Negotiating Acceptance: Autism, Motherhood and the Emotional Politics of Care in Bengaluru

This article examines acceptance as a central, yet under-theorised, dimension of autism care in Bengaluru. Rather than treating acceptance as a private emotional experience, it approaches it as an analytic object that reveals how mothers navigate institutional demands across clinical and therapeutic contexts. Drawing on long-term ethnographic research, the article identifies three situated orientations of maternal acceptance—tempered, radical and relational—shaped by mothers’ biographies and by the moral contradictions and shifting temporalities they encounter. Following mothers across diagnostic encounters, early intervention centres and special-school counselling, the article shows how clinical and domestic worlds form a continuum in which categories circulate between households and institutions. Within these interstitial spaces, acceptance emerges as an embodied form of engagement and an institutional bricolage, making care workable amid scarce support and enduring uncertainty. Acceptance is thus shown to be a situated, ongoing relational practice that illuminates the emotional politics of care in contemporary India.