Visualising 'Unacceptable' lives?: The moving story of 'Hikari to tomo ni' [With the light: raising an autistic child] (2001-2010)

In this article we will interrogate the notion of 'the unacceptable' by tracing the movement of a particular text, a series of manga novels by Keiko Tobe entitled Hikari to tomo ni [With the Light: Raising an Autistic Child] (2001-2010), from serialisation in a Japanese women's magazine, to publication in Japanese as a series of manga novels, to publication in English in book form. In following this text - a narrative of parenting a child with autism from birth to adolescence - through its various contexts of production and reception, we want to raise some doubts about a shibboleth of a particular kind of media and cultural studies: that the unacceptability of a text in mainstream popular or political contexts makes it particularly interesting from a scholarly point of view.