Innocent Machines: Asperger's Syndrome and the Neurostructural Self

Elizabeth Fein

doi:10.1108/S1057-6290(2011)0000013006

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Advances in Medical Sociology

ISSN: 1057-6290
Series editor(s): Professor Barbara Katz Rothman

Subject Area: Sociology and Public Policy

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Innocent Machines: Asperger's Syndrome and the Neurostructural Self

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Title:	Innocent Machines: Asperger's Syndrome and the Neurostructural Self
Author(s):	Elizabeth Fein
Volume:	13 Editor(s): Martyn Pickersgill, Ira Van Keulen ISBN: 978-1-84855-880-9 eISBN: 978-1-84855-881-6
Citation:	Elizabeth Fein (2011), Innocent Machines: Asperger's Syndrome and the Neurostructural Self, in Martyn Pickersgill, Ira Van Keulen (ed.) Sociological Reflections on the Neurosciences (Advances in Medical Sociology, Volume 13), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, pp.27-49
DOI:	10.1108/S1057-6290(2011)0000013006 (Permanent URL)
Publisher:	Emerald Group Publishing Limited
Article type:	Chapter Item
Abstract:	The ways in which the brain, as mapped by bioscience, has become popularly understood as the locus and determinant of the self is a topic of increasing importance within medical sociology. Nikolas Rose has influentially chronicled the emergence of a “neurochemical self,” determined by brain chemistry and thus fluid, malleable, and open to improvement via increasingly fine-tuned psychopharmacology. This chapter argues for the contemporaneous emergence of a neurostructural self, intrinsic to the growing neurodiversity movement. Drawing on trends in contemporary neuroscience and biological psychiatry, this model of “brainhood” conceptualizes the brain-as-self as a material system: governed by physical laws, and thus both morally innocent and robustly predictable. Rather than being infinitely open to intervention and optimization, however, the neurostructural self is imagined as fixed and immutable, resistant to the medical intervention and presumption of infinite flexibility inherent within neurochemical selfhood. This chapter draws on a two-year ethnographic study of autism spectrum disorders in North America, investigating the ways in which circulating discourses about medicine, culture, and identity are shaping the emergence, development and use of autism spectrum diagnoses in contexts of daily practice. In this chapter, I explore why individuals with the autism spectrum disorder known as Asperger's syndrome are particularly effective examplars, consumers, and producers of this neurostructural selfhood.