Becoming Intelligible: On Life in the U.S. Autism Healthcare

This preprint is adapted from Producing the Autistic Subject: Care, Capital, and Clinical Life in the Contemporary United States, an undergraduate honors thesis in medical anthropology conducted under the supervision of Professor Charles L. Briggs at the University of California, Berkeley.

Drawing on eleven semi-structured interviews conducted in English and Spanish with caregivers and autism service providers in the San Francisco Bay Area, this manuscript examines how autistic individuals become administratively legible subjects through clinical diagnosis, bureaucratic documentation, insurance requirements, and therapeutic interventions.

Integrating Marxist political economy with Foucauldian theories of power and subjectivation, the analysis explores how medical classification simultaneously facilitates access to healthcare and subjects autistic individuals and their families to institutional expectations of progress, independence, and behavioral normalization. Particular attention is given to the often-unrecognized caregiving labor necessary to navigate and sustain these arrangements.

The manuscript contributes to scholarship in medical anthropology, medical sociology, critical disability studies, and the political economy of healthcare by examining how clinical subjectivities are produced and negotiated through the everyday institutional organization of care.

Publication status: Preprint; not peer-reviewed.