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

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Really? So human brains and minds don’t differ from one another? There’s an awful lot of scientific evidence that shows quite plainly that there’s considerable variation among human brains. And if we all thought alike, the world would be a very different place indeed. The person who wrote this sentence was probably trying to object to the neurodiversity paradigm and/or the positions of the Neurodiversity Movement, and has ended up sounding rather silly as a result of failing to distinguish between these things and the phenomenon of neurodiversity itself. Spoon Knife is the first anthology series that’s specifically devoted to neuroqueer literature. It’s multi-genre (or genre-queering), so it includes neuroqueer speculative fiction but also other neuroqueer fiction in other genres like magical realism (for instance, the story “Only Strawberries Don’t Have Fathers,” contributed to Spoon Knife 3 by legendary poet Judy Grahn, or Craig Laurance Gidney’s “Coalrose,” which appears in Spoon Knife 5). If you are Autistic, or care about someone who is Autistic, or in any way an outlier, this book is for you and for them. It will change how you view yourself and others in your life, guiding you to fully embrace your weird and amazing self. It's more than that too. While all these writers may be deepening and complexifying our knowledge of particular forms of neurodivergence from a lived experience perspective, I think it is vital to recognise that the neuroqueer movement does more than this. Academic work on neurodivergence can often amount to, if you’ll indulge the metaphor, looking at “experience” under various kinds of microscopes, looking closer and closer at the same old picture (often the one painted by the DSM). Neuroqueering– that active doing verb – can turn the inert and static microscope into a kaleidoscope. With each turn the picture is rearranged: diverging, queering. Neuroqueering is not just about seeing madness more clearly but about seeing the world with fresh mad eyes.

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. Autigender is not explicitly saying that “My gender is autism”– it’s not about saying you are a boy, girl, enby, autism, whatever. It’s about your relationship with your gender. I didn’t openly express myself in dress much—I was deathly afraid of being noticed and totally unsure about what I felt—but I would splash some color in. I opted for a pink tinted coating on a new pair of eyeglasses once. Kids at school gave me grief, but I liked them and came to wear them as a defiant badge and also a sort of shield. My father had the coating removed. 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 form of neurodivergence they share is one to which the neurotypical majority tends to respond with some degree of prejudice, misunderstanding, discrimination, and/or oppression (generally facilitated by classifying that form of neurodivergence as a medical pathology).

The Neurodiversity Movement is a social justice movement that seeks civil rights, equality, respect, and full societal inclusion for the neurodivergent. What It Doesn’t Mean:In other words, are there really more gay/trans/queer/ace autistic people, or do they just figure it out/come out of the closet more readily than non-autistic people? Just as it's possible to use the word 'neurodiversity' and be working within the pathology paradigm, I hope the author will now recognise that people can potentially construct phrases in a variety of ways and be working within a neurodiversity paradigm. 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* Regardless of which specifics resonate with different readers, my hope is that in some way or another the book will awaken in each and every reader an expanded sense of the possible. My hope is that the book will inspire readers to explore of the infinite realms of creative potential that lie beyond the walls of normativity. Too often high-profile queer activism relies on shaming people for understanding gender and language in anything other than a middle-class way. Take, for instance, the "transphobes don't understand how pronouns work" trope which rests on classist assumptions, positioning the trans activist as having the moral high ground through being educated or 'intelligent', and using grammar normatively.

The definitive, citable version of this essay, along with supplementary comments, can be found in my book Neuroqueer Heresies . So what does it mean to neuroqueer, as a verb? What are the various practices that fall within the definition of neuroqueering? 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. New paradigms often require a bit of new language, and this is certainly the case with the neurodiversity paradigm. I see many people – scholars, journalists, bloggers, internet commenters, and even people who identify as neurodiversity activists – get confused about the terminology around neurodiversity. Their misunderstanding and incorrect usage of certain terms often results in poor and clumsy communication of their message, and propagation of further confusion (including other confused people imitating their errors). At the very least, incorrect use of terminology can make a writer or speaker appear ignorant, or an unreliable source of information, in the eyes of those who do understand the meanings of the terms.The path toward a neurocosmopolitan perspective––on either an individual or collective scale––necessarily involves learning to recognize our internalized standards of neuronormativity as culturally constructed and culturally instilled, and then freeing our minds from the limits of those standards.