Transing the archive: Toward a trans‐autistic historiography of neurodivergent futures

Abstract

This article advances transing the archive as a methodological intervention into how autism's canonical history became institutionally secured through archival processes operating within clinical and bureaucratic regimes, not simply through omission. Drawing on archival and digital ethnographic research, I trace how translation hierarchies, citation regimes, and diagnostic inscription consolidated particular clinicians and deficit framings while marginalizing more relational figures such as Grunya Sukhareva and Anni Weiss. I argue that these processes function as recognition infrastructures, shaping what becomes documentable, citable, and actionable across institutional systems. I analyze autistic digital counter-archives-hashtag recirculation, annotation, and diagnostic reinterpretation-as patterned historiographical work that intervenes by re-translating, re-citing, and re-inscribing medical knowledge. By reframing archives as contested infrastructures, this article extends medical anthropology's engagement with evidence, temporality, and epistemic authority.