Lifelines: a neuroqueer politics of non-arrival in an undergraduate disability studies classroom

Abstract

Fantasies of control, order, efficiency, and “a relatively unilinear notion of historical progress” are enmeshed in the collective imagination of industrialized societies in the Global North. These same ideals uphold settler white supremacy, cisheteropatriarchy, neo-colonialism, anti-Black racism, genocide, ecoism, land theft, and mass incarceration. The current global predicament shows that non-normative lives and alternative ways of living, especially those deemed unproductive to the free market economic system are either disposed of as excess or rebranded and repurposed through the tactical use of exceptionalism (and necropolitics). In this paper, I address and challenge epistemic, cognitive, and material injustice along with mindless consumerism, especially the mindless consumption of knowledge received and reproduced uncritically about bodymind "excess". More specifically, I actively and deliberately complicate fixed and constant expectations and interventions targeting subjects and subjectivities formed around dominant discourses and images of Autism in the USA’s popular imagination.

Keywords:

• Autism
• phenomenology
• liberatory education
• plural feminism
• neuroqueer methodology

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes

1 Neuroqueer/ing – a subversive concept/practice – simultaneously and independently coined by several autistic scholars (the exact year is unknown, although it started circulating publicly around 2014), amongthem: Ibby (Elizabeth) J. Grace, Remi Yergeau, Athena Lynn Michaels-Dillon, and Nick Walker (2021) (see https://neuroqueer.com/neuroqueer-an-introduction/). Neuroqueer encompasses different meanings anddifferent uses beyond specific viewpoints about gender and sexuality – including principles andapproaches to life and lived experience, embodiment, neurocognitive expression, phenomenology, socio-spatial-temporal orientation, method/methodology, onto-epistemology, bioethics, etc. It is also used as a noun – see: neuroquerness.

2 See Neil Marcus (2012) – “Disability is an Ingenious Way to Live.”

3 Women, non-binary and trans people, and their embodiment are all marginalized under patriarchy, and as such share many common experiences and resistances. There are also crucial differences, and non-binary and trans embodiment is a crucial subject of study, especially as it relates to the topics discussed in this paper, pedagogy, lived experience, and arrival. It is, however, beyond the scope of this paper, which focuses on my embodiment and lived experience as a cisgender woman.

4 See also Wilkerson (2002), Hall (2011), Kafer (2013), and Ben-Moshe et al. (2014).

5 Authors like Yergeau (2018), Broderick (2011), Milton (2012), Hacking (2009), Manning (2012, 2016), Orsini (2012), Scuro (2017), Broderick and Roscigno (2021), Brown (2017), Rodas (2018), and McGuire (2016) among many others have pushed the envelope of autism-related research in various arenas: rhetoric, educational research, critical theory, and world-systems analysis, law and policy analysis, curriculum studies, bioethics, activism, philosophy, cultural studies, art, English and literature. In their various works, the authors challenge the idea of a ‘common sense’ reality of autism rooted in medical pathology.

6 See Deleuze (2004).

7 See also Frith (2003).

8 See Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM–5) (APA, 2017).

9 It is important to note here that although “high” and “low” are descriptors associated with varying degrees of human functioning – like those of the spectrum, although under different guises – those varying degrees are arbitrarily determined based on ideologies that dictate what it means to function normally within the Western-centric, heteropatriarchal, able-bodied, mid-upper-class, protestant worldview. In other words, measures of level functioning such as high and low do not assess how someone functions in a certain context vs. another or when exposed to different forms of stimuli. They are however effective in indiscriminately separating people who are more likely to approximate normativity (McGuire, 2016; Savarese, 2018) from those who are not through the production of docility (Foucault & Foucault, 2012): abusive interventions, therapies, medications, etc.

10 By modern ideals of success, I mean personal values modeled on a spirit of competition, rather than collaboration, and socio-economic upward mobility, rather than holistic approaches to a socially committed citizenry

11 See Evgeny Morozov (2013).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Sara M. Acevedo

Sara M. Acevedo is an Assistant Professor of Disability Studies, in the Department of Educational Psychology at Miami University in Oxford, OHio, USA.