Reclaiming Neuroqueer Bodies, Knowledges and Futures
illustration by Lynne Zakhour
In June 2025, I attended the Critical Neurodiversity Studies conference (CNS) at the Institute for Medical Humanities, Durham University. Co-hosted by the Institute’s Measurement Lab (which “examines the social, cultural, political and historical forces that shape the meaning and function of measurement in medicine, health and health sciences”) and the Neurodivergent Humanities Network (which offers “a safe and generative space” for neurodivergent scholars to find collaboration and peer support) this was the first large scale international conference to focus on the ‘critical turn’ in neurodiversity theory. Featuring keynotes, panels, and roundtables delivered by people from across the globe who think with neurodivergence – academically, creatively, personally – the conference was overflowing with resonance for our project, as well as for me personally and professionally. In this blog I will highlight a few of those moments of convergence across themes of method/ologies, justice, and speculative worlding with some hopeful reflections on the reclamation of bodies, knowledges, and futures.
Doing neuroqueer method/ologies: reclaiming pathologised ways of knowing
Our project, Doing Disability Futures, is specifically oriented towards ways of doing (working/living, practices, methods, and methodologies). We explore what arts-based and speculative approaches can do to imagine and help manifest futures where disability justice and liberation can flourish. This chimes with how CNS organisers Louise Creechan and Robert Chapman described their event, which they hoped would “help clarify critical neurodiversity studies as a departure from both first wave neurodiversity studies and especially the neurodiversity-lite paradigm […] primarily through arts, humanities, and social sciences approaches, grounded in the various traditions of critical theory and aimed at liberatory praxis rather than knowledge production alone.” We are in a time when any academic work outside STEM subjects is framed as both frivolous and radical, when universities are closing humanities-focused departments and discourse around whether we “need” literature and arts education anymore is circulating. Against that backdrop, it was encouraging to see the role literary and arts-based approaches were given in this conference focused on the production of innovative theory and praxis. And to see these creative, literary theories and practices used as liberatory tools for disability justice.
The neuroqueer tenet of, as Nick Walker put it, “reclaiming one’s capacity to give more full expression to one’s uniquely weird potentials and inclinations” was on full display across CNS. (Walker, 2021, 156) There were several papers that foregrounded the embodied and affective value and meaning of pathologised behaviours, for example reframing stimming in resistance to the ableist mandates of “quiet hands” and violent practices like ABA. Chris Bailey spoke of escaping the post-affect society (“a society that suppresses individuals’ internal drives in favour of external conditions”) by “feeling with theory” while Aby Watson shared her neuroqueer choreography which “seeks to disorder the dance space” via what she calls “stimprovisation”. Lloyd Meadhbh Houston presented a playful and expansive paper re-thinking neurotypical framings of autistic people as “creepy”. Neuroqueering this creepiness and noting that one feature often cited is a tendency to stand “too close”, Houston suggests the possibility of “too close reading” as a literary method.
Houston’s paper in particular really resonated with work I have been doing with the Mad Feeling Collective, an interdisciplinary research collective that brings lived experience and affect-led approaches to explorations of madness on TV. We have been engaged in our own kind of “too close reading” that works with the mad tendency to “read too much into things” in ways that might disrupt the line between the real and imagined – a contested and shifting line that is also integral to the kind of futuring that DDF is interested in. I’ve written elsewhere about the need for mad and neurodivergent ways of thinking, feeling, and knowing to be taken seriously as not solely something that tells us about the topic of disability but something that can expand existing knowledge traditions like philosophy by drawing on our “uniquely weird potentials and inclinations”.
One of the keynote talks was given by Merri Lisa Johnson, which I had the pleasure of chairing. I have known Lisa for a long time and she and I, as scholars who claim our borderline personality disorder diagnoses (albeit with critical distance), have a penchant for re-claiming the maligned borderlines of pop culture. In her keynote, Lisa engaged in what she called a “cripistemology of other-womanhood”, engaging with the infamous 1990s thriller film Fatal Attraction “not as part of an archive or a canon, but rather as a maker space, where I can play with its content in all its bombastic abruptness, its weird flirtations and its flirtations with weirdness to make something new.” Lisa’s work on BPD has called for a neuroqueer feminist approach to the controversial topic, one that leans into rather than attempting to negate or downplay stigmatised and pathologised traits like dysregulated emotions. Lisa and I talked about seeing the borderline as a hopeful figure, sharing that we both felt Fatal Attraction’s Alex Forrest had an optimistic, hopeful, and romantic spirit that was often overlooked. Donna Haraway’s “staying with the trouble”, Lauren Berlant’s “cruel optimism”, and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick’s “paranoid reading”, some of the most cited texts in queer/feminist theory, all highlight the risky nature of attachments and investments – and the things people will do to avoid the dangers of caring, trusting or loving too much. In our neuroqueer feminist embracing of this borderline hopefulness, and in our shared love for reparative readings of problematic and pathologised texts, we wondered what it might do to lean into that hopefulness, to think with it. The concept of “futures”, of course, is at the centre of the DDF project. And this tendency to hopefulness is something that might typically be considered naïve, unserious, not politically useful. And I don’t know if it is, but here in the messy safety of a blog, where I don’t have to make any concrete claims, I want to acknowledge how it felt to affirm these pathologised traits in community with folks who share them.
Doing neuroqueer justice: decolonial perspectives
A core aspect of DDF has been thinking about how historical and ongoing injustices like colonialism and eugenics shape our current world and the futures that are (imagined) possible. These issues were ever-present in the talks at CNS, not only in the celebration of and critical engagement with pathologised traits and behaviours, but in an acknowledgement of and resistance against the “neurodiversity-lite” paradigm that favours white Western cis middle-class autistic men with low support needs, while those outside this narrow category are overlooked. Though one conference cannot single-handedly fix this issue, the organisers did commit to making participation more accessible to those with cutting edge ideas in this emerging field who might be otherwise unable to attend. They offered fellowships “to support people participating at the forefront of critical neurodiversity studies research who are facing barriers engaging with the academic system”, including two specifically allocated for Black Neurodiverse scholars and five for scholars from Lower- and Middle-Income countries. This commitment to providing resources goes beyond the usual lip service to these barriers often seen in academia and it made it possible for voices to be heard that are not usually at the table.
Natasha Downs’ paper on exploring the shared aims of “maddened and critical-neurodiverse” literary approaches called for a “Mad[]Neurodiverse” approach, drawing on mad studies and neurodiversity simultaneously to see what unique insights this might produce. (Downs cites Smilges and Greenberg for her use of square brackets here, in a similar vein to Trans[]crip Theory). This was a thread that ran through the whole conference, and I heard many attendees note the fact that they more easily declare their autism or ADHD diagnoses than their (for example) BPD or OCD ones. Despite knowing the statistics of how common a BPD diagnosis is, I was still surprised when these murmured disclosures happened multiple times a day at CNS, because in my everyday professional life I have almost never interacted with another academic who openly claims their BPD the way I do (Merri Lisa Johnson, of course, being the shining exception to this). This kind of stigma impacts clinical practice too, of course, and intersects with factors like class and race. I felt this keenly during Cassandra Lovelock’s paper on the pathologisation of mixed-race identity and the misdiagnosis of personality disorders. She highlighted the culturally-shaped white Western biases present in the DSM and in clinical psychiatric practice in the UK. Through the story of her sister, who died by suicide after a lifetime of being treated for BPD while ADHD and autism were never considered, Lovelock gave the nuance and texture of lived experience to an issue often oversimplified.
Protichi Chatterjee described living with visions of an aunt who never lived, hauntings she and her mother share and that she does not think the DSM can explain away. Chatterjee found resonance in a performance by artist Anh Vo, whose work explores the unmourned and unremembered of the Vietnam War, that she has not found in her psychiatric diagnoses. Chatterjee’s paper asked what a spectral body can do, how it might affect and be affected, and how it might challenge Western pathologising epistemologies. Another paper, by Milo Ira, discussed Indigenous conceptualisations of neurodivergence as “relational, land-based, and embedded in kinship”. Ira’s talk centred Indigenous decolonial epistemologies, particularly Cree and Métis framings of neurodivergence, as well as the Anishinaabe concept of pyro-epistemology. The latter draws on knowledge about living interconnectedly with the land to think about decolonisation as a “controlled burn” clearing away the underbrush of colonialism to allow knowledges to flourish. Ira talked about how these perspectives can disrupt current paradigms defined by normalising principles in service of productivity and colonialism, giving concrete examples about the everyday lived experience of Indigenous Two-Spirit youth in Canada, as well as the intersecting histories of residential schools and ABA. There is such deep interconnectedness here between thinking and living, between ways of knowing and culturally specific living and breathing. Mad and neurodivergent people may engage often with the clinical sphere, and as academics we work within institutions that continue hierarchies of knowledge – but we do not have to defer to these gatekeepers to understand our own bodies and communities. Perhaps – and this is very much the crux of my own work – they should be deferring to us!
Doing hopeful worlding: imagining scholarship otherwise
The Critical Neurodiversity Studies conference was, more than anything else, an exercise in worlding – and what is more hopeful than realtime worldbuilding? It is the first conference of its kind – international, with mostly neurodivergent speakers and attendees, focusing not just on what neurodiversity is but what it does. The presentations, the workshops, even the way the whole event was organised, all were speculative – imagining scholarship otherwise. This was true of every aspect of the event, but in this final section of my blog I want to highlight some of the work that directly engaged in speculative worlding with themes of temporality, ontology, ethology, and epistemology. These speakers are involved in what Donna Haraway calls the “risky game of worlding and storying”, passing the complex, tangled and knotted inheritance of stories (frameworks, methodologies, terminologies) back and forth, working together to fold and unfold, to stay with the trouble that is unliveable conditions and hostile ideologies and access friction and legacies of harm. (Haraway, 2016, 13)
Abs Ashley’s talk focused on the “storying practices” of trans and neurodivergent experience, drawing on Smilges’ concept of “neurotrans” and Cavar’s of “transMad”, and discussing Akwaeke Emezi’s auto-fiction novel Freshwater. Emezi’s book is as defiantly neuroqueer a text as I have ever seen, a bold and unapologetic re-storying of a pathologised self through Emezi’s Nigerian Igbo heritage. M. Remi Yergeau’s keynote was also engaged in re-storying, bringing their signature expertise in rhetoric to bear on the language and practices used to treat OCD. They spoke with witty irreverence about their own obsessions and compulsions, and about the meaning they draw from these, beyond and despite what meanings clinicians attach to them. Drawing on La Marr Jurelle Bruce’s concept of “madtime”, Yergeau talked about the ways that OCD’s perseverative experience undermines normative ideas about time.
Staying with this metaphysical mode, Sahana V Rajan talked about the importance of bringing together insights from social constructionist and medical/biocentric models of neurodiversity, highlighting the value and limitations of both and ultimately advocating for an onto-epistemological intra-active model that acknowledges the way experiences are both embodied and shaped by cultural forces. Ombre Tarragnat took this ontological focus a step further, examining the intersection of critical neurodiversity studies and critical animal studies. They highlighted the way that the human, as constructed by enlightenment thinking, has shaped what is normal and therefore what is divergent, noting the overlap this has with the animal.
I want to close this blog with a question raised by Tarragnat, one that I had been waiting for someone raise at the conference: why do we continue to use the prefix “neuro”? This terminology was born from an attempt to talk about specifically brain-based disabled experiences, as they were/are often understood – autism, ADHD, mad experiences, chronic illnesses that bring about brain fog and so on. But how do we feel about this very medically-coded terminology, that conjures MRI machines and diagrams of the brain? Especially those of us who emphasise affect, embodiment, and even the spiritual in our work, does “neuro” still resonate? Can it hold our wild hopes and our embodied knowledges? Or do our “uniquely weird potentials and inclinations” overflow, surpass, and even undermine what can be neatly outlined in a textbook? I think so! But what instead, what language expresses the unique ways of our bodyminds? Perhaps a question for the next (future!) conference.