Between Conformity and Creativity: A Feminist Autoethnography of AuDHD Identity and Professional Performance

Authors

Abstract

Neurodivergent women, particularly those with co-occurring autism and ADHD (AuDHD), are often missed by current diagnostic biases due to male-centered medical models and gendered socialization. This critical feminist autoethnography examines how neurotypical and gendered workplaces shape identity construction for a late-diagnosed neurodivergent woman navigating professional environments without diagnostic recognition. Drawing on feminist standpoint theory, dialogical self theory, and neurodivergent trait analysis frameworks, this study positions lived experience as epistemically valuable knowledge frequently excluded systematically from organizational research. Workplace narratives analyzed retrospectively serve as primary data, using evocative autoethnographic methods accessing internal cognition and otherwise invisible behaviors. Critical themes of image management through masking, self-medication, and progressive identity fragmentation across professional contexts are revealed. Identity reconstruction is catalyzed through late diagnosis, retrospective reframing, and a rejection of internalized self-stigma, precipitating a new understanding of neurological difference. This study demonstrates that autoethnography uniquely exposes invisible workplace experiences that may typically remain opaque using traditional interview methods. Implications are relevant to organizational support for late-diagnosed employees, methodological contributions of neurodivergent voices in scholarship, and to co-occurring neurodivergence as phenomenologically distinct. This study challenges deficit-based models, validates adaptations required to navigate neurotypical professional environments, and privileges epistemically marginalized positions in explicating lived experience.

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