Corporeal reflexivity and autism

Ethnographic video recordings of high functioning children with autism or Aspergers Syndrome in everyday social encounters evidence their first person perspectives. High quality visual and audio data allow detailed analysis of children's bodies and talk as loci of reflexivity. Corporeal reflexivity involves displays of awareness of one's body as an experiencing subject and a physical object accessible to the gaze of others. Gaze, demeanor, actions, and sotto voce commentaries on unfolding situations indicate a range of moment-by-moment reflexive responses to social situations. Autism is associated with neurologically based motor problems (e.g. delayed action-goal coordination, clumsiness) and highly repetitive movements to self-soothe. These behaviors can provoke derision among classmates at school. Focusing on a 9-year-old girl's encounters with peers on the playground, this study documents precisely how autistic children can become enmeshed as unwitting objects of stigma and how they reflect upon their social rejection as it transpires. Children with autism spectrum disorders in laboratory settings manifest diminished understandings of social emotions such as embarrassment, as part of a more general impairment in social perspective-taking. Video ethnography, however, takes us further, into discovering autistic children's subjective sense of vulnerability to the gaze of classmates.