A construção de uma identidade autista na fase adulta e sua luta por reconhecimento

Abstract

This dissertation investigates how obtaining an Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) diagnostic report in adulthood articulates the perception of harm within spheres of recognition and impacts the re-identification of the autistic person. The research is justified by the need to understand trajectories marked by historical invisibility and the normative violence of this technology. The general objective is to analyze the contribution of this report to identity reconstruction, considering the tensions between individual and collective dimensions of recognition. Methodologically, a qualitative approach of an interpretive and implicated nature is adopted, based on 14 interactions (semi-structured interviews and a biographical account) that generated a corpus of 218 analytical records, examined in light of Andrew Feenberg’s Critical Theory of Technology and Axel Honneth’s Theory of Recognition. Results reveal that the pre-diagnosis period is characterized by subjective discomfort and the internalization of strangeness as a moral failure. The analysis demonstrates that, although the diagnosis operates as a hermeneutic key for biographical resignification and as a technology of biocitizenship indispensable for access to rights, it proves insufficient to guarantee full social recognition. It is concluded that the transmutation of individual pain, lived in the solitude of inadequacy, into a collective issue of social justice does not stem from technical validation itself, but from the urgency of the collectivization of resistance, indicating the political articulation among peers as a horizon where self-identification can emerge as an act of tension regarding normative grammars, enhancing the transformation of private suffering into a public struggle for existential legitimacy and new regimes of recognition.