“DOING IT” DIFFERENTLY? NARRATING AND NAVIGATING AUTISTIC SEXUAL DESIRE

Abstract

This dissertation examines how Autistic college students conceptualize and perform sexual activities and expressions. Scholarly interest in Autistic sexuality has historically been relegated to quantitative studies on childhood and adolescence. From 2000-2022, only 18 of 741 such studies analyzed the sexual behaviors and motivations of Autistic adults, and fewer than half of those were qualitative. A majority of these also did not incorporate Autistic people into the study design. My project addresses these oversights by centering Autistic voices in research about their lived experiences with sex and sexuality. Drawing upon data from twelve semi-structured indepth interviews with Autistic college students around the United States, I argue that Autistic young adults develop notions of intimacy, temporality, and space that are uniquely theirs. Collectively, they form the foundation of a process I label “sexual logistics,” or the ways that Autists negotiate sexual activities and desires. I propose neuropleasure as a theoretical inroad towards understanding these sexual logistics in context. Broadly conceived, neuropleasure explicitly describes how Autists always and already perform sexuality in public and private, even if those performances go unrecognized by others. The theory is comprised of discrete yet tightly interwoven tenets that, when examined holistically, demonstrate how sexual logistics are pluralistic and unfixed, contingent upon their social context, and open to contestation and how these negotiations occur at individual, relational, and communal levels. In short, neuropleasure is a paradigmatic constellation of Autistic sexual desires, motivations, and practices. This framework is uniquely Autistic but can—and should—be applied broadly to expand our understandings of desire, pleasure, fulfillment, and even sex itself.