Máscaras sociais, neurodivergência e normatividade institucional

uma autoetnografia crítica da experiência docente no ensino superior

Abstract

This article analyzes the experience of teaching in higher education from a critical autoethnographic perspective, focusing on the relationship between neurodivergence, masking, and institutional normativity. Based on the lived experience of an autistic professor whose pedagogical performance shows no technical impairment, the study shifts the debate from didactic competence to the implicit regimes of recognition that structure academic belonging. It argues that masking, rather than merely an individual adaptive strategy, operates as a technology of normalization within the university field, regulating legitimate forms of presence, communication, and interaction. In dialogue with theoretical contributions on performativity, recognition, habitus, and ableism, the text demonstrates that formal inclusion may coexist with tacit demands for behavioral conformity. Autoethnography is adopted as an epistemological stance that articulates singular experience and structural critique, rendering visible the subjective cost of pedagogical intelligibility. The article concludes that expanding the debate on inclusion in higher education requires problematizing the relational norms that sustain institutional life, recognizing cognitive diversity also within the academic faculty.