Autism and The Ethics of Care: A Phenomenological Investigation Into the Contagion of Nothing

Abstract

Abstract This article investigates the social contagion of autism from a phenomenological perspective. It asks: Can a phenomenological approach, rather than merely illustrating the typologies revealed by constructionist and political economic approaches,generate new categoriesbecause it insists on a different unit of analysis rooted in a first‐person perspective? To answer this, the article contrasts a third‐person account of autism as an epidemic of representation and a phenomenological account. Drawing upon philosophical phenomenology (Gadamer in particular), it broadly outlines what is at stake in the phenomenological insistence on the primacy of the first‐person perspective. Turning to an ethnographic case, it examines how the category of autism spectrum disorder (ASD), as it is lived by one family, poses a threat far more pernicious than a third‐person exploration of ASD might suggest. As a lived experience, it becomes linked to other epidemics and life conditions, emerging as the ominous category “becoming nothing.”

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