ABSTRACT

This dissertation deals with what is understood as the Autism Spectrum Disorder and its relation with the experience of the senses particular to these subjects in confrontation with the culturally hierarchical senses in the West. The general objective of this dissertation was to understand the autistic experiences of the pathologized individuals within the medical-psychiatric discourse in the emergence of a concept under construction, neurodiversity, in confrontation with the concept of inner experience. The methodological approach begins with a brief genealogy of the concept of abnormality, moral monstrosity, and the right to repair damage, so that I can explain these relationships within the context in which autism was "discovered", and its theoretical articulation with the concepts of neurodiversity and biossociability through the cerebral subject. Subsequently, the practical approach, an ethnography, which was present through observant participation that allowed a narrative analysis, and a theoretical articulation of the data collected from the concept of inner experience articulating the sacred and the profane contained in the experience of the senses, where the construction of the concept of subject takes place in different perspectives. This study hopes to contribute to the empirical knowledge of autism as a culturally organized competence in the creation of meanings, based on the perception of sensory and performative experience, a field that undoubtedly belongs to anthropology.

Keywords: subject; power; neurodiversity, experience.