“A DIFFERENT LITTLE FRIEND”: THE REPRESENTATION OF THE AUTIST IN MONICA’S GANG COMICS

Abstract

The literary production delivered to the children are an ideal context to produce social
representations to child audience identify themselves. For this reason, it is an opportunity to
question where the place to the diversity of the identitary representations, in special the ones from
people with disability, that claim, legitimately, for more visibility in the field of artistic-cultural
productions is. Based on this assumption, the objective of this article is to investigate one number
of a Brazilian comic book called Monica‘s Gang, by Mauricio de Sousa, in order to analyze
the approach that the narrative gives to the child with Autistic Spectrum Disorder. Originally
published in 2002 and with guaranteed distribution up to the present day, the aforementioned issue
is entitled Monica´s Gang - a different litlle friend and highlights the character of an autistic boy
called André. When examining the constitution of this character, we found that the autist child
projection is still lined with stigmas, which are translated by his limited place of speech in the
narrative. The theoretical contribution came up from the studies about representation promoted by
Hall (2016); studies about Autism carried out by Gaiato and Teixeira (2018); also contemplating
the peculiarities of comic narratives in the perspective of McCloud (1995).