Being a woman and living with autism spectrum disorder (ASD) involves double difficulties. Women need to put up with gender-normative demands on how women should be and women with ASD also face difficulties when trying to live “as others”, despite their symptoms. In this thesis we aim to, from an intersectional perspective, study how women with ASD handle gender-normative demands in combination with the maintenance of a good self-image and relationships with others. Our study is a qualitative literature study in which the empirics are based on autobiographies written by, or in collaboration with, women with ASD. The results, concerning the difficulties that women with ASD face, go hand in hand with what previous studies show; women with ASD are shown to mask and imitate their surroundings and theirself-image often change when being diagnosed. Our addition to previous studies is the critical approach to how researchers refer to and study women with functional variation. We find a unilateral perspective insufficient and stress that an intersectional perspective is needed to understand the difficulties women with ASD face. Functional variation or gender alone does not give a full perspective. In our study we therefore have an intersectional, multidimensional, perspective and show that the difficulties women with ASD experience are not only related to their diagnosis but also to their gender.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:lnu-86108 |
| Date | January 2019 |
| Creators | Jörlid, Linnea, Lindh, Linnéa |
| Publisher | Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för socialt arbete (SA), Linnéuniversitetet, Institutionen för socialt arbete (SA) |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | Swedish |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
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