NeuroQueer: A Neurodivergent Guide to Love, Sex, and Everything in Between

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Truman, S. E. and Shannon, D. B. (August 2020). Speculative Songwriting and Queer Futurities. European Congress of Educational Research (ECER). Glasgow, Scotland. [Conference cancelled] PI: Prof Cathy Burnett, Sheffield Hallam University; with Dr Gil Adams, SHU; Prof Julia Gillen, Lancaser; Dr Terrie-Lynn Thompson, Stirling. So one crucial first step is for all of us to engage our creativity and awaken our sense of the possible, and start generating individual and collective visions of neurocosmopolitan futures that inspire us. Truman, S. E. and Shannon, D. B. (April 2021). Counter-archives of feeling: In-school speculations on queer pasts and anticolonial futures. American Education Research Association (AERA). Virtual conference.

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. A lot of work on neurodiversity has been strongly informed by the lens of disability studies. This work is necessary and important, but I think some people fall into the trap of thinking that the disability studies lens is the only useful way to think about neurodiversity.National Professional Qualification of Middle Leadership, Institute of Education (UCL), 2016 (part-time). You talk of the embodied mind or “bodymind” frequently in your book, rather than “mind” or “neurology.” Where does your understanding of the bodymind fit into Neuroqueer Theory? In recent years a new paradigm has begun to emerge, which I refer to as the neurodiversity paradigm. The term neurodiversity , coined in the 1990s, refers to the diversity of human minds—the variations in neurocognitive functioning that manifest within the human species. Within the neurodiversity paradigm, neurodiversity is understood to be a form of human diversity that is subject to social dynamics—including the dynamics of oppression and systemic social power inequalities—similar to those dynamics that commonly occur around other forms of human diversity such as racial diversity or diversity of gender and sexual orientation.

My 15-year-old identified as LGBTQ and then gender diverse from age 12. In the past 12 months, they now have ADHD and autism diagnoses. Being neurodivergent and LGBTQ means that they are even less understood by their peers. My amazing kid has always been different — quirky, creative, out of the box. They show up in life as one amazing human, even as they continue to struggle to have people understand them.” — An ADDitude Reader Truman, S. E. and Shannon, D. B. (August 2018). Queer sonic cultures: An affective walking-composing project. Capacious: Affective Inquiry/Making Space. Lancaster, Pennsylvania.

Neuroqueer

This project reviewed extant literature related to the entanglement of children’s language with place.

A lot of people hear neuro and they think, brain. But the prefix neuro doesn't mean brain, it means nerve. The neuro in neurodiversity is most usefully understood as a convenient shorthand for the functionality of the whole bodymind and the way the nervous system weaves together cognition and embodiment. So neurodiversity refers to the diversity among minds, or among bodyminds.The conceptualization of neurodiversity as diversity among bodyminds has been central to neuroqueer theory from the start. Being assigned female at birth while having a boy brain led to 25+ years of my ADHD symptoms presenting more like a typical boy’s. However, because I am female, I was just thought to be a tomboy or rebel and, as a result, nobody ever noticed my struggles trying to keep up with everybody else. I only got diagnosed when I went to grad school in the U.S. and my higher-than-average IQ couldn’t manage school, a part-time job, and taking care of myself.” — An ADDitude Reader Neurodiversity is not a political or social activist movement. That’s the Neurodiversity Movement (see below), not neurodiversity itself. 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. Shannon, D. B. (2021). What do ‘propositions’ do for research-creation? Truth and modality in Whitehead and Wittgenstein. Matter: Journal of New Materialist Research. 2(2) (Open Access)