@utism: (Re)negotiating Collective Identity in the Blogosphere

Autism has been referenced in a variety of analyses from philosophical to medical to sociological. The study of Autistic culture has been rarely undertaken. In an effort to bring previously ignored voices into a conversation where they have been routinely ignored, this study locates Autistic culture as it exists persistently on networked online mediums. While studies of community have typically gone on through ethnograghic adventures to foreign locales, many sites of community exist in networked locations, such as blogs. This study follows the work of Christine Hine’s landmark book Virtual Ethnography and comes to view Autistic blogs not as finite or completed texts but as settings or sites for conversation and communal meanings. Methodologically, the study identified two major blog websites, Radical Neurodivergence Speaking as well as Ballastexistenz and then used a filtering technique to identify four blogs from each website to analyze. Once located, the commentaries of bloggers were analyzed through a Foucauldian discourse analysis methodology that was able to read how bloggers positioned themselves and there community in terms of dominant nonprofits, medical discourses, the claims of parent groups and the thoughts of disability rights organizations claiming to represent them. Apprehending the series of critical discourses present in such Autistic blogs has been so engrossing of a task that the secondary aspect of this study remains largely unfinished. It is clear that future virtual ethnographies focusing on blogging communities in the future must focus their analysis on the comment sections where the real conversations happen.