Meeting text-to-text: familial encounters of love, care, and transformation in autistic life writing

Lee, Bianca Mercedes

Meeting text-to-text: familial encounters of love, care, and transformation in autistic life writing

Thesis / Dissertation

2026

Publisher

University of Cape Town

Department

Department of English Language and Literature

Faculty

Faculty of Humanities

Abstract

Historically, much of the literature on autism has been occupied by medical and psychoanalytic concerns, while the popular culture media tends to favour autistic stereotypes as the means of representation. The current autistic self-advocacy movement can be characterised by an increase in autistic life writing – mostly memoirs. This thesis analyses the nuances of love, care, and communication encounters between autistic people and their caregivers. This is conducted using three life writing texts centring on autism to provide alternative ways of approaching these interpersonal dynamics. It focuses on the co-authored memoir I Will Die On This Hill (2023) by Meghan Ashburn and Jules Edwards, the epistolary Sincerely, Your Autistic Child (2021) edited by Emily Paige Ballou, Sharon daVanport, and Morénike Giwa Onaiwu, and the memoir Children on the Bridge (2006) by Kirsten Miller. These life writing works utilise hybrid textual forms to convey the contradictions, transformations, and resolutions that arise from autistic and allistic love and care encounters. This hybridity subverts normative textual and communication forms, offering the potential to function as didactic tools for teaching and transforming current and future enactments of love, care, and family-making for autistic people. This research critiques the idealisation of the supermom trope to expose the anxiety that may occur due to the tension between idealised expectations of care and the lived experience of caring for autistic children. It then utilises love theories by Alice Walker and bell to transform the politicised family where acts of love become justice for autistic people. Lastly, the experiences of autistic people are analysed in terms of their hybrid textual and political forms to argue for autistic writing as a blueprint for alternative and adaptive love and care.