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School of Media, Culture and Creative Arts ‘And Besides: Autobiographical Essays on Parenting and Difference’ and ‘Representation, Counter-narrative and Culture in Parental Memoirs about Autism’ Rachel Anne Robertson This thesis is presented for the Degree of Doctor of Philosophy of Curtin University of Technology March 2011 Declaration To the best of my knowledge and belief this thesis contains no material previously published by any other person except where due acknowledgment has been made. This thesis contains no material which has been accepted for the award of any other degree or diploma in any university. Signature: …………………………………………. Date: ………………………...………………. Abstract This thesis comprises a creative work and an exegesis. Together, they explore a specific type of relational life writing, that of parents writing about their children with autism. I examine the narrative stances and strategies available to parental memoirists and how these can be used to represent the child in an ethical way, to create a narrative that counters more traditional views of disability and to engage with the cultural dimensions of autism. The creative work, ‘And Besides’, is a series of connected autobiographical essays which explore my experience as mother of an autistic son. While each essay focuses on a single theme, the work as a whole interrogates notions of normalcy, difference and disability, and charts the growth of my own understanding of the idea of neurodiversity and how one might parent from this perspective. The exegesis analyses five published parental autism memoirs and the narrative strategies used to represent the children, and disability, within these texts. I examine the narrative stance taken by the parent-narrators and the extent to which these memoirs can be read as counter-narratives. I argue that the most progressive memoirs are those where the parent takes a role as cross-cultural translator and embraces autistic values and culture, thus offering a vision of social change. Parent narratives about their autistic children are one of the clearest examples of the dilemmas associated with representation and power inequality in relational life writing. Whilst my thesis has not resolved these dilemmas, it provides a contribution to the life writing and Disability Studies literature in its exploration of these issues through both scholarly and creative practice. ii Acknowledgements I am very grateful to my principal supervisor, Dr Julienne van Loon, and my co- supervisors, Professor Tim Dolin and Dr Mary Besemeres, for their support, insight and engagement with this thesis. Thank you also to Dr Ron Blaber, Chair of my Thesis Committee, and Dr Liz Byrski and Dr David Whish-Wilson, who acted as supervisors when Julienne was on leave. It has been a privilege and a pleasure to work with such wonderful scholars, writers and colleagues. I have been fortunate to be encouraged and supported in my work by some close friends. In particular, I thank Anna Sabadini, Rosemary Stevens and Annamaria Weldon for their input. My family have provided years of emotional, practical and financial support to enable me to complete this work. I cannot thank them enough for this and for their generosity in allowing me to write about some of our shared experiences. I thank ‘Robert’ for his commitment to our son and our joint parenting. Most of all, I thank my son (called ‘Ben’ in these pages) who gives so much just by being himself. iii Contents Declaration ........................................................................................................ i Abstract ............................................................................................................ ii Acknowledgements .......................................................................................... iii Contents ........................................................................................................... iv And Besides: Autobiographical Essays on Parenting and Difference ............ 1 On Pomegranates and Life Stories – an introduction ...... Error! Bookmark not defined. Reaching One Thousand .................................. Error! Bookmark not defined. Raw Experience .............................................. Error! Bookmark not defined. The Blank Face ............................................... Error! Bookmark not defined. Winding .......................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined. The Cage ......................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined. Bonus .............................................................. Error! Bookmark not defined. Geometry of Echoes ........................................ Error! Bookmark not defined. Carving, Forging, Stealing ............................... Error! Bookmark not defined. Pumpkin Scones .............................................. Error! Bookmark not defined. Frog in Girlland ............................................... Error! Bookmark not defined. Fancy Footwork .............................................. Error! Bookmark not defined. The Shape of a Life ......................................... Error! Bookmark not defined. Notes ............................................................... Error! Bookmark not defined. Representation, Counter-narrative and Culture in Parental Memoirs about Autism ........................................................................................................... 183 Introduction ................................................................................................. 184 Chapter One: The Challenge of Ethical Representation ............................... 188 Chapter Two: From Restitution to Quest ..................................................... 203 Chapter Three: Narrative and Value ............................................................ 223 Chapter Four: Border Crossing .................................................................... 235 Conclusion .................................................................................................. 250 Works Cited ................................................................................................ 256 Bibliography .................................................................................................. 265 iv And Besides: Autobiographical Essays on Parenting and Difference Pages 3 to 182 have been removed from this version as they are published as Reaching One Thousand by Black Inc 2012. Representation, Counter-narrative and Culture in Parental Memoirs about Autism Introduction At the end of Autism and Representation, Mark Osteen calls for the development of an ‘empathetic scholarship’ in research and writing about autism. This ‘convergence of the personal and professional’, of ‘experiential knowledge and scholarly rigour’ (297), is precisely the sort of scholarship that I am endeavouring to practise in this exegesis, informed as it is by my role as writer, scholar and mother of an autistic child. My initial purpose in writing a life narrative about my experience of parenting was twofold: I wanted to understand more about what it meant to mother a child whose developmental path was so different from the typical one; and I wanted to convey to others my son’s personality, especially his complexity and his value. From the beginning I was clear that I wanted to contest what I believed to be the dominant popular and medical understandings of autism, challenging the notions that autism is a collection of deficits and that autistic people are inferior to non-autistic people. In making the decision to write an autobiographical narrative about an autistic child, I recognised that I was giving myself a number of challenges. The first set of challenges was around the ethics of writing about a child who was vulnerable because of his age, his relationship to me and his disability. Linked to issues of privacy and his ownership of his own life and life-story, was the challenge of ethically representing another. As well as the representation of my son, I was aware of the complex ethics of representing autism and disability in general. The second set of challenges was around the nature of autism itself, what might be described as the ‘unnarratability’ of autism, a neurological condition that is characterised in the medical literature by repetition, narrow interests, and lack of communication and interaction with others. Given the deep connection between the western tradition of autobiography and individual identity, autonomy and independence, writing autobiographically about a child with a developmental disability seems somewhat paradoxical. Indeed, the way that autism (as constructed in medical and psychological discourse) appears to contest the key constituents of life writing – identity, embodiment, agency, experience, memory (Smith and Watson) – was one of the reasons for my interest in writing autobiographically. I 184 wanted to explore these apparent contradictions, particularly around identity, narrative and autism. My research focused on the narrative strategies parents use to write life narratives about their autistic children that address the twin challenges of ethical representation and narrativity. My research took me into the fields of life writing, especially scholarship on relational life narratives, and Disability Studies, particularly analyses of the representation of disabled people in literary and other texts. I also read published works of memoir about illness and disability, including

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