Storying Autism: Picture Books, Parent Advocacy, and New Forms of Autistic Story-Making

This article examines how picture books about autism act as a form of autism advocacy reliant on key epistemological assumptions. Picture books emerge as a crucial location for analyzing complex debates about power dynamics and story-making within autism advocacy circles at large. Focusing especially on parent-authors, the author argues that this advocacy encodes a specific epistemological approach that constructs rather than describes a certain kind of (abnormal) autistic subject. In this way, picture books about autism offer important opportunities to examine how epistemological and hermeneutical injustices become embedded in textual and visual forms in children’s literature. However, the author contrasts deficit-based autism advocacy narratives with more recent picture books by autistic authors and neurodiversity supporters that enact autistic self-advocacy and provide new ways of knowing and thinking about autistic story-making.