Neuroqueer Heresies: Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Possibilities

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Among the early sections of the book, the one that concerned me most was the grammatical prescriptivism chapter. It rails against various 'misuses' of language around neurodiversity. I would be worried about undergraduates reading this unedited early text in the privileged position of course textbook, primarily because the text assigns morality to normative grammar, unintentionally stigmatising those who don't construct sentences and assign meaning in the same way that the author does. Dora M. Raymaker’s published fiction so far includes the brilliant sci-fi detective novel Hoshi and the Red City Circuit, the short story “Heat Producing Entities” (which appears in Volume 3 of the annual Spoon Knife neuroqueer lit anthology), and the epic novel Resonance, which will be published sometime in 2022 (I’ve already read Resonance because I had the honor of being Raymaker’s editor on it, and I’m eager for everyone else to read it). Neurotypical can be used as either an adjective (“He’s neurotypical”) or a noun (“He’s a neurotypical”). Producing critical responses to literature and/or other cultural artifacts, focusing on intentional or unintentional characterizations of neuroqueerness and how those characterizations illuminate and/or are illuminated by actual neuroqueer lives and experiences.

This group is for people who identify as both queer and ND (neurodivergent).” NEUROTYPICAL, or NT What It Means: The social dynamics that manifest in regard to neurodiversity are similar to the social dynamics that manifest in regard to other forms of human diversity (e.g., diversity of ethnicity, gender, or culture). These dynamics include the dynamics of social power inequalities, and also the dynamics by which diversity, when embraced, acts as a source of creative potential. What It Doesn’t Mean: But the work of mad scholars, and our presence in academic spaces, is not necessarily, and certainly not only, about accurately representing our diagnoses. Though lived experience work is often valued in the medical humanities, its perceived value can tend to be limited to what mad people can tell us about madness. We are told that we are the experts on our experience. Unfortunately this valuing of expertise can tend to begin and end with the light we can shed on our diagnosis and the patient experience. I think that what this misses is that lived experience scholarship has the potential to bring urgently needed new critical perspectives, including critiques of how we understand particular diagnoses and also ways of thinking, feeling, knowing, and doing otherwise. Embodying and expressing one’s neurodivergence in ways that also queer one’s performance of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and/or other aspects of one’s identity.Neurodivergent is not a synonym for autistic. There are countless possible ways to be neurodivergent, and being autistic is only one of those ways. There are myriad ways of being neurodivergent that have no resemblance or connection to autism whatsoever. Never, ever use neurodivergent as a euphemism for autistic. If you mean that someone is autistic, say they’re autistic. It’s not a dirty word. Examples of Correct Usage: I’m omnivorous in my scholarly interests, and transdisciplinary in my approach. My fields of study include somatic psychology, depth psychology, transformative learning, cognitive psychology, developmental psychology, transpersonal psychology, transformative somatic practices, possibility studies, queer and neuroqueer theory, queer and neuroqueer literature, neurodiversity studies, gender studies, human sexuality, creative writing, narrative inquiry, arts-based inquiry, autoethnography, speculative fiction, comics studies, and ethics in research and professional practice. And, as I increasingly find myself in the position of reviewing other people’s writing on neurodiversity – grading student papers, reviewing book submissions or submissions to journals, consulting on various projects, or even just deciding which pieces of writing I’m willing to recommend to people – I’m getting tired of running into the same basic errors over and over. Nope. Nope nope nope. There’s no such thing as a “form of neurodiversity.” Autism and dyslexia are forms of neurodivergence. NEURODIVERSITY PARADIGM What It Means: This groundbreaking anthology of writings by somatic psychology practitioners from various marginalized communities includes a chapter by me entitled “Somatics and Autistic Embodiment.”

To refer to neurominority groups or neurodivergent individuals as “neurodiverse” is incorrect grammatically, because diverse doesn’t mean different from the majority, it means made up of multiple different types. So an individual can never be diverse, by definition. And a group where everyone is neurodivergent in more or less the same way (e.g., a group composed entirely of Autistic people) wouldn’t be “neurodiverse,” either. The term bodymind points toward an understanding that mind is an embodied phenomenon, and that mind and embodiment are inseparably entwined. The embodied nature of the mind is a fundamental premise of somatic psychology, a field in which I’ve long been involved as a student, practitioner, and educator. Chapman, Robert. 2021. “ Negotiating the Neurodiversity Concept”. Psychology Today, 18 August. Accessed: 30 Jun 2023. Speaking from my mad experience can often feel like being in a jar, captive and on display for the eyes of the curious. Of course, not all curiosity is malicious. Well-meaning people sometimes tell me, after I present my theory-heavy research, that I am brave or inspiring or that my voice is important. I would never dismiss these comments, because I know that there have been and still are times and places where I would not be allowed to speak at all, or where it would not be safe.Dr. Walker encourages the reader to be their true, authentic, oddball selves, regardless of what socio-cultural expectations dictate.... but this book is also much more than that. I was honored to contribute a chapter, “The Use of Transformative Somatic Practices in Processes of Collective Imagination and Collaborative Future-Shaping,” to this visionary futurist anthology.

In addition to being thoroughly neuroqueer, these fabulous books are also gripping space opera tales grounded in the best classic sci-fi traditions. Hoffmann has also produced a lot of extraordinarily good and thoroughly neuroqueer short stories and poetry, much of which can be found in the collection Monsters in My Mind. The Neurodiversity Movement is not a single group or organization, is not run by any single group or organization, and has no leader. Like most civil rights movements, the Neurodiversity Movement is made up of a great many individuals, some of them organized into groups of one sort or another. These individuals and groups are quite diverse in their viewpoints, goals, concerns, political positions, affiliations, methods of activism, and interpretations of the neurodiversity paradigm. Reply to @martianpudding #autism #neurodivergent #queer #genderfluid #gender #autistic ♬ Supermodel – Ru Paul This book is a work of advocacy for fellow neurodivergents, an intellectually demanding book that will challenge your preconceptions and assumptions. Meanwhile, a couple of other members of that little Facebook group, who were involved in the discussion where Athena and Remi and I first discovered we’d each been playing with the same concept, became so excited about this new term that they immediately ran out and started spreading it around on various social media platforms. The word caught on like wildfire, much faster than its creators had imagined and much faster than we could keep up with. Soon it was showing up not only all over queer and neurodivergent social media spaces, but also in academic papers and conference presentations by people we’d never heard of.Other forms of neurodivergence, like epilepsy or the effects of traumatic brain injuries, could be removed from an individual without erasing fundamental aspects of the individual’s selfhood, and in many cases the individual would be happy to be rid of such forms of neurodivergence. The neurodiversity paradigm does not reject the pathologizing of these forms of neurodivergence, and the Neurodiversity Movement does not object to consensual attempts to cure them (but still most definitely objects to discrimination against people who have them).

The primary deficit of autism includes difficulties interpreting and understanding social constructions. This means that we have a disability that inherently makes understanding gender part of our disability. I really wanted to offer this book to my peers at college, as we are on the final level of a counselling qualification, and I feel that it is so important it is for counsellors to be informed about how autistic people actually feel, so that their understanding is not dictated by the medical model. *shudders*

What It Means:

So there you have it, from the people who brought you the term. This definition is, again, not an authoritative “last word” on the subject, because that would be a silly thing to attempt. Rather, I hope this will be taken as a “first word” – a broad “working definition” from which further theory, practice, and play will proceed. Several burnouts and a retirement later, I have zero capacity for masking, for attenuating myself to the sensibilities of surrounding bigots and bullies. I enjoy my pink and my flower print Thai fisherman pants and wistfully wishing I could dial my gender to my pansexual, polyamorous, genderpunk, genderqueer mood. When I first started publishing pieces of my writing on neurodiversity in 2012, I wasn’t ready to put the term neuroqueer out into the world yet. I wanted more time to let it simmer, to think and feel my way into its nuances and implications. In early 2014, though, I mentioned it in in a small private Facebook group for autistic bloggers, and discovered that my friend and colleague Athena Lynn Michaels-Dillon had also come up with the term independently and had also been playing around with it, letting it simmer, and thinking about putting it into publication eventually. Another dear friend and colleague, Remi Yergeau, who was also in that discussion, revealed that although the term neuroqueer was new for them, they’d been thinking along quite similar and compatible lines in playing with the concept of “neurological queerness.” Spoon Knife also accepts short memoir pieces and poetry, so each volume offers the reader quite the diversity of experiences. As far as neuroqueer speculative fiction goes, Alyssa Gonzalez and Verity Reynolds are two more authors whose contributions to multiple volumes of Spoon Knife are excellent examples of the genre.