neuro-queer, or, how the birth of the clinic met my dangerous desires - by Elizabeth Hassler

Like my best crip friends

I love wordplay, and here

I am playing; tumbling the

new queer thoughts

around my head until

they get smooth

and reflective of my body---

neuro-queer. I worry

my flesh intrudes on your discourse

(my body is many things,

but it is not autistic

---of course, I remember

when autism felt like a threat

and a warning not to stim).

My body arches, grasps desires unevenly and

without finesse,

drives electric wheelchairs

into doorways. It writes poems because

line / breaks make queer ideas fit together,

not all queer ideas all together of course

but certainly mine. Nothing

about my flesh is linear.

Here are meditations on the form

(Ibby has been kind and encouraged

my disagreements

and my coy shield):

my queerness is in lower-case,

and I came to it easily

once I stopped tasting my experience in rights-based alphabet soup.

I fled

toward radical corners,

toward people who didn't tell tell tell me

my body was too wrong.

The wrong kind of disabled: no,

I can't prove I'm good enough

and clean enough

to be an inspiration.

The wrong kind

of queer

because ditto.

[Here is the part

of the essay that is a poem

that is an essay where

all the thoughts happened all together and I got

stuck in the writing.] Growing up,

disability meant Easters Seals camp

and wheelchair basketball [badly] and riding the short bus [but never

the “Shortbus,” kids!] and

never saying the word can't.

The only depressive crip I knew

was a woman

who had acquired her disability jumping

out of a fourth-story window in winter

decades earlier. When I was fifteen

she relayed her romantic frustrations and

attempted to sell me on disabled lesbian sisterhood

---but then,

I've never been a lesbian.

One of my childhood friends with lesbian parents

went crazy in her teens:

her mothers visited

to catch up and tell the story of her psychosis,

how she lived in a locked facility in a midwestern state.

They didn't expect me to know what Seroquel was.

Afterward, one of her mothers

(the one with the beach hat and the

masculine features) whispered to me conspiratorially

about sometimes liking men.

I never wrote her letters in lock-up

or saw those women again.

I grew up with disability

and craziness

separated by an ocean

of discourse about bodies:

wheelchair users are strong and independent

and wear superhero capes.

For a few years of high school,

my best school friend was a “biffer” jock

who goaded me into good moods

[don't try this with suicidal teenagers at home].

One time a therapist tried to convince me

I resented my wheelchair, but

I've never wanted to walk.

I wanted an etiology

for my body,

reasons household noises drove me to tears while

happiness felt so hard to grab hold of

and no less dangerous.

I brought Ordinary People into

my first therapist's waiting room.

I read blogs written by parents of disabled kids

to convince myself I wasn't a terrible daughter

and to find a language for my body

(autistic bodies

seemed a lot like mine).

I failed classes in school

while depressed friends kept me alive.

I never pretended I had

a nondisabled body., online

or in my head. But I knew

the disability rights community was never mine---

I still won't read

books of disability history that insist WE

on their covers. I never

made sense of my life

in cultural nationalisms,

and so I shy away from Queer.

But I am queer, nonetheless, even though our movement politics

are so white and so middle-class and

imagined so exclusively on dance floors

and crowded meeting rooms that I

sometimes flee in fits of overstimulation

[critiques the white girl whose parents are lawyers].

And I am, of course, disabled.

Crazy (which some people who call themselves queer

have told me not to reclaim)

seems less distant from disability now.

[Still, my poor mother---

every girl her age read Karen,

but there's no moralist classic about

raising a bipolar daughter.]

And this never was

independent living.

When The Advocate publishes op-eds about

obstacles lesbians with disabilities must overcome,

I wish this was a different revolution.

Of course, I'm not a liberal

or a lesbian,

but I want revolution more than progress

and I crave community with lesbians

who don't conflate trans* lives with child abuse

or delusion

and tell me to want different things in bed.

[Dear reader, the Sex

Wars never ended.]  I want to be a radical

before the patriarchy ends.

My body keeps

disability and desire all stitched together

in my disabled skin

---I've told rooms full of people

how my needs and my wants never separate themselves.

How many DSM entries does a girl need

before she's neuro-queer?

In my life queer is a verb,

and it means queer acts:

mine happen without candor or privacy,

and I have a body in plain sight.

There are silences here,

and if this were an academic paper

this would be the Spivak citation (I don't dance but I

read academic theory,  and when I am a sub

-altern I do not speak). My neuro-queer

is in the silences, in the coy,

in coastal metaphors, in the third person,

in building her a life

and tides of disabled pleasures.

Ashley X

has cerebral palsy too;

my queer girl-girl-grrrrrlhood

remembers discursive gaps.

Some days there is no womanhood here,

but that feels right to my mouth.

I am neuro-queer, and neuro-femme:

cologne smells like a phantom boyfriend's clothes.

I still hold shame

about the boyfriend from a year ago,

not hir behavior but how I nearly got sucked in

because I thought that was the right discourse for femmes and I

thought we had equivalent needs.

I'm glad, now,

that there are other tricks

to feeling like a girl.

I didn't value my desires

as conduits for revolution, not even when

I could tell the story

of not doing that again.

The structure of my needs

has always shaped the shames

and the resistance of my body; no,

I won't please stand. I won't

pretend the shames fade, either,

not today not for this poem.

I feel the shame intensely,

hence a sweet release

of this stiff form:

I am a crazy crippled girl

with desires,

and I am learning

to access intimacy and that neuro-queer

has so much potential for joy.

My body needs a here and now

[an abject here and now]

more than a future,

and neuro-queer's remembering

the things our bodies need.

--Elizabeth Hassler