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by
Nick Walker
the idea that just as humanity is ethnically diverse and diverse in terms of gender and myriad other qualities, humanity is also neurocognitively diverse. Just as there are ethnic minority groups and gender minority groups, there are neurocognitive minority groups, and that’s what autistic people are.
A paradigm is a lens through which one views reality.
These dynamics include the dynamics of social power relations—the dynamics of social inequality, privilege, and oppression—as well as the dynamics by which diversity, when embraced, acts as a source of creative potential within a group or society.
The master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. To work within a system, to play by its rules, inevitably reinforces that system, whether or not that’s what you intend. Not only do the master’s tools never serve to dismantle the master’s house, but any time you try to use the master’s tools for anything, you somehow end up building another extension of that darned house.
The shift from the pathology paradigm to the neurodiversity paradigm calls for a radical shift in language, because the appropriate language for discussing medical problems is quite different from the appropriate language for discussing diversity.
In the context of human diversity (ethnic, cultural, sexual, neurological, or any other sort), to treat one particular group as the “normal” or default group inevitably serves to privilege that group and to marginalize those who don’t belong to that group.
The word normal, used to privilege one sort of human over others, is one of the master’s tools, but the word neurotypical is one of our tools—a
Once we’ve thrown away the concept of “normal,” neurotypicals are just members of a majority—not healthier or more “right” than the rest of us, just more common. And autistics are a minority group, no more intrinsically “disordered” than any ethnic minority.
All the frictions and failures of connection between the two groups, and all the difficulties autistics run into in neurotypical society, all get blamed on autism.
So it’s important to remember that mere adoption of terminology isn’t the same as actually making a meaningful shift in mindset.
the fact that it’s harder for people to understand each other when their respective modes of experience and cognition differ significantly, and under the pathology paradigm this mutual gap of understanding is blamed entirely on alleged autistic deficits rather than treated as a mutual communication challenge to be worked on reciprocally. Milton dubbed this double standard the Double Empathy Problem, and it’s a phenomenon that’s now widely recognized and discussed in the field of Critical Autism Studies. •
Cosmopolitanism is the open-minded embracing of human diversity.
Neurocosmopolitanism consists of approaching neurodiversity in the same spirit in which the cosmopolite approaches cultural diversity.
The neurocosmopolitan seeks to actively engage with and preserve human neurodiversity, and to honor, explore, and cultivate its creative potentials,
To view the bodyminds of neurominority members through the lens of pathology—e.g., to frame autism and other minority modes of neurocognitive functioning as “conditions,” or to rank the functioning of human bodyminds as “high” or “low” based on the degree to which they conform to some particular set of cultural norms of performance—is fundamentally incompatible with the neurocosmopolitan spirit
True neurocosmopolitanism, like true cosmopolitanism, extends beyond the mere acceptance and accommodation of the differences among us, to an active embracing of and engagement with those differences as potential sources of growth, enrichment, and creative synergy.
The true creative potentials of neurodiversity can be realized, within any given environment, only to the extent that people are empowered to participate in the ongoing collective co-creation and shaping of that environment while openly acting in ways that violate the constraints of neuronormative performance.
so that collective and collaborative visions of possible neurocosmopolitan futures can eventually emerge to provide a greater sense of direction for the work of the neurodiversity movement and the field of Neurodiversity Studies.
Part of the challenge of imagining a truly neurocosmopolitan future is that it means imagining not merely a future in which the neurodiversity movement has made substantial progress in its goals, but a future in which those goals may have been so well achieved as to render the movement obsolete.
I offer the following questions to spark reflection and imagination.
This tends to make the autistic individual’s subjective experience more intense and chaotic than that of non-autistic individuals:
While the number of individuals diagnosed as autistic has increased continually over the past few decades, evidence suggests that this increase in diagnosis is the result of increased public and professional awareness, rather than an actual increase in the prevalence of autism.
However, in the context of a society designed around the sensory, cognitive, developmental, and social needs of non-autistic individuals, autistic individuals are almost always disabled to some degree—sometimes quite obviously, and sometimes more subtly.
Ultimately, to describe autism as a disorder represents a value judgment rather than a scientific fact.
To non-autistics, autistic people almost always come across as socially “odd” in some way—sometimes very much so. Indeed, as already noted, it’s become a widespread error in the field of psychology to misconstrue autism as being primarily a set of “social and communication deficits.”
But because autistics are very much in the minority and hold less power in society, communication difficulties between an autistic and a non-autistic are always attributed to a deficit on the part of an autistic person. One rarely hears it pointed out that a non-autistic person suffers from an impaired ability to understand autistics. As the political scientist Karl Deutsch once noted, power is “the ability not to have to learn.”
Therein lies the key point, and the cause for hope and optimism: the social anxiety that afflicts so many autistics isn’t inherent to autism—it is, instead, a symptom of trauma. And trauma can be healed.
Among those researchers and professionals who recognize that it has value and purpose, stimming is most commonly understood as serving essential functions of self-regulation and integration—that
In addition to serving to regulate and integrate sensory, perceptual, cognitive, and emotional experience, stimming can also function as a way of exploring and relating to the sensory world, and as a means of accessing not only a wide range of cognitive and emotional capacities but also exceptional human capacities such as flow states or experiences of profound communion and ego transcendence.
One could therefore argue that everybody stims, and that autistics, because stimming is such an essential practice for the regulation and navigation of autistic sensory and cognitive experience, simply tend to stim more than non-autistics.
I would argue that in some way and at least to some small degree, an action must necessarily fall outside the bounds of neuronormative performance in order to qualify as stimming.
With all this in mind, I offer the following as a working definition: To stim is to engage in any action that falls outside the boundaries of the social performance of normativity, and that provides some form of sensory stimulation in order to facilitate, intentionally or otherwise, some particular cognitive or sensorimotor process, or access to some particular state or capacity of consciousness or sensorimotor experience.
the sort of people who identify as neuroqueer and engage in neuroqueering tend to be the sort of people who delight in subverting definitions, concepts, and authority.
A neuroqueer individual is any individual whose identity, selfhood, gender performance, and/or neurocognitive style have in some way been shaped by their engagement in practices of neuroqueering, regardless of what gender, sexual orientation, or style of neurocognitive functioning they may have been born with.
Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness;
defining the sort of work I wanted to do was far more interesting to me than defining myself.
Anyone trying to police other people’s self-identities is just another tedious cop, and a cop is pretty much the most un-queer, non-liberatory thing a person can be.
It doesn’t matter whether a person was born autistic, or born neurodivergent in any way. It doesn’t matter what their gender or sexual orientation is. If they engage in neuroqueering, and they want to call themselves neuroqueer, they’re welcome to, and it’s no one else’s business.
One’s gender, in other words, is first and foremost something that one does—and therein lies the possibility of liberation from the confines of normativity.
What I’m saying here is that we shouldn’t allow our conception of neurodiversity and its potentials to be constrained by such categories, just as we shouldn’t allow our conceptions of gender and sexuality to be constrained by the binaristic categories of male and female, or gay and straight.
In conceptualizing gender as being constructed through ongoing socially instilled performances which can be subverted and altered (i.e., queered), Queer Theory frames identity as a fluid byproduct of activity: gender and sexuality are first and foremost things that one does, rather than things that one is, and queer is a verb first and an adjective second.
One is neuroqueer not because one was born immutably neuroqueer, but because one acts in ways which queer neuronormativity
Neuroqueer is not a mere synonym for neurodivergent, or for neurodivergent identity combined with queer identity. Neuroqueer is active subversion of both neuronormativity and heteronormativity.
Neuroqueer is about recognizing the fundamentally entwined nature of cognition, gender, and embodiment, and also about treating cognition, gender, and embodiment as fluid and customizable, and as canvases for ongoing creative experimentation.
The term neuroqueer points to a horizon of creative possibility with which anyone can choose to engage.
This hybrid understanding is based in the premise that although gender roles and the rules of gender performance are socially constructed and instilled, each individual human does also have their own unique set of more-or-less-innate tendencies and potentials (tendencies and potentials which have nothing whatsoever to do with the shape of a person’s genitals or with so-called “biological sex”).
What I’m suggesting here is that although no one is born a straight cisgender heteronormative girl or woman, boy or man, some people are born with a collection of inner tendencies and potentials that are at least somewhat compatible with their local culture’s norms of heterosexual feminine or masculine gender performance—thus enabling them to readily internalize those gender norms, to live within the parameters of those norms, and to come to experience their own socially instilled normative gender performance as “natural.”
Like heteronormative performance, neuronormative performance is a better fit for some folks than for others.
Neurotypical people aren’t people who all share one distinct type of human brain, they’re people whose compliance with prevailing cultural standards of neuronormative performance gains them the privileges that come with being considered “normal” within the dominant culture. Neurotypicality is more a social phenomenon than a biological one.
From a neuroqueer perspective, this is excellent news; it means that no one is biologically doomed to a life of being normal.
