Franco-Ontarians Autistic Pathways | Voices: When does acknowledging neurodiversity become a militant path to emancipation?

This article is based on an exploratory study conducted with four French-speaking autistic youths and adults from Ontario on a collaborative blog named Voix autistes franco-ontariennes. Their discourses detract from the majority of writings on autism largely focused on children issues, thus, revealing the stigmatization of their threefold identity status: adult, autistic, francophone living in a linguistic minority setting. Rarely heard, their minority voices join the thousands of others gathered in an emerging activist movement that claims that autism ought to be recognized as a neurological variation rather than a pathology. Known as neurodiversity, this new form of activism is part of a conscious journey to reclaim the right to autistic self-identification acting as a new emancipatory track of social inequalities.