Womanhood on the Spectrum - Self Representation of Autistic Women on TikTok

Autistic women have previously faced significant erasure, cultural misrepresentation and exclusion from broader medical and social autism discourses which have remained male centric. This thesis explored how autistic women navigated these forms of marginalizations through practices of self representation through social media posts on TikTok, a predominantly visual and algorithmically functioning social media platform. Using multimodal thematic analysis of 122 posts with 92 image based posts and 30 video based posts, this research explored how self representational practices of autistic women take form in response to diagnostic erasure, intersectional invisibility and the platform's affordances. The research was guided by theories of representation by Hall (1997), intersectionality (Crenshaw, 1989), identity performance by Goffman (1959) and social media affordance theories led primarily by Treem and Leonardi (2013). The thematic analysis followed a multimodal structure where audial, visual, text based, hashtag based and other affordances were taken into account while formulating analyses. Some affordances that guided the process were visibility as a high level affordance centering the analysis of platform logics supported by editability and searchability as low level affordances and the related concepts of imagined affordances and the algorithmized self. The findings revealed how the narratives of self representation took diverse forms like distinguishing the autistic femininity, a focus on educational and humorous content and the use of advocacy as a representational practice. Visibility and vulnerability were closely tied with the engagement of affordances. Prominent inductive themes emerging from the dataset included the struggles of being misrecognized in earlier life, the reclamation of identity through resolving childhood memories of masking autistic traits, and subversion of stereotypes through humor, irony and memes. Affordances added the nuance of platform logics directing and aiding the narratives to take form, be interacted with on both an interpersonal and an intrapersonal level on the platform while consequences of affordances included community building, validation of identity and exploration of the authentic self.