"Don't question the experts": Autistic Autobiographies, Expert Paratexts, and Epistemic Injustice

Abstract

This thesis examines expert paratexts in autie-biographies as a rhetorical intervention that places pressure on emancipatory readings of the genre. Expert paratexts (forewords and afterwords provided by experts in psychiatry and psychology) envelope several autie-biographies, particularly early texts in the genre. Through a close reading of two sets of expert paratexts (Bernard Rimland’s foreword for Emergence: Labeled Autistic [Temple Grandin, 1986] and Tony Attwood’s foreword and afterword for Lucy’s Story: Autism and Other Adventures [Lucy Blackman, 1999]), the thesis finds that these paratexts enable testimonial injustice (Fricker 2007) by framing autistic autobiographers as deficient rhetors who lack the credibility necessary to validate their life narratives as trustworthy representations of autistic subjectivity. These rhetorical interventions both influence reader responses to autie-biographies and influence a wider scientific discourse about the nature of autistic subjectivity. This thesis thus concludes that such interventions should be critically engaged with to support a larger pursuit of recognizing autistic individuals as epistemic authorities on their experiential knowledge.