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In terms of scholarship, discourse, and praxis, there are two basic ways to approach the biopsychosocial phenomenon of neurodiversity. Sometime around 2010, I started referring to these two approaches as the pathology paradigm and the neurodiversity paradigm. 2
Neuroqueer, then, is the idea that individuals who do not to conform to neurotypical standards are neurologically queer, further queering their bodyminds. Queerness begets more queerness. Not everyone who is Neurodivergent neuroqueers, but everyone who neuroqueers is Neurodivergent. Some might question if one might be able to unconsciously neuroqueer, we will explore this further in another article. By being aware of your neurodivergent identity and your queer identity, and recognizing that they interact, you have successfully neuroqueered. Considering how your other identities, such as race, socioeconomic class, ethnicity, ect., interact with your neurodivergence and your queerness is also neuroqueering.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. Walker, N. (2015, May 2). Neuroqueer: An Introduction. Retrieved from https://neurocosmopolitanism.com/neuroqueer-an-introduction/ Truman, S. E. and Shannon, D. B. (May 2022). Cosmic Beavers: Queer counter-mythologies and the practice of research-creation. Association for Philosophy and Literature. Banff.
Dr. Dora M. Raymaker: You've been deeply involved in the neurodiversity movement and neurodiversity scholarship since the early days. Can you start with an overview of the concept of neurodiversity and the movement's origins, particularly for readers who might not be familiar with its genesis?
Autistic activists began to recognize that autistics were an oppressed minority group whose oppression in some ways followed similar patterns to the oppression of other minority groups. For example, researchers studying autistic people always started from the unquestioned assumption that autism was a medical pathology and that being autistic was inherently inferior to being nonautistic; this assumption biased and warped autism-related research in much the same way that sexist and racist assumptions have historically biased and warped so-called “scientific” discourses about women and people of color.
The pathology paradigm starts from the assumption that significant divergences from dominant sociocultural norms of cognition and embodiment represent some form of deficit, defect, or pathology. In other words, the pathology paradigm divides the spectrum of human cognitive/embodied performance into “normal” and “other than normal,” with “normal” implicitly privileged as the superior and desirable state. Two authors who stand out for me as being on the leading edge of the emerging field of neuroqueer speculative fiction are Dora M. Raymaker and Ada Hoffmann. Shannon, D. B. (2019). ‘What could be feminist about sound studies?’: (in)Audibility in young children’s soundwalking. Journal of Public Pedagogies. (4) (Open Access)Another term you use a lot is “neurocosmopolitan” or “neurocosmopolitanism.” Where does neuroqueer theory fit into a neurocosmopolitan world?
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