Discourses of Disability, Narratives of Community: Reclaiming an Autistic Identity Online

As increasing rates of autism diagnosis generate media interest, the autism community is bombarded with various disability discourses. Using netnographic methods, I explored how members of one online community, Aspies Central (AC), engaged these discourses to communicatively (re)claim a positive autistic identity. By assessing 561 posts on AC's forums, interviewing 10 individuals who frequent online communities, and interacting extensively with two informants, I located reclaiming discourses that allowed community members to shift their understanding of autism from a biomedical to a cultural perspective. Through these discourses, community members reclaimed (a) normalcy, (b) symptoms, and (c) agency. In this paper, I discuss implications for the narrative construction of disability identities and the activation of self-advocacy movements.