Amelia Cruz

BA English Literature and Women’s and Gender Studies, Rutgers University–New Brunswick, 2020

Amelia’s research focuses on the stories that compose the concept of autism as a way of being. Because there is no empirical or biological means of diagnosing it, autism is, in the words of John Duffy and Rebecca Dorner, an “essentially narrative condition.” While medical experts are on the hunt for an empirically provable cause or a watertight set of diagnostic criteria for autism spectrum disorder (ASD), Amelia’s research interrogates the motivations and effects of psychiatric taxonomies. Her work muddies the boundary between the scientific and the literary, acknowledging how the current criteria for ASD which appear in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) are just one small part of autism’s narrative archive. Amelia’s dissertation is a literary heritage – a narrative heirloom of sorts – designed to aid in the autistic community’s current Renaissance of redefinition. An autistic person herself, Amelia writes from a first-person perspective, rejecting the ethnographic and often alienating tone employed by many authors of autism stories.