Ett hermetiskt förseglat universum? : Om självrepresentationen av autism i paret Newports gemensamma biografi Mozart and the Whale: An Asperger's love story

Sammanfattning: This essay aims to examine how autism and self-representation is portrayed in the couple Jerry and Mary Newport’s memoir, Mozart and the Whale: An Asperger’s love story (2007). The analysis of the memoir raises two key terms of importance for the purpose of the essay, the concepts of aesthetic nervousness coined by Ato Quayson and the figure of the sentimental savant which has been formulated by Stuart Murray. Another central discourse was articulated by Jenny Bergenmar: That autistic biographies are characterized by a tendency to incorporate narrative about self-awareness, acceptance and the capability to agency as a strategy to escape the objectification of non-autistic readership. What emerges in the analysis is that the experience of living within the autism spectrum involves a form of suffering, though also an opportunity for agency, which is what is evident in the self-representation in the Newport couple’s joint biography. Other autistic voices that convey stories of their inability to reach agency have been excluded from the biography and thus ultimately excluded from a discourse of what it means to have autism. And above all it becomes apparent that to be able to act as an autistic in the world requires a different form of self-centeredness than the one that is normatively attributed to the autistic condition, namely self-love.