In his 2008 book, Idiocy: A Cultural History, Patrick McDonagh delineates the boundaries of his archive by declaring that the “presumed objectivity” of clinical, scientific, or other professional accounts of idiocy renders them irrelevant and unworthy of study by a cultural historian. McDonagh concedes that medical professionals often “engage in flights of metaphor and analogy” in their “objective” writing, but he maintains that clinical work simply does not belong in the analytical archive of a cultural historian. This divide is maintained by medical historians as well. Caren Zucker and John Donvan’s 2016 account of the autism diagnosis, for example, focuses solely on clinical work, referencing film representations, such as Rain Man (1988), only insofar as they influenced the work of disability rights activists. Unlike other identity signifiers like race and gender, neurodivergence is inextricably tied to medical institutions, leading scholars to engage with its stories along disciplinary lines. Situated at the crossroads of disability studies and the medical humanities, this panel troubles this divide by reconsidering which stories are worthy of study and which methodologies are considered appropriate for analyzing them.

Each of the three 15-18-minute-long presentations on this panel employ a unique methodological approach to engage with various segments of the neurodivergent archive. We begin with Amelia Cruz, a doctoral candidate in English at the University of Southern California, who demonstrates the necessity of deconstructing disciplinary boundaries by arguing that clinical and literary accounts of autism are, in fact, a part of the same narrative archive. “Tales Told About Idiots: Autism’s Rhetorical Feedback Loop” frames the work of American novelist William Faulkner as a rhetorical nexus linking broad umbrella diagnoses like ‘feeble-mindedness’ in the opening decades of the twentieth century to the development of the autism diagnosis in the early 1940s. Caught in an endless rhetorical feedback loop, novelists such as Faulkner and clinicians such as H. H. Goddard and Leo Kanner pass stories back and forth, working together to create a coherent, if multifaceted, master narrative about autistic and otherwise neurodivergent brains, bodies, and behaviors.

Then, Shanna Killeen, a doctoral candidate in English at UC Santa Barbara and a new faculty hire at UT Austin, models the viability of applying humanities methodologies to clinical texts by engaging directly with medical records from the Mendocino State Asylum circa 1890-1940. Featuring original archival research from the California State Archives, “A Meaningless Unexpressive Smile: Narrative Constructions of Affect and Emotion” considers how psychiatry’s diagnostic, observational, and treatment methods fostered a broader social narrative about neurodivergent people as either emotionless or meaninglessly expressive. By close-reading psychiatric case files as cultural, historical, and literary texts, Killeen uncovers the symbolic and real-world effects of clinical empiricism. These early psychiatric accounts of neurodivergent life, they argue, are acts of “epistemic injustice” which have served to justify the mass institutionalization and mistreatment of countless cognitively and/or neurodevelopmentally disabled people.

Finally, Serafina Paladino, a doctoral student in English at UC Riverside expands the neurodivergent archive by applying a literary methodology to fan-made paratexts (e.g., fanfiction, fanart, online discussion posts, etc.) based on the Japanese animated series, Serial Experiments Lain. More than simply identifying with autistic-coded characters, Paladino considers how autistic audience members remake existing narratives in their own image, highlighting the representational elements which resonate and abandoning those which do not. While Cruz and Killeen focus on literary and/or clinical narratives composed about neurodivergent people, Paladino’s paper, “Navigating the Wired: Autistic-coded Neurodiversity in Serial Experiments Lain,” brings actual neurodivergent voices into the archive and troubles the self-imposed limitations academia often places on the texts worthy of critical attention.

Chaired by Erika Wright, the Associate Director of the HEAL (Humanities, Ethics, Art, and the Law) and Narrative Medicine MS Programs at the University of Southern California, this panel aims to free literary, cultural, and medical historians from the constraints of disciplinary divisions. From an early-stage doctoral student and a candidate on the cusp of matriculation to new and established faculty members, our presider and three speakers occupy various stages of scholarly development. The panelists’ fresh, new takes on the neurodivergent archive promise to paint a picture of both the current and future states of critical neurodivergence and disability studies, as well as the medical humanities.