Características químicas

Posters on these online neuroqueer community spaces feel a sense of shared exclusion. Neuroqueering attempts to make this exclusion visible through strategizing against it.

challenge identity hierarchies. Neuroqueer is focused on inclusion and active rejection of and opposition to any group, or ideology that excludes, marginalizes and/or is inaccessible to any person. Moreover, neuroqueering requires individuals to meet the crip theory tactics outlined above. Therefore, I suggest that neuroqueer is a cripping project devoted to conversations of neurodivergency. These posters who are participating in neuroqueer practices understand identity as fluid and complex (Tactic 1). They also often relate and focus attention on the experiences of sexuality as a way to also understand the experience of disability and vice versa (2). They frequently attempt to subvert ableism and ablest discourses and narratives, often pointing inaccessibility and exclusionary practices out and find ways to strategize against them (3). They attempt to uncover ways in which discourses such as language and imagery used in media, governments, law, educational institutions, and other organizations subtly and overtly reinforce normative expectations and frequently recognize the damage these types of discourse can do (4). Neuroqueering is intimately involved with deconstructing dominant narratives of cure. Members engaging in neuroqueering reject the notion that disabled people must seek cure and shared their experiences with expectations of cure and often attempted to provide alternative narratives. (5). Furthermore, neuroqueering posters deconstruct normative expectations through subversive tactic, consistently finding ways to strategize against exclusion (6). The stories that are

referenced here are subversive in their intention to deconstruct. Subversive stories are those that are grounded in specific experiences that are able to ‘break the silence’ and counter hegemonic narratives that produce marginalization.

Neuroqueer is a crip project in its strong focus of deconstructing and challenging

dominant discourses that privilege some bodyminds over others as well as challenging discourses of pride and celebration of difference that do not question oppressive medical model narratives.

Neuroqueering is thus a project of engaging in disidentification (Munoz 1999). For Munoz, minoritarian subjects have three options for identification. First, (the most widely available option) one can identify with dominant society and make a trade: assimilating and finding

representing within normative society by sacrificing and giving up one’s personal non-normative identities (Munoz 1999). Second, some individuals have the option of counteridentification (Munoz 1999). By employing counteridentification individuals can identify with a marginalized (often) militant counter cultural group. Counteridentification may denounce dominant discourses but such opposition often reifies and perpetuates dominant discourses through a false binary. The third option for some minoritarian subjects is disidentification in which individuals resist the binary of identification/counteridentification.

Disidentification is a performative mode of tactical recognition that various minoritarian subjects employ in an effort to resist the oppressive and normalizing discourses of dominant ideology. Disidentification resist the interpellating call of ideology that fixes a subject within the state power apparatus. It is a reformatting of self within the social. (Munoz 1999: 97)

There is little choice in which mode of identification minoritarian subjects assume. Often identifications/counteridentifications are unavailable to individuals with complex identities. Due to the complexity of their intersectional identities Neuroqueer posters are excluded from other

communities and thus may have no other choice but disidentification. Through disidentification one can rouse desires and break free or imagine breaking free from the limitations of the social body (Munoz 1999). This is congruent with data from neuroqueer blogs as posters describe processes of attempting to break free from the oppressive that marginalizes non-normative bodyminds through practices of discourse. Kafer calls for the deconstruction of these oppressive able-bodied/able- minded discourses (see quotation on page 5). Neuroqueering, as outlined by the online neuroqueer blogs examined here, can answer this call by employing disidentification from both dominant and

identity based communities, rejecting progressive medical model discourses, and attempting to challenge and deconstruct such discourses.

As described in the theoretical framework section there has been some intersectional work that considers disability. However, few theorists of intersectionality have engaged with disability, and neurodivergency is rarely attended to. Neuroqueering can provide for feminist scholars an approach to intersectionality that engages with a diversity of bodyminds, while considering practices of ablebodieness/ablemindedness. While the neuroqueer perspective presented by these bloggers is not entirely free of the tendency of previous scholarship to replicate ever more specific pairings of identity categories, their work does take us some way down the road of challenging the usefulness of bounded categories, even in the context of intersectionality. We are still a long way from a dynamic theoretical perspective on intersectionality in which issues of race, gender, sexuality, disability, neurodiversity, and other aspects of human difference can be thoroughly, and simultaneously, considered, instead of being broken into discrete categories of oppressive

experience. The work of these bloggers does, however, challenge us to push the limits of identity- based theoretical and activist perspectives in ways that might move us forward in that direction.

Limitations and considerations for future work. The purpose of this paper is to bring the creative work of the neuroqueer blog authors and posters to the attention of mainstream academic

audiences. This paper focused on the emerging term neuroqueer by highlighting the work present on blog spaces and therefore it does not consider other approaches to neurodiversity. Much can be gained by engaging with multiple approaches to neurdivergency. Indeed, neuroqueering should be further conceptualized by attending to conversations about neurodivergency on other social media platforms like Twitter (particularly the use of hashtags like #actuallyautistic) and considering other academic work such as the newly released anthology All the Weight of Our

Dreams: On Living Racialized Autism. It is especially important to attend to the voices of

neurodivergent people of color as the majority of the bloggers self-identified as white or did not self-identify at all (although some neuroqueer bloggers made it appoint to center anti-racism by pointing out their own whiteness). As whiteness often goes unmarked, for neuroqueer to be successful in rejecting all exclusionary practices it is imperative that future neuroqueer work more explicitly engage with issues of race, as to not perpetuate whiteness.

Furthermore, there were many themes from blogs that could not be attended to in this paper. Future work should consider issues of academic gatekeeping as it applies to disability and neurodivegency least we risk reifying the exclusionary structures neuroqueer seeks to dismantle. Posts attending to academia’s inaccessibility were very prevalent in the blogs, which opens up conversations about imagining possibilities for accessibility of language and academia through centering disability. Additionally, one of the objectives of this paper is introducing neuroqueer and the work of neuroqueer bloggers to sociological audiences therefore there are many

approaches to neuroqueer that could not be explored here that are worth attention. Specifically, academic audiences should engage with the work the scholars and activists on these blogs are producing in their own right (not just the work academics have done by citing these blogs). In other words, scholars attending to intersectionality, ablemindedness, and/or neuroqueer should take up the work of Grace, Yergeau, Monje Jr., Walker and blog commentators in

conceptualizing their projects.

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