Heads Up, Call For Submissions

Detailed call coming soon. Use this space to ask questions to prime the pump as our editorial collective works on this detailed call.

But we are going to have a forum in which we find out what the idea/practice/etc of neuroqueer means to everyone who sees the call and has thoughts and feelings about it and cares to write about what it means. We'll publish submissions in a sort of orderly form at a given time and people can comment on each other's ideas.

There are some reasons for this. I'll say a lot more, but not just yet.

Right now, I'll say two things about it:

The first is, as I said when I started this blog, it is important to my definition that other people's definitions matter and are valid. Otherwise, we're not doing it right.

The second is-- and it's why I'm jumping the gun and writing a clear, ringing heads up before the real call-- the second is I heard that some people still think "neurodiversity" is some kind of autistic thing, and so by extension, so is neuroqueer, because of the neuro.

Well, that sounds to me kind of like saying plain old (non-neuro) "diversity" is some kind of Black thing. I realize people do say that, and I equally think they should not.

So let me dispell that myth in ways that I guess my earlier essays did not do.

Neurodiversity is not autistic.  In another context, a few of us wrote this litany, to which we keep adding: "mad, developmentally disabled, learning disabled, autistic, intellectually disabled, mentally disabled, brain injured, and neuro-muscularly disabled people, including those with conditions like epilepsy and migraine..." -- see where I'm going with this?  Things that have to do with your brain are neuro.  

Now that we have that cleared up (in my dreams) be thinking what neuroqueer may mean to you, because we are about to call for art, poetry, scholarly and experiential articles, creative non fiction, op eds, cultural commentary pieces, you name it. On that topic. To expand the definition and blow our collective chaotic hivemind.

Love,
Ib

Melanie Yergeau is Coming Soon!

Watch this space!

Melanie Yergeau is writing exclusive new commentary for the video pieces Shiny Identity and I Stim, Therefore I Am which were featured in our panel at Society for Disability Studies. This commentary along with easy access to the pieces themselves will be available here at NeuroQueer soon: very soon.

I just had to tell you ahead of time because I am really excited about this and also I am a bit of a tease. Oh, did I say that out loud? ;)

Love,
Ib

P.S. Pass it on.

Disability Visibility Project: How You Can Get Involved

NeuroQueer is delighted to announce we have the honor of being media partners with DisVisibility. Please see below official press release for this transformative historical project:

Disability Visibility Project

"Recording disability history, one story at a time."

Press Release: June 16, 2014

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

Disability Visibility Project launches in SF Bay Area, Chicago and Atlanta

Collecting oral histories from Americans with disabilities

SAN FRANCISCO, June 16, 2014—A community partnership with StoryCorps, the Disability Visibility Project is launching a year-long campaign to encourage Americans with disabilities to record their stories at three StoryCorps locations: SF Bay Area, Chicago and Atlanta from July 2014-2015.

The Disability Visibility Project aims to record and preserve disability history by creating an archive that will be included in the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress celebrating the upcoming the 25^th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA).

“The ADA was a landmark civil rights law that prohibited discrimination based on disability. In the year leading up to the 25^th anniversary, we are taking this opportunity to remember and reflect as a community on the tremendous changes we’ve experienced so far,” says Alice Wong, Project Coordinator. “The history of people with disabilities rarely makes it in textbooks so our project’s slogan is simple: ‘Recording disability history, one story at a time.’”

For more information on how to participate in the Disability Visibility Project, go to:
http://disabilityvisibilityproject.com/2014/06/07/disability-visibility-project-a-community-partnership-with-storycorps/

MEDIA CONTACT:
Alice Wong, Project Coordinator
Disability Visibility Project
Phone: 415-502-7097
Blog: http://disabilityvisibilityproject.com
Twitter: https://twitter.com/DisVisibility
Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/groups/356870067786565/

[Poster meme says: "Recording disability history, one story at a time." Disability Visibility Project.]

Neurodiversity and Bakhtin's Awkward Postanarchism, by Zach Richter

Editor's Note: This is the script of the paper Zach Richter read at the Society for Disability Studies conference panel on Neuroqueering in Minneapolis a few days ago. He has generously allowed us to reprint it by popular demand, but please keep in mind he is also polishing it up for more formal academic journal publication. Love, Ib

What we have heard earlier in this presentation some introductions to the basic concepts of neurodiversity, neurodivergence, and neuroqueerness, this paper will be an application of those concepts to things like anatomy, postanarchism and ontology or the study of being.

The area of poststructuralist theory known as “postanarchism” has long sought to be what Hakim Bey calls an “ontological anarchism”, but is at this point very very lost in that journey. Through a neurodivergent (neurologically unusual, primarily in Autistic usage) application of Bakhtin’s theory of the lower bodily stratum, I will truly unleash here what might be a crip postanarchism.

Awkwardness can be said to describe that which is physically unwieldly and socially incoherent and as such exemplifying the incongruence of disability and sexuality within both social and materialist models. Awkwardness informs a concept of crip and queer embodiments as experienced in a place of confusion between materialist and discursive origin points. Just as disability cannot be distilled and fully understood as either inaccessibility or bodily limitation, sexuality is not reducible to choice or genetics. Awkwardness names the chaotic liminal space of misunderstanding between existential and archetypal presence---always eluding grasp within any singular explanation and as such presiding over a complexity of experience that fails to fit within any singular conceptual or methodological format and is defined by a sense of perpetual motion and dynamism.

The concept of ontology dates back to Existentialist usages such as Heidegger which comes up with a body thrown into a sea of absurd phenomenon. But ontology is, in a more contemporary sense, a philosophical plumbing of bodily works. Likewise, Bakhtin’s lower bodily stratum suggests that in the modern canon, the orifices, where fluids actively are released or enter the body, has been painted over.

Similar to Fecal elaborations on Bakhtin’s work, this presentation does seek to bring such bodily fluids back to their lost prominence. Autistic people experience unique gut problems. Many of us are allergic, some get frequently nauseated or have chronic stomach discomfort. Autistic people, it is also noted, have sensory issues. The Markert brothers’ Intense World theory of Autism, which has recently come into popularity and controversy in the discipline of psychology, alleges that sensory issues underlie many of the problems that autistics have in integrating with neurotypical and neuronormative societies. In opposition to Enlightenment era views of the mind as the center of the sensory faculties, here I argue emphatically that the stomach is where Autistics experience emotion and the five or more senses.

But more than a mere affirmation of the alchemical pot in the abdomen, this essay seeks to dislodge the head. Since the middle ages, it has been alleged that the head is the center of consciousness. Some of this tendency to prize the peculiar bulbous body part has come from Western society’s doubtless obsession with reason and rationality. Within Galen’s concept of the Tripartite Soul, it is the head that is associated with reason.

Likewise, as documented by Foucault in History of Madness, the call to regulate one’s passions or emotions has long been echoed by religious, medical and state authorities. Instead of another curative suggestion that would foreclose on passions for a little more reason, I ask for the passions to revolt against reason itself and urge representatives of the sensory faculties to challenge the dominance of rationality.

What would a re-centering of human consciousness in the lower bodily stratum imply?

The stomach is not so singular and phallic as the head, but is more a liminal or cross-roads space. Some things are being digested, muscles are moving, blood is flowing up and down to get to the poles of the genitals and the head, the stomach also dances with the inhale/exhale of the lungs and it is a pivot point for the spine, either indicating focus or uprightness. It is thus subject to the wiles of all four humors---it is a place of hybridity, where all is mixed. 

Furthermore, the stomach is a space of between-ness that caters to a coalition spanning the entire disability community. Placing consciousness in the stomach and even inadvertently privileging a settled stomach does not negatively affect a certain disability community cohort, as it does when physically disabled people claim sanity and intellectual ability in a compensatory move. To all, even those whose stomachs are impaired, a settled stomach is strictly a positive development.

Like unmanageable bodily fluids that exist through numerous bodily tubes, Awkwardness is given expression through history in a series of attempts to grasp and emergences. The Awkward has been ever-emergent. Awkwardness has been defined as meaning turned the wrong way, but in its medicalized context, it has come to refer to physical clumsiness and social difficulty discretely. In James’ The Awkward Age, the awkward gained a new meaning as an ill-fitting temporality. The adaptation of that thinking found its way into psychoanalysis, producing theses that identify the pre-teen years as a vital period in which heterosexuality is under threat, in which an individual’s capacity as a worker is either naturalized or weakened in a permanent way. This clinical reading of James’ novel ignores another potency in the text, that the Awkward Age refers not to the catty attitudes of the novel’s main characters but to the periodicity of the Victorian early-industrial backdrop to their drama. Finally, in contemporary times, Awkwardness is metaphorized and becomes an affect of incongruence. To truly wrestle with what Awkward truly means we must engage with a recent British advertisement with the message that awkward comes not from impaired embodiment, but an abled gaze. The advertisement is not mistaken, but its message rings true to the archive of detours, incoherence and unfitness that accompanies the awkward.

To demand a cutting off of the head anatomically is anarchist in that it means a coalition which is not led by hierarchical top-down authority, but by an intermingled gurgling mass.

To center on the stomach is also an admission that denies Romantic notions of an impenetrable or singular will. The flows and affect of a stomach are not reducible to one direction but seemingly are capable of many aberrant or normal contractions. We turn to the stomach because indecision and ennui are also major parcels of technomodernity. The head, in its physical aesthetic existence, is a round obelisk, outstretched alone from a more complete body. It is by definition, an isolated extremity. 

Awkward provides a new model for engagement with heteronormativity and ableism as systems that work to eschew that which is fixed. The origin of deviance is ultimately unknowable---our anomalousness is somewhere between multiple intentions, bodily trajectories and infantile alienations. To try to simplify the Awkward is always either a violent intervention punishing and making further incongruence or a model of a private reaction that would see the entire body and its misery as a reaction to an unkind situation. 

Either version is mistaken: properly following complex embodiment means recognizing the constant dynamism at the basis of this difficulty in fitting. 

[Rainbow möbius/infinity on black background with words on white: neuro queer. Our logo.]

On The Train, by Ibby Grace

Mystic glyphs of graffiti adorn

Columns supporting workaday bridges

Whose large arcs quietly echo

Stacked truck fenders

And the curve of the creek nearby.

My chest swells with the warmth

I know is named affection

When I see my land's geometry

From the window of this train.

~Ibby Grace

The paradox of white cis patriarchial binarist normativity, by Kylie Brooks

The paradox of white cis patriarchial binarist normativity:
Years ago I asked myself what a man is and what a woman is.

The answer was ... I don't know.

And I still don't know. Never will know.

People think they know, but do they really? Nah.

~Kylie Brooks

NeuroQueer logo: on black background, rainbow color möbius strip/infinity with the words in white: neuro queer

White Woman, Aged 53, by Barbara Ruth

White Woman, Aged 53

        “I want to understand why the PD needed to shoot the distraught woman holding the bat. Was there no other way?” My friend posted this on Facebook last week. That’s how I found out.

            This FB friend and I live in the same a.  I looked online, found the news reports. A 53 year old white woman, “reportedly despondent”

        Who made that report? Who came up with the word despondent?

called 911, afraid she would harm herself or others. “Several” cops came, and called to her. She swung open the door and “emerged”

    what did ‘emerged’ feel like? The final emergence in her emergency.

with an aluminum bat in her hands. Two cops shot her. And she is dead.

    Some reports said she swung at them. But the first report said she opened the door.     A bat.         In her hands.

          The sheriff’s department issued a statement

the officers “were left with no choice.”

no choice to back the fuck out of the way?

no choice to grab the bat from her?

no choice to use their batons to knock it out of her hands?

“She made a motion

what was the motion

of a woman

so crazy

she actually thought that the cops would help her

toward the officers, and they didn't have any other options than to use their firearms.”

and shoot     

to kill

“During a recent five-year period, 10 out of 22 officer-involved shootings in the South Bay involved suspected mental health issues.”

This does not count

the officers’ mental health issues.

later   in yoga class   the corpse pose   I felt it    two shots into my belly and chest    another          piercing my arm,

this woman, her death,

lodged in my body.

Two days later I learned she went to the mental health center where I used to go.

Was she in DBT? Was she in Anxiety and Depression Support Group? Most of the people who go there are not white, not that old. The newspaper said she was 5’5.

             I think she was in my women’s group.  

The poetry group, the LGBT group - there were so few people - no one that race, that age.

        But the women’s group…..

I don’t think she was in my WRAP group.

Wellness Recovery Action Plan. With sections on Daily Maintenance, Triggers, Early Signs, When Things Are Breaking Down, and finally: The Crisis Plan.

I just went to get mine. Still there, on the bottom shelf of the coffee table,

dusty

and not necessarily

findable by someone

who might

have need,

but I took that 10 week course and I made that notebook so I will

never

ever

be 5150ed again.

We try

so very hard.            

Call 911 - White female, aged 53, was that your crisis plan?

I called my ex-therapist, from when I went there, and asked if she could tell me, who is this woman? Will there would be a memorial for her? How are folks at the Center handing it? Call never returned.

There have been no demonstrations, no calls to action, for the name-withheld woman. No picket signs cry “Killer Cops. No Justice, No Peace.”

        My sister, where is your peace? Was there ever a time when justice found you?

No one demands an independent investigation. No calls for review of the current cop training for when they deal with The Mentally Ill

    what?     what is that?   do you know it when you see it?   Or are you “It”?

I read all I can online. Still can’t find her name. One article has the exact address.

She lived alone in a first floor apartment.

I go there. It’s a nice building.  A sweet sitting area, with benches and flowers and bushes by the parking lot. At the door: heavy duty security. Leafy trees shade the building. Across the street a grassy field.

Later I Yelp it, all the reviewers gave it 1 star, talked about how thin the walls are

        “you can hear everything.”

Finally buzzed in, I knock on the manager’s door.

It’s getting

harder t

o breathe.

I left my oxygen tank in the car to look more credible, less like the HUD client I am. “The woman who was shot last week,” I say to the two in the office

    I do not say murdered

“I think I may know her. We went to the same organization.”

I do not use the words “Mental Health.”

“What is her name?” one asks, before I ask her.

If I’d only been able to guess it. But I don’t have a name attached to this woman I maybe knew

“How are people here doing?” I ask. “It must be hard.”

“Oh everyone’s fine. They’re getting extra services.”

        What does she mean, extra? Why doesn’t she say “we’’?

They take my name and number. “Do you want to be told if there’s a service for her?”

“Yes.”

        I ache for some extra service for her

“We’ll pass your information on to the detective.”

Oh. Hadn’t seen that one coming. I’d imagined calling the cops: I’m the Poet Investigator delving into the case of the white woman, aged 53, who died - was killed - was murdered - by your department last week. Have you divulged her identity yet?

I think they’re waiting to contact her family

and it’s been so long now, a week and a half,

maybe that’s hard to do.

The person who told me this woman and I went to the same mental health place

the “Organization”

probably knows

why it’s taking so long

maybe knows her name

but thinks it’s unethical to say even a word.

But a word, a name was said. Our shared Organization.

So I know that she walked the same halls I did,

whether she went to the Voice-Hearing Network

or the Self-Care Group.

We sat around the same tables,

stepped into the courtyard,

maybe saw the same shrinks.

Just after I read that first post on Facebook

someone else commented,

the woman “was small, didn’t weigh much.

“She was one of my faves.”

I don’t know this friend of my Facebook friend

But somebody knows the white woman, aged 53, somebody knows her stories.

Somebody misses her.

At the place where she lived

there’s a warning sign:

toxic chemicals including cancer-causing, are used in this building. More information is available to tenants.

But she didn’t die of that.

She died of lead poisoning.

Acute.

The blasts of the bullets

in that place where we hear everything

still ricochet through the vestibules

of those who do and do not know

the name of the South Bay woman

who mid-April, 2014,            fatally

fatally called 911.

[Image of author: Olive-skinned  woman, with grey and brown hair, wrinkled face partly in shadows,  sadly leans her head against trunk of tree, also grey and brown.

bio: After 67 years Barbara Ruth still believes another world is possible. More than ever, she believes in the healing power of nature.]

 (Ed note: Here, also provided by the author, is the above story as told by San Jose Mercury News.)