Neuroqueer

Whether discussed in clinical journals or in media accounts, ABA purports to change neural pathways, rewire neuroqueer brains, and ford synapses.

Neuroqueer perspectives challenge typical understandings of identity categories through disidentification processes. A neuroqueer project not only questions typical conceptions of gender but also pivots away from normative gender categories altogether.

My conceptualization of neuroqueer technoscience is also strongly influenced by 3 my own experiences as a multiply neurodivergent queer femme.

Neuroqueer is a queer/crip response to normative discussions about gender, sexuality, and disability as pathology.

Autistic rhetoric scholar Melanie Yergeau theorizes neuroqueer as a kind of “asocially perverse” motioning.

For a primer on the issue of neuroqueer and its roots in multiple discourse fields from queer aversion therapy to antiautistic hate speech, see Yergeau 2018.

In this regard, the potential of a prosthetic, specialized environment is the always-now —any change could result in neuroqueers backsliding into neuroqueerity.

For those of us who inhabit the spaces between the cracks, the neuroqueers who wander outside a prescribed notion of “cognitive normalcy,” we know things are not that simple.