The doing and undoing of the “autistic child”: Cutting together and apart interview-based empirical materials

This article discusses how posthuman and new materialist theories afford us opportunities to rethink the production of the “autistic child,” drawing on a qualitative research project on parenthood in the context of childhood disability in Italy. We will put some Baradian’s key concepts (intra-action, agential cut and cutting together-apart) to work in glancing at the complexities we keep encountering when a mother, Arianna, describes her relationship with her daughter Laura. The aim of this article is twofold: first, to methodologically re-turn the production of the “autistic child,” and second, to rethink and unsettle the dichotomies that constitute some children as “disabled human beings,” abnormal, and undesirable.