"I had only experienced life as myself": Self-representation of autistic people on Instagram

Representations of autism in the media are often colored by discourses asserting that autism is a deficit or the product of imposed social structures. These discourses stem from the so-called medical and social models of disability. Both offer unnuanced understandings of autism, which affect audiences’ views, and impair autistic people’s possibilities to recognize themselves in the media. Lived experience of autistic people is therefore overlooked and autistic people are seen as victims of social structures or of their disability. A third model of disability, the predicament model, takes into account lived experiences of autistic people and asserts that autism is at once a biological and social disability that presents itself differently in every autistic individual. This model creates a more nuanced understanding of autism by arguing that we need to take into account autistic voices to better understand how autism is experienced by them. For example, autistic people can assert a more complex and nuanced understanding of autism through self-representation on social media. This research examined such self-representations on Instagram and aimed to answer two research questions: (1) how do autistic people represent autism on Instagram? and (2) how do users engage with and interpret autistic people’s portrayals of autism on Instagram? Through purposive sampling, three autistic Instagram creators were selected to examine their representations of autism. Using qualitative multimodal content analysis, ten posts of each account and thirty accompanying comments were analyzed. From the analysis, four categories and their patterns were developed. The first three categories were based on the medical, social and predicament models of disability. These categories demonstrate the way that these models influenced, were present, or were opposed in the creators’ representations of autism. The medical model was opposed through the use of irony. The social model was present to explain how living in a neurotypical society is difficult for autistic people, and how autistic people continue to be mistreated. The predicament model fits the creators’ representations of autism best because they normalized being autistic through a variety of strategies. Emphasis was furthermore placed on valuing autistic experience, representing lesser-known autistic traits and behaviors, and challenging stereotypes. The fourth category focused on user engagement with and interpretation of the creators’ posts, and concludes that users largely adopt the intended meaning of the creators’ posts. They are grateful for the representations, relate to the content and engage in conversations with others, thereby building a positive autistic identity and safe space on the internet.