Unmasking Neurodiversity in Neoliberal Canada: Autistic Narratives of Work, Resistance, and Becoming

Authors

Abstract

This research investigates the affective, material, and relational dimensions of Autistic life and labour through a post-humanist, post-qualitative lens. Drawing on Deleuze and Guattari, it traces how Autistic subjectivities are produced, constrained, and reconfigured within assemblages of desire, affect, and institutional control. Structured around three interrelated manuscripts, the project explores: (1) how Autistic individuals enact refusal within normative work environments; (2) how corporate neurodiversity initiatives commodify difference in ways that reinforce, rather than subvert, capitalist demands; and (3) how relational methodologies can cultivate neuroqueer modes of care, kinship, and collective support. Rather than positioning inclusion as an endpoint, the project reframes refusal, opacity, and collective access as insurgent practices of survival and world-making.Grounded in in-depth interviews with Autistic employees, employers, and disability professionals, the study examines how participants navigate and resist pressures around masking, disclosure, and affective legibility. Autistic difference is conceptualized not as a diagnostic identity but as a disruptive force that unsettles dominant norms of productivity, coherence, and belonging. Intersectionality is approached as dynamic and situated, showing how race, disability, and affective recognition converge within overlapping structures of harm and endurance. By foregrounding Black disabled knowledge and micropolitical praxis, the project highlights how Autistic life is continuously negotiated within racialized and neurotypical workspaces. Challenging the abstract promises of universal design, this research advances collective access as a relational, context-specific practice rooted in interdependence and care. It contributes to critical disability studies and public health by offering a theoretically generative, empirically grounded account of how Autistic workers resist normative demands, confront institutional exclusions, and generate alternative infrastructures for thriving. Bringing together neuroqueer theory, post-qualitative inquiry, and post-humanist disability studies through a Deleuzo-Guattarian lens, the project moves beyond inclusion-as-accommodation toward a speculative politics of neurodivergent futurity.

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