Neuroqueering Me Not

I’m a curious person, rigorous in my tasks, a critical thinker who loved theory from the first moment I picked up The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism. I read the work interwar Germans and 1960s French, digesting the lives of the marginalised, the outsiders, the divergents in prodigious ways. The renegotiation of space and identity in a world reemerging from war and empire ‘made sense’ at the time. I attended Hampshire College at a pivotal moment in the early 90s, an experimental liberal arts university located on a New England farm⁵Hampshire, and other liberal arts institutions I’ve been involved in are indirectly referenced in an essay fragment here. From an early age I found a home in academic settings – surrounded by other curious sorts dedicated to thinking differently in pursuit of new knowledge that extends in many directions, in and outside of the mind and body. I craved mentors who’d assist in finding the right navigation tools so I could navigate through the questions and curiosities raised as I stumble through life.

Feeling adrift in a highly personal, rhizomatic relationship to knowledge and its communication, I looked to academia for mentoring that would combine situating oneself in a specific community of other knowledge-seekers with nurturing independent curiosity.

I often find it hard to gain/benefit from mentoring available (if any is) when adjacent to folks who think more chronologically, have better short-term memories, and process language in traditionally linear ways. Everyone wants to be inclusive, but they look to us for how to achieve this. A bit of a challenge, really, when the point is to learn to speak each other’s language and not accommodate someone’s differences. I prefer to meet folx halfway over being given extra time, training, or editing to assess whether or not I’m learning at a similar level to my peers. I’m generally learning, but not always about what was intended. I not only observe, but physically experience connections that seem overlooked by most, a sense there are daily practices that are taken for granted which produce or understand of the world, and, probably felt most strongly, an observation that the social-emotional climate shapes and limits our ability to engage with (one) an/Other.

These connections and perspectives of neurodivergent folx are frequently celebrated for the ability to make abstract connections overlooked by more neurotypical mindsets. However, they aren’t often welcomed in many environments that aim to be inclusive – such as corporate business, commercial creative arts, social services, and the audience overseeing this project: academia.

A practice-led inquiry that returns critical theory to the body is not an easy project to do in an institutional setting, in this particular (geopolitical) time-space, let alone at the PhD level, which functions as a ‘test’ of producing legible, standardised research and knowledge exchange. Routes and P(l)aces sits outside and between disciplines to explore the gaps, overlaps, silences, and dialogue related to creative methods that challenge a priori forms of knowledge production. In other words, research that generates more questions than answers, research that prompts folx to follow their curiosity without the intention of conclusion, research that extends outside academic silos. We’re all on the same team on some level – the intent is to identify that common ground and go from there. Or maybe I’m overlooking something, I’d like to find out.

Mapping a world felt along an unknown path … commiting to that feltness even when logic dictates seemed like a good way of addressing conflicting narratives, nuance, and the uncomfortable. The aim at the onset was to unsettle what is assumed in order to clear a path overrun by theory and logic … while still valuing the fact that theory and logic make sense of it all. Seeing-hearing-feeling-knowing differently – a perspective felt in the body and externalised in written, visual, and audio forms. Nonetheless, zines and blogs, even with a CODA, as a piece of original contribution, feel like they sit right on the edge of what qualifies as scholarly, no matter how successful it is at engaging with theory, archival material, and producing comprehensive analysis. The provocative and antagonistic qualities of the zines and Anarchive, buried in a casual, playful, and intuitive style, leave sanctimony and ‘taking yourself seriously’ at the door. I play with subtlety, euphemism, circuitousness … even hyperbole – testing boundaries, challenging relationships, observing tensions and frictions produced by these stylistic acts.

Once neurodiversity, now without pathology – in an attempt to locate neurodiversity beyond the descriptions offered in SpLD frameworks, I noticed the distractions it produced. There are habits of culture, ways of communicating and investigating, and approaches that are rooted in specific ethnocultural traditions/practices … which sit entirely outside the possibility of pathology yet are insisted upon to better communication, relationships, and overall productivity of those who sit far outside normative and conventional ways of being in the world. There is not only a common language and way to make the points that get us through each day – rational, empirical, a priori, linear. There is a common belief that these notions of knowing and being – speaking, working, interacting – share a common logic, a root humaness, ethics, framework of belief underlying our ability to coexist and flourish. A sense of proportion that offers some order, a settled feeling for a world that is otherwise completely unsensible. Routes and P(l)aces attempt to de-escalate some of the feelings associated with these frictions, the chaos, that disorder, disgust, even terror felt when proportion and logic collapse.

Why FLINTA then? Neuodiversity, as pathology, offers a channel to adapt, accommodate and support folx who only need reasonable adjustments to participate as full members of society. Neurodivergent folx (ranging from autism and ADHD to dyslexia and dyspraxia) are often associated with a specifically male, able-bodied, heterosexual individual. This perspective has shifted significantly over the past decade through both scholarly research and popular culture via shows like Love on the Spectrum and Special. Nonetheless, the attention given to the intersections between gender, sexuality, and neurodiversity has predominantly mixed the quantitative with the qualitative, geared towards clinical and institutional settings like psychiatry, education, and social services. Routes and P(l)aces re/centres unconventional ways of being towards the FLINTA (inter)actor – and in doing so has discovered that what’s one person’s neurodivergence is another’s madness. The practice of reorienting the senses that are initially linked to neurdivergent and neuroqueer praxis eventually puts distance between the zeitgeist around the subjects today and the ongoing lived realities of lives represented here. When centred on releasing grips on conviction, suddenly that distance needing accomidation became (becomes?) irrelevant.

With that, I leave you with fragments from notes relating to some of the ideas that prompted this work:

=> a desire to devise a method (theatre devising, dance prompts, post-qualitative methods, research-creation, practice-led, etc) that is legible in multiple disciplines.

=> Centering on neuroqueer experience and voices: You need neurodivergent folks involved in testing and vetting methods that align with social repair politics and/or transformational outcomes. If the research methods and procedures exclude over 10% of the population, then one should rethink the metrics, claiming that the method is inclusive or transformational.

=> Both queer and neurodivergent studies frequently engage with sense, sense perception, and affect as a topic. This includes sensory anthropology, embodied research practices, and post-qualitative social science disciplines. Each highlights the overarching, almost universal, benefit of working in ways that prioritize multisensory learning, disrupting a priori knowledge, and creating more questions than answers without acknowledging these methods being at home with many neurodivergent communication and learning patterns. Let’s share these overlaps.

=> The ontology of ‘disorder’, how it measures up to the mental-emotional connection between

=> Broader continuum versus spectrum -> biodiversity/neurodiversity as emergent and necessary for survival.

Below is a brief set of references that launched (and brought a close to) neuroqueer study as praxis for FLINTA ways of knowing and being.