Living in Multiplicity: How Annemarie Mol’s Ontology Comforts My Autistic Body

There is a kind of relief (a quiet, grounding comfort) in reading Annemarie Mol’s The Body Multiple as an autistic person. In it, Mol argues that the body is not singular or fixed, but multiple. This is not simply about having different perspectives on one body, but about different realities being enacted in different practices. A disease like atherosclerosis, Mol shows, is not one thing. It is many things, depending on where, how, and by whom it is enacted: through a scan, a symptom, a surgery, a test.

This concept (that the body is “multiple”) has stayed with me not just as an abstract theory, but as a deeply personal and affirming way to understand my own being in the world as an autistic person.

Autistic Multiplicities

Being autistic often means having a body and mind that does not consistently align with normative expectations: of communication, behaviour, movement, time, or affect. It means being told, often implicitly, that one's way of experiencing the world is wrong, excessive, deficient, or in need of correction. But Mol’s theory resists that flattening. She invites us to see the body not as a static object but as something enacted. This is something that becomes real in practice, through interaction, through context.

In my own life, I feel this multiplicity in the way my body shifts across environments. At home, in silence, I am fluent, articulate, capable. In fluorescent-lit supermarkets, I become tense, scattered, semi-verbal. Around people I trust, my sensory stimming is joyful. Around strangers, it is something to hide. These aren’t contradictions or inconsistencies. They are enactments of my body in different relational and material worlds.

Mol gives me a vocabulary for this and not as pathology or failure, but as multiplicity. I am not one fixed, stable subject. I am many. I shift. I enact. I become.

A Body That Doesn’t Need to Be Resolved

What is comforting in Mol’s account is her resistance to the demand for unity. She doesn’t try to pin the disease down to a singular truth. She doesn’t search for an essence. Instead, she shows how different versions of a disease coexist and are coordinated — not reconciled into one version, but held together in tension.

This has been healing for me. As an autistic person, I have often felt the pressure to resolve myself: to choose a version of myself that others will accept, to flatten out the “too muchness” of my sensitivities, or to suppress the so-called contradictions in how I move through the world. But what if resolution isn’t the goal? What if multiplicity is not a problem, but simply the way things are?

Mol’s theory allows me to rest in that ambiguity. I do not have to be fully consistent to be real. I do not have to be coherent to be cared for. I can be multiple and still be worthy of recognition, support, and understanding.

Towards a More Generous World

There’s also a political hope embedded in Mol’s work. If bodies are multiple, then care practices must adapt; not force bodies into conformity, but learn how to coordinate with their multiplicity. For autistic people, this means creating environments that respond to our sensory realities, communication styles, and needs — not because they conform to some universal standard, but because they are valid in their own right.

Rather than asking, “What’s wrong with this person?” Mol’s framework might encourage us to ask: “What version of this body is being enacted here, and what kind of care does it call for?”

That’s a radically different ethical orientation. It shifts the burden away from the autistic person having to change themselves to fit a rigid world and towards the world learning to accommodate and affirm different realities. It replaces the demand for normalisation with a practice of attunement.

Conclusion: Living in the Plural

In The Body Multiple, Mol writes not just about disease, but about the ontology of care, of reality, of bodies. Her work offers something more than theoretical insight: it offers a way of being that affirms those of us who have always felt out of sync with the dominant version of the body.

As an autistic person, I find in her theory a deep, almost quiet permission: to be varied, shifting, plural. To exist differently in different moments and still be whole. To refuse reduction. To be, without having to be just one thing.

In a world that too often demands singularity, The Body Multiple is a reminder that multiplicity is not only real; it’s ordinary, it’s livable, and it’s enough.