Many of the stereotypes I have to contend with as a person with ADHD are identical to those I have to contend with as a bisexual woman‚ namely that I’m ‘flighty’ and ‘afraid of commitment.’ I believe the true antidote to these unkind stereotypes is education, education, and more education. Within LGBT spaces, I’d love to see greater consideration given to those of us with sensory processing and integration issues.” — An ADDitude Reader Then there's neuroqueer, a term originally developed by M. Remi Yergeau, Athena Lynn Michaels-Dillon, and myself. 30 In the field of Queer Theory, gender is understood as an embodied performance: we're trained from infancy to perform and embody certain narrow and specific heteronormative gender roles. When we speak of queering gender (or of being queer), we're referring to actively subverting, disrupting, and deviating from the performance of heteronormative gender roles. 31 In terms of pitfalls to be guarded against, I'd say the big one these days is the far-too-common trend toward viewing neurodiversity through a lens of neuroessentialism, in which all people are seen as divided into rigidly defined, innate, and largely immutable categories or “neurotypes”—that is, each person is categorized as fitting permanently into the box of “neurotypical,” or the box of “autistic,” or the box of “ADHD,” or what-have-you, depending on what “type of brain” they were born with. This sort of essentialism is n't much different from the gender essentialism that seeks to permanently assign each person to the narrow category of either “male” or “female” depending on the shape of the genitalia they're born with. Shannon, D.B. (2023) ' ‘Trajectories matter’: affect, neuroqueerness and music research-creation in an early childhood classroom.' Qualitative Inquiry, 29(1) pp. 200-211. According to Walker, because I am neurodivergent and writing this article on my interaction with the term, I am practicing neuroqueering. If you’re an artist and create a work that brings awareness to the interaction of neurodivergence and gender and/or sexuality then you have neuroqueered. If you are neurodivergent and decide to represent your gender identity in an intentionally-queer way, as to subvert hegemonic ideas of gender performance, then you have neuroqueered.

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)

NeuroQueer.org is an online platform community, a place to get queer-competent ADHD Coaching and/or Autism support from peers and coaches. We can build accomodations for the obstacles and challenges of being neurodivergent, and embrace the benefits simultaneously. We don't have to do it alone. Speaking of creativity, you talk of neuroqueer speculative fiction in the book. What are some of the best examples of well done literature in this genre that you would recommend? It’s worth noting, by the way, that in recent years the term bodymind has been showing up with increasing frequency in the field of disability studies. As you can probably guess, I see this as an excellent development. But a lot of people who’ve been using and/or appreciating the term in disability studies are unaware that it originates in the field of somatic psychology. Spoon Knife also accepts short memoir pieces and poetry, so each volume offers the reader quite the diversity of experiences. As far as neuroqueer speculative fiction goes, Alyssa Gonzalez and Verity Reynolds are two more authors whose contributions to multiple volumes of Spoon Knife are excellent examples of the genre. The emergence and popularisation of Neuroqueer theory in the contemporary disability rights discourse and Autistic rights movement represents a significant step forward. Not only does it encourage pride in ones true self, but it emancipates the Neurologically Queer from the normative attitudes that society so often indoctrinates us into. For many people this term may be new, so in this article we will explore it’s origins and meaning.

When I found the term neuroqueer it seemed as though I had finally found a way of accessing that part of myself that wanted to call forth the notions of my own gender and sexuality. Shannon, D. B., and Truman, S. E. (January 2024). Cosmic Beavers: Queer counter-mythologies and the practice of research-creation. European Congress of Qualitative Inquiry (ECQI). Helsinki, Finland. A neurocosmopolitan individual accepts and welcomes neurocognitive differences in experience, communication, and embodiment in the same sort of enlightened way that a cosmopolitan individual accepts and welcomes cultural differences in dining habits. In a future society that's truly embraced the neurodiversity paradigm, neurocosmopolitanism would be the prevailing attitude toward neurocognitive differences among humans.Mind is an embodied phenomenon. The mind is encoded in the brain as ever-changing webs of neural connectivity. The brain is part of the body, interconnected with the rest of the body by a vast network of nerves. The activity of the mind and body creates changes in the brain; changes in the brain affect both mind and embodiment. Mind, brain, and embodiment are intricately entwined in a single complex system. We're not minds riding around in bodies, we're bodyminds. 4 Truman, S. E. and Shannon, D. B. (August 2018). Queer sonic cultures: An affective walking-composing project. Capacious: Affective Inquiry/Making Space. Lancaster, Pennsylvania. Nope. Nope nope nope. There’s no such thing as a “form of neurodiversity.” Autism and dyslexia are forms of neurodivergence. NEURODIVERSITY PARADIGM What It Means:

The differences between autistic bodyminds and nonautistic bodyminds are very real, and yet at the same time autism is a culturally constructed category that won't necessarily last forever or be culturally relevant forever. A hundred years ago, in the days of Sigmund Freud, physicians and psychologists never imagined that the “illness” they referred to as “hysteria” was a cultural construct that would someday be regarded as a laughably archaic bit of sexist pseudoscience. 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. Large organizations and institutions have a lot of inertia, so we're not seeing the influence of the neurodiversity paradigm on policy and practice on any large scale yet. I've seen exciting developments on a smaller scale, though, at a more grassroots level of praxis—for example, individual psychotherapists and other professionals, or small organizations, making the shift to the neurodiversity paradigm. And again, there 's that appropriation issue; neurodiversity is a popular buzzword in the tech industry these days, but it usually just means, “How can we more effectively exploit the labor of the autistics who are good at software development?” There's this brilliant sci-fi novel called Hoshi and the Red City Circuit 20 that explores where that sort of thing can lead.Neuroqueering is ultimately an act of resistance. For writers like Enger and Yergeau, the questions and critiques formed by the LGBTQ+ movement and queer theory can help facilitate the emergence of a new, self-defined rhetoric of autism. Questions for you: Really? So human brains and minds don’t differ from one another? There’s an awful lot of scientific evidence that shows quite plainly that there’s considerable variation among human brains. And if we all thought alike, the world would be a very different place indeed. The person who wrote this sentence was probably trying to object to the neurodiversity paradigm and/or the positions of the Neurodiversity Movement, and has ended up sounding rather silly as a result of failing to distinguish between these things and the phenomenon of neurodiversity itself.

The two paradigms—the pathology paradigm and the neurodiversity paradigm—are as fundamentally incompatible as, say, homophobia and the gay rights movement, or misogyny and feminism. In terms of discourse, research, and policy, the pathology paradigm asks, “What do we do about the problem of these people not being normal,” whereas the neurodiversity paradigm asks, “What do we do about the problem of these people being oppressed, marginalized, and/or poorly served and poorly accommodated by the prevailing culture?” 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. What are your thoughts on using queer theory as a framework for understanding the neurodivergent movement and many autistic people’s relationship with gender, self-perception, and sexuality? This writer is actually trying to talk about either the neurodiversity paradigm or the Neurodiversity Movement. Neurodiversity, as a biological characteristic of the species, can’t “claim” anything, any more than variations in human skin pigmentation can “claim” something.Neurodiversity is not a political or social activist movement. That’s the Neurodiversity Movement (see below), not neurodiversity itself. Shannon, D.B., Truman, S.E. (2020) 'Problematizing Sound Methods Through Music Research-Creation: Oblique Curiosities.' International Journal of Qualitative Methods, 19 Another crucial step is to produce more and more literature, art, educational material, and entertainment that decenters the neurotypical perspective and the neurotypical gaze––in other words, work which not only is grounded in non-neuronormative perspectives, but also refuses to assume that the default reader or viewer is neurotypical. Thank you for reading ADDitude. To support our mission of providing ADHD education and support, please consider subscribing. Your readership and support help make our content and outreach possible. Thank you. Save Neurodiversity is the diversity of human minds, the infinite variation in neurocognitive functioning within our species. What It Doesn’t Mean: