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

by Nick Walker

That’s a true paradigm shift: a shift in our fundamental assumptions; a radical shift in perspective that requires us to redefine our terms, recalibrate our language, rephrase our questions, reinterpret our data, and completely rethink our basic concepts and approaches.

The pathology paradigm ultimately boils down to just two fundamental assumptions: There is one “right,” “normal,” or “healthy” way for human brains and human minds to be configured and to function (or one relatively narrow “normal” range into which the configuration and functioning of human brains and minds ought to fall). If your neurological configuration and functioning (and, as a result, your ways of thinking and behaving) diverge substantially from the dominant standard of “normal,” then there is Something Wrong With You.

At an international feminist conference in 1979, the poet Audre Lorde delivered a speech entitled “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House.” In that speech, Lorde, a Black lesbian from a working-class immigrant family, castigated her almost entirely white and affluent audience for remaining rooted in, and continuing to propagate, the fundamental dynamics of the patriarchy: hierarchy, exclusion, racism, classism, homophobia, obliviousness to privilege, failure to embrace diversity. Lorde recognized sexism as being part of a broader, deeply-rooted paradigm that dealt with all forms of difference by establishing hierarchies of dominance, and she saw that genuine, widespread liberation was impossible as long as feminists continued to operate within this paradigm.

“What does it mean,” Lorde said, “when the tools of a racist patriarchy are used to examine the fruits of that same patriarchy? It means that only the most narrow perimeters of change are possible and allowable. […] For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change.”

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 f...

So if we use phrases like “person with autism,” or “she has autism,” or “families affected by autism,” we’re using the language of the pathology paradigm—language that implicitly accepts and reinforces the assumption that autism is intrinsically a problem, a Something-Wrong-With-You. In the language of the neurodiversity paradigm, on the other hand, we speak of neurodiversity in the same way we would speak of ethnic or sexual diversity, and we speak of autistics in the same way we would speak of any other social minority group: I am autistic. I am an autistic. I am an autistic person. There are autistic people in my family. These linguistic distinctions might seem trivial, but our language plays a key role in shaping our thoughts, our perceptions, our cultures, and our realities. In the long run, the sort of language that’s used to talk about autistics has enormous influence on how society treats us, and on the messages we internalize about ourselves.

If you reject the fundamental premises of the pathology paradigm, and accept the premises of the neurodiversity paradigm, then it turns out that you don’t have a disorder after all. And it turns out that maybe you function exactly as you ought to function, and that you just live in a society that isn’t yet sufficiently enlightened to effectively accommodate and integrate people who function like you. And that maybe the troubles in your life have not been the result of any inherent wrongness in you. And that your true potential is unknown and is yours to explore. And that maybe you are, in fact, a thing of beauty.

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.

The neurodiversity paradigm is a specific perspective on neurodiversity—a perspective or approach that boils down to these fundamental principles: Neurodiversity is a natural and valuable form of human diversity. The idea that there is one “normal” or “healthy” type of brain or mind, or one “right” style of neurocognitive functioning, is a culturally constructed fiction, no more valid (and no more conducive to a healthy society or to the overall well-being of humanity) than the idea that there is one “normal” or “right” ethnicity, gender, or culture. 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.

Neurodivergence (the state of being neurodivergent) can be largely or entirely genetic and innate, or it can be largely or entirely produced by brain-altering experience, or some combination of the two. Autism and dyslexia are examples of innate forms of neurodivergence, while alterations in brain functioning caused by such things as trauma, long-term meditation practice, or heavy usage of psychedelic drugs are examples of forms of neurodivergence produced through experience.

Let’s start with a relatively simple example to help make the social model of disability more clear: if you can’t walk, that’s what’s known as a mobility impairment. Are you disabled? Yes, but here’s the crucial piece that the social model highlights: the precise degree to which you’re disabled depends on how well your access needs are accommodated.

In the context of the prevailing social milieu, this person is going to be disabled, because their autistic style of embodiment and communication will result in social rejection, discrimination, misunderstanding, disrespect, exclusion, and abuse by the majority of non-autistic people they encounter. A multitude of doors will be closed to them; they’ll have undue difficulty getting or keeping jobs (or other useful things, like apartments); their performance at school and work will be seriously impacted by the hostility of peers and authority figures; they’ll have a hard time getting any assistance they need from others (including those whose jobs are supposed to involve protecting people from abuse and discrimination). All this adds up to some pretty significant disablement.

Some people, working from incomplete and inaccurate understandings of the neurodiversity paradigm, somehow arrive at the false impression that the neurodiversity paradigm implies that autistic people aren’t disabled. This is a gross misinterpretation.

if you ask me whether autism is a disability, I’ll say no, but if you ask me whether autistic people are disabled, I’ll say yes. To people who don’t understand the distinction between the medical model of disability and the social model of disability, “autism is a disability” and “autistic people are disabled” might seem like they mean the same thing. But the implications of these two phrases are actually quite different. “Autism is a disability” essentially means “autism is a pathology or deficit,” whereas “autistic people are disabled” essentially means “autistic people’s needs are not properly accommodated by the world around them in a way that enables their societal participation.”

When cross-cultural interactions are navigated with in a cosmopolitan spirit, rather than with provincial prejudices or colonialist agendas of domination, it fosters mutually beneficial cultural exchanges and the creative hybridizations and synergies which have in myriad ways shaped music, art, language, literature, spirituality, philosophy, aesthetics, science, and technology throughout history and into the present day. How much more of what the philosopher Edgar Morin calls “the genius of diversity” might be awakened in a society that was not only truly cosmopolitan in its engagement with cultural diversity, but also truly neurocosmopolitan in its engagement with neurodiversity? What new confluences, creative hybridizations, and transformative synergies might emerge, on every scale in every realm of society and culture, and what might the results look like? We’re a long ways from a neurocosmopolitan society, but it’s a goal worth working toward and a vision that serves to guide and inspire much of my work. Perhaps it will guide and inspire you as well. And while we work toward this perhaps distant goal, each one of us can cultivate the neurocosmopolitan spirit in our own minds and in our own lives, right here and right now.

“Our essential task in life is to awaken to the way that the eternal would speak through us, to learn to live out our intended personality and the inner weirdness that makes us a unique torchbearer of the flame of life.” Michael Meade

Where researchers mired in the pathology paradigm might have framed social anxiety as a “symptom” of autism or a “comorbid condition” (thus implicitly framing autism as a pathological “condition”), we explicitly acknowledged that social anxiety in the autistic population was a symptom of the extensive social trauma neurotypical society inflicts upon autistics from childhood—in other words, that what we sought to treat was a symptom not of autism but of traumatic oppression.

What Is Autism? Autism is a genetically-based human neurological variant. The complex set of interrelated characteristics that distinguish autistic neurology from non-autistic neurology is not yet fully understood, but current evidence indicates that the central distinction is that autistic brains are characterized by particularly high levels of synaptic connectivity and responsiveness. This tends to make the autistic individual’s subjective experience more intense and chaotic than that of non-autistic individuals: on both the sensorimotor and cognitive levels, the autistic mind tends to register more information, and the impact of each bit of information tends to be both stronger and less predictable. Autism is a developmental phenomenon, meaning that it begins in utero and has a pervasive influence on development, on multiple levels, throughout the lifespan. Autism produces distinctive, atypical ways of thinking, moving, interaction, and sensory and cognitive processing. One analogy that has often been made is that autistic individuals have a different neurological “operating system” than non-autistic individuals.

The crucial thing to understand is that social anxiety is not intrinsic to autism. Intense and atypical sensory experiences, and atypical styles of physical movement, are innate to autistic neurocognitive processing; if one is autistic, such experiences are going to be part of one’s reality to some degree. But that’s not necessarily the case with social anxiety. 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.” A more accurate and less biased way of looking at it is that the communication difficulties between autistics and non-autistics run both ways: autistics have trouble understanding and communicating with non-autistics, and non-autistics have trouble understanding and communicating with autistics. This makes perfect sense: of course it’s challenging to understand someone whose mind works very differently from one’s own.

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.

Person-first language is rooted in autistiphobia and anti-autistic bigotry, and its use is widely recognized by most of the autistic community as being a reliable indicator of autistiphobic attitudes. The reason that person-first language is so prevalent in our society’s discourses on autism is that those discourses have always been dominated by the voices and viewpoints of autistiphobic bigots. From the 1930s through the present day, the vast majority of the non-autistic people who’ve written about autism or done any sort of autism-related work have held deeply ingrained autistiphobic attitudes. The language used in their work reflects those attitudes. The use of person-first language when talking about autistic people is so prevalent and so widely accepted that most non-autistic folks don’t think twice about it and don’t even recognize it as the language of bigotry and stigma. The autistiphobic bigotry inherent in person-first language doesn’t become obvious until you listen to how it sounds when you use that same sort of language to talk about members of other historically oppressed and marginalized groups. Here, give it a try: People with homosexuality? Children who have Jewishness? Adults experiencing femaleness? Ooh, how about individuals living with Blackness? Are you comfortable with those phrases? If you read an article in which the author consistently referred to gay people as people with homosexuality, adults who have homosexuality, and individuals living with h...

The infinite possible varieties of stimming include, but are certainly not limited to: proprioceptive or kinesthetic (e.g., rocking, pacing, waving or flapping one’s hands, seeking physical pressure or impact); tactile (e.g., touching objects and surfaces with appealing textures, stroking one’s own skin); vestibular (e.g., spinning or swinging); visual (e.g., gazing at running water or rising smoke); auditory (e.g., listening to running water or loud music); olfactory or gustatory (e.g., sniffing or tasting things); verbal (e.g., repetition of particular words or phrases); any combination of the above (e.g., drumming, which combines the kinesthetic, the tactile, and the auditory).

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.

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.

Golden Rule of Neurodiversity: Respect the bodily, sensory, and cognitive needs of others as you would want your own to be respected, whether or not you understand the reasons for those needs.

we can understand “check your privilege” to mean, at least in part, “Learn! Be quiet, pay attention, and learn. Learn, even though the learning process, and the level of profound humility it requires, is going to be uncomfortable. Learn even though, because of your privilege, this sort of learning and humility is a discomfort that you have the luxury of being able to avoid—a luxury that we didn’t have, when we had to learn your ways. Learn even though you don’t have to.”

Applied Behavior Analysis (ABA), an abusive and trauma-inducing form of conversion “therapy” aimed at forcing neurodivergent children into compliance with normative performance, seeks among other things to coerce its young victims into suppressing their capacity to stim. Perpetrators of ABA often focus a great deal—creepily and sometimes downright obsessively—on control of their victims’ hands, and on the suppression of hand-related stimming in particular. The use of the command “Quiet hands!” by ABA practitioners in this context has led to the adoption of the phrase “loud hands” as one of the slogans of autistic liberation