. I stopped worrying about what I was expected to do, and worked on building an understanding of what I could do to make myself feel safe and calm. […] I leave crowded spaces. I switch off discordant music. I wear headphones at restaurants. […] I spend hours alone at home rearranging my little piles of bric-a-brac, because it’s really fun. […] I find joy in my life where I once couldn’t because I was too busy trying to do the ‘right’ thing instead of checking in with my own needs first. (Gadsby 2022, 273)

For Yergeau (2018, 165), seeking formal ‘diagnosis for acceptance’ undermines its primary clinical purpose of identifying pathology. Gadsby reworks their diagnosis for their own purposes and needs, rejecting the notion of the ‘right’ or ‘normal’ way of being in the world and prioritising their well-being and pleasure over adapting to expectations. Especially for autistic adults who are diagnosed later in life, diagnosis may be an important component to make sense of challenging experiences in the past, to develop an autistic identity and to enter autistic community (Bartmess 2018; Kelly et al. 2022). Yergeau understands this process of ‘becoming autistic’ as having no beginning and no end, but rather ‘striving toward a becoming that is multiple and always-more’ (2018, 160). Nevertheless, within this becoming ‘diagnostics hold a shaping role in one’s coming-to-know, or one’s self-epistemic.’ For Gadsby, their official autism diagnosis became a crucial element for their ‘self-epistemic’ and their self-affirmation.

Honestly, the day I was formally diagnosed with autism was a very good day. Because it felt like I’d been handed the keys to the city of me. Because I was able to make sense of so many things that had only ever been confusing to me. Like why I could be so intelligent but struggle to leave any proof. Why I can’t fill in forms. Why … Wh – Why I felt such a profound sense of isolation my entire life, despite trying so hard to be part of the team. […] But I’m not here to collect your pity. I’m here to disrupt your confidence. Because, clearly, I’ve worked out a way to share my thinking. Haven’t I? […] I like the way that I think. If the world is right and I’m right in it, I can find my funny zip and my thinking expands. There is beauty in the way that I think. (Gadsby 2020, 01:04:48–01:06:18)

Gadsby uses their diagnosis to reframe and understand certain struggles in their life that did not make sense to them before. They rework the clinical purpose of diagnosis by finding appreciation for their experience instead of searching it for flaws. In this way, official diagnosis became an important element for Gadsby to embrace their autistic identity unapologetically. However, an official diagnosis is not always a desirable option for everyone. It could mean stigmatisation in the workplace or even loss of self-determination if autistic people are placed under legal guardianship. Therefore, many prefer self-diagnosis to a formal assessment and carefully consider the situations in which they want to disclose their diagnosis to others (Yergeau 2018, 166). Although Gadsby’s official diagnosis gave them both a better understanding for themselves and a form of appreciation for their autistic experience, they did not begin to disclose the diagnosis until much later. In their memoir, they recall being met with doubt and dismissal when they first spoke about being autistic. They were told that they were too fat, too social, too empathetic or too female to be autistic (Gadsby 2022, 268). Yergeau argues that ‘[c]laiming rhetoricity, claiming self-definition, claiming empathy or understanding […] in some way, defy autism’s clinical categorizations’ (2018, 167). Facing disbelief therefore becomes a part of autistic experience. On the one hand, Gadsby was denied claiming their autism diagnosis as self-definition at various occasions; on the other hand, they recount that their bodytype was frequently subjected to unsolicited diagnostic commentary and pathologisation by others.

In their memoir, Gadsby describes an encounter with an audience member after one of their shows. Gadsby had told a story on stage about an incident in which they got stuck in a waterslide as a teenager. Gadsby experienced it as a constructive joke that connected them to their audience, laughing together about teenage body issues that most had faced in their adolescence. However, a woman in the audience approached Gadsby after the show to point out that they should not joke about the size of their body because they had a clinical condition. Although Gadsby recalls how embarrassed they were by this unsolicited diagnostic intrusion, they walked away from that situation and soon used it for their next joke (Gadsby 2022, 225–226). In this moment, Gadsby rejects the diagnostic surveillance to which their body was subjected. By doing so, they undermine the authoritative set-up of the diagnostic gaze that seeks to categorise certain bodies as deviant while reassuring their own status within the norms. In Douglas, Gadsby even invites the audience’s diagnostic gaze to a certain extent, but only to re-appropriate it in their own terms. Before the stand-up performance formally begins, Gadsby gives their audience a ‘detailed, blow-by-blow description of exactly how the show is going to unfold’ (Gadsby 2020, 00:03:12–00:03:18). They humorously describe each step of the performance, already disclosing the ‘big reveal’ of their autism diagnosis that will happen during the show (Gadsby 2020, 00:09:53). By creating such a metatheatrical narrative structure, Gadsby gains control over the framing of their autism story. Instead of delivering an unexpected ‘coming-out’ moment, they gently weave their autistic experience into the unfolding show.

Looking back on the cited sections above, we can recognise Gadsby’s ambivalent relationship to the medicalising and normalising tool of diagnosis. At times, Gadsby allows a certain diagnostic medicalisation of their bodymind and at other times, they reject it. Yet, I suggest that they do not just simply reaffirm or reject the diagnostic framework, but primarily rework it for their own purposes and needs. For Gadsby, diagnosis became an opportunity for ‘self-epistemic’ (Yergeau 2018, 160) and self-affirmation that allowed them to appreciate and embrace their autistic experience. In their employment of life narrative, we have seen how this form of ‘self-epistemic’ approach helped Gadsby to revisit painful situations of the past and give their younger self ‘more compassion and understanding than [they] received in [their] youth’ (Gilmore and Marshall 2019, Gender Pessimism). Gadsby rearranges the normalising framework of diagnosis for their own purposes by ‘critiquing, rejecting, using, and desiring diagnosis, […] all at the same time’ (Kafer 2020, 97).

Conclusion

In this article, I have proposed to conceptualise Hannah Gadsby’s use of autobiographical discourse in their stand-up comedy show Douglas (2020) and their memoir Ten Steps to Nanette (2022) as a form of ‘autistic life narrative’ (Rose 2008) that draws on the political and ethical stance of what Sara Ahmed calls ‘diversity work’ (Ahmed 2017, 91). This means understanding autistic life narrative as a way to recognise how a ‘life is shaped by norms’ (Ahmed 2017, 43) of neurotypicality and how not inhabiting these norms creates a recurring state of ‘being in question’ (Ahmed 2017, 114). Rosemarie Garland-Thomson’s ‘concept of misfitting’ (2011, 592) gives an analytical name to the notion of ‘being in question’ and allows us to analyse the intersections of neuronormativity, heteronormativity and normativities regarding the body type in Gadsby’s life narrative (Ahmed 2017, 123–125). In Douglas and Ten Steps to Nanette, Gadsby tells a story of ‘being in question’ most of their life because they could not properly inhabit the norms of neurotypicality, gender-conformity, heterosexuality and bodily slimness. By employing life narrative in this way, Gadsby recognises their individual life within the forces of these norms and is able to articulate the ‘exhaustion of having to insist just to exist’ (Ahmed 2017, 122). In this way, autistic life narrative as diversity work moves from narrating the state of ‘being in question’ to ‘question being’ (Ahmed 2017, 134). This means that autistic life narrative holds the potential to expose the contingency of neurocognitive norms and consequently formulate ‘an implicit or explicit critique of the cultural and social norms of the neurotypical world’ (Rose 2008, 49).

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my colleagues Tanja Vogler, Michael Rasell and Mrunmayee Sathye for their critical but supportive comments on this article. I would also like to thank the two anonymous reviewers and the corresponding editors, Maryanne Dever and Alison Downham Moore, who thought with me during the writing process and helped me refine my arguments.

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

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Verena Sperk

Verena Sperk is a researcher in the field of Critical Gender Studies at the Department of Education at the University of Innsbruck. As a fellow of the doctoral program ‘Gender and Gender Relations in Transformation’, she is working on her doctoral thesis, which analyses (stand-up) comedy as a medium for queer/feminist politics. She is currently the recipient of an Excellence Scholarship from the Vice-Rector for Research at the University of Innsbruck.

Notes

1 Margaret Price (2015, 269) uses the term bodymind on the one hand ‘to mark the fact that […] mental disability matters, that it is an important category of analysis.’ On the other hand, Price refers to body and mind in a single term, ‘because mental and physical processes not only affect each other but also give rise to each other – that is, because they tend to act as one, even though they are conventionally understood as two’.

2 Nick Walker (2021, 36) describes neurotypical as ‘a style of neurocognitive functioning that falls within the dominant societal standards of [what is thought of as] “normal.”’ The term neurodivergent therefore means, ‘having a mind that functions in ways which diverge significantly from [these] dominant societal standards’ (2021, 34). Being autistic is one of many different ways of being neurodivergent.

3 Most scholars in the field do not understand Critical Autism Studies (CAS) and Neurodiversity Studies (NDS) synonymously, but rather see them as two different yet often overlapping approaches to research on autism and neurodivergencies. While CAS focus on autism through a lens informed by the neurodiversity paradigm, NDS emphasise critical perspectives on neurotypicality and the inclusion of all neurodivergencies. My approach in this article is aligned more closely to the strand of CAS. I have chosen to foreground autism and autistic experience as they are strongly present in the cultural texts analysed.

4 Hannah Gadsby uses they/them pronouns. Therefore, I will refer to Hannah Gadsby with either they/them or their name throughout this article.

5 Furthermore, it is a critical differentiation from the term autobiography, which refers to a specific genre associated with ‘the autonomous individual and the universalizing life story’ (Smith and Watson (2001) 2010, 3) of the Western Enlightenment.

6 In their memoir, Hannah Gadsby also addresses their late-life ADHD diagnosis. Therefore, we could conceptualise their life narrative more generally as a form of neurodivergent life narrative. However, in both Douglas and Ten Steps to Nanette, Gadsby emphasises their autistic experience and identity. This is why I will – at least for this article – place autism and autistic life narrative at the centre of my analysis.

7 Critical autism scholars Owen McGill (2021) and Anna Stenning (2022) both use Garland-Thomson’s (2011) concept of mis-/fitting in their work to approach autism and neurodivergence from the perspective of feminist disability studies.