Orchestrating voices: autism, identity and the power of discourse

Abstract Constructing identities is a highly social, ongoing process. For individuals with disabilities this process can be particularly challenging, given the powerful negative discourses of disability. While there has been some attention given to the issue of identity and disability, there has been little attention paid to the process of identity construction for individuals with autism, in large part because of the assumption that social worlds hold little importance. This ethnographic study, which focuses on the process of identity construction for one young man with autism, was conducted over nine months using participant observation and interviews to construct an in‐depth narrative. Using the works of anthropologists and the literary scholar Bahktin as an interpretive framework, this article illustrates that constructing identities requires creativity and ingenuity. It is hard work, in many ways a struggle to orchestrate conflicting discourses in an attempt to author oneself and construct multiple identities. Acknowledgements I would like to thank Cheryl Mattingly, Melissa Park, Pollie Price, Esther Heucker, Susan Spitzer and Donald Holmes for their support and suggestions during the conceptualization of this article.