"What is NeuroQueer?" by Michael S. Monje Jr.

What is NeuroQueer and what does it mean to me?

Well, let's see. Maybe you should take a seat,

this could be a long one in the telling,

and I'm not sure that you necessarily want the whole thing.

Plus, I'm feeling like this is a lot of responsibility,

because I'm one of the original three to speak the term into being,

but I'm not wanting a situation like at science fiction conventions

where conventionally timid disciples cling on to continuity questions.

This is my origin, yes, but that still means it's a construct,

so your perception of it is its meaning once it leaves me,

and I have to hope you're good people who remember my intentions,

but I'm also aware that my ideas will become garbage

if I can't learn to loosen my rhetorical grip.

So if you remember one lesson, let it be this:

I'm a working demonstration of constructing a durable cultural rhetoric,

and I didn't originate a single one of my own damn tactics,

all I did was assemble parallel arguments, making a collage of activist rhetoric

that pulled its credibility from the humanity of its ethic.

I'm an autistic atheist trans humanist,

trying my best to create a storm around an empty eye, a center

where we can center anyone who has a need for the calm,

create a safe space to hold them while they grow,

and then let them loose with their own rhetoric to storm some more.

Then we center another young artist through their traumatic experience,

because that's what crafting at this level will always be,

birth is painful, you try speaking yourself into being.

That's why I will always owe this debt to the cultural orators before me

from Nas to James Baldwin, Amy Tan to Tennessee Williams.

In my summer rhetoric before I let my web serial begin,

I hinted that there was an explanation of the fugue

and a canon to give to you, and this is it,

so let this be the beginning,

and know that this is a document that you should always be adding on to,

and it started long before you,

and it started long before me too.

But what is NeuroQueer to me?

Well, it was almost the title of the Clay Dillon series,

if that gives you an idea of his place in this and my thoughts (in the beginning).

It was an expression of the fact that my gender was in question,

and I was unsure of the implications for this and

for the rediscovery of my tactile fetishes

on my perception of my own sexual orientation.

When your gender is in flux and you're attracted to both sexes,

there is actually the question of whether you're in different states

and still feeling like a heterosexual, or if it's more than that

and you spend much more time than you might like thinking on it,

and it becomes just another thing that interferes with the progress of your being.

So I decided to let those insecurities breathe in the brain of a character,

and I actually started with him older and only wrote Nothing is Right

when I had to find a backstory,

because I was drowning in my own immersive memories,

and putting his life in order allowed me to order my being

and center the voice that sounded like a version of me that I wouldn't hate to be,

and if that meant it, then transitioning.

So in short, at first neuroqueer was my perception of my gender,

a new type of neurodivergence, interacting with both my behavior

and my autistic characteristics, and it was what that meant

for my communication style and choice of partners

during sexual interactions.

It was always all three, which is why when I wrote Defiant

I used chapters that illustrated all the intersections,

and then how they were alone,

and then when other segments came unexpectedly into play,

like how Clay gets confused by sadistic cues in his therapist

and becomes compliant because his sexual preferences have conditioned him to it

and how he has to build a professional power exchange relationship

with his wife as his partner in control of it

before he can structure a career path that makes sense to him.

And Nothing is Right is all of those characteristics as expressed in a little kid,

and if you read clearly you can see my sources all cited:

Like it was Eli Clare who said his gender was screaming,

so I took that same feeling, as I understood it being when it was me,

and I stuffed it into the brain of this fictional seven year old

and showed you the pain exactly as I had felt it unfold.

In reality, those aren't memories,

but that's because I'm acknowledging the reality

of the Persistence of Memory being malleable actually,

and so I'm broad brushstroking and hoping you catch on to what expressionism is,

and then I'm moving it into the viewpoint of the little kid

and trying to say his cognition is

a perfect demonstration of what it's like to live in that environment

when you're more of an impressionistic thinker,

and none of the portraits in your perception are recognizable.

But never forget, the text is the product

of my omniscient third person.

Clay Dillon reads a lot, but he actually says little,

so if you're about to make the objection that the vocabulary

was out of wack to the perceptions of little kids,

I'm just going to accuse you of not understanding a bit

about what autism is.

The words are descriptions of things he understands through feeling,

visualizing, reading silently, dancing through, or dreaming.

He makes connections in his head, but the assumption that they're verbal

or that his cognition is the thing you're reading is really demeaning

and makes me wonder if you can be a competent critic. But if you get it?

Then we're in business, and you need to know this:

I'm only writing one dissertation. It's represented in several media

and put in chronological progression,

but the poetry and theory are the same work,

and the fiction and drama are rhetoric in the showing mode,

case studies in accessible language for how these theories unfold.

That means: You guessed it. I have already penned three treatises:

Nothing is Right and Mirror Project are already available and widely marketed

along with some minor discourse on coming out to myself,

and that's without citing all the blog posts that I did

or the half dozen articles I sydicated to other outlets.

I put in the work and had copyrights and ISBNs

before advertising the theories I had tucked within

to make sure I put you in the position of having to cite fiction,

because the drama is the criticism

and I did everything on my end to put in the work

to make sure rhetoriticians in disability studies had to teach literary interp.

This is what Neuroqueer is to me

a way to speak my way of thinking about literature into being

because my identity is my cultural vocabulary,

and my new narrative happens on levels that illustrate moral stories

decorated with a bibliography in all the arts of rhetorics that influenced me;

I'm constructing sampled mashups like internet directories,

hypertext rhetoric, not a line stolen but rather an easter egg citation,

begging the student to understand how to write like this

by throwing on some Nas and reading like they might get it.

If I've been dead awhile and you find me, then locating my references

will let you know what I did because it will locate my influences

and that will let you infer my most direct descendents;

I'm a creative scholar who's studied hip hop philosophy,

paleoanthropological and historical methodologies,

and sought to expand the diversity of their stories

so that when I construct meaning, it's with an awareness of my own identity

that locates me within a vast network of free beings,

all thinking, contributing to our group understanding with our interactions,

coming to understand our moral obligations through negotiation

and not pontification based on assumptions of others' experience.

See what I did?

I'm betting right now there are people who want me to get to speaking about who I read,

but I'm more interested in discussing what Mirror Project did.

That was my out of body exploration piece,

but in a way it was closest to being my autobiography.

I don't think I need to explain the abuse dynamics in the writing,

but know that my perception of gender was growing as I explored Lynn's body,

and so in a way it was my fingers talking back to me,

giving a scenario to the verbal thinker in my face,

having a dialog between my body and my brain,

and negotiating what each of them will need

if we're going to make the jump and I'm going to get free.

So that one took the longest but you need to include it in your read

because without it you can't understand the rest of my theory.

And my entire career it will be like this, from discourse poems on my blog to publications

to novels, conferences, and paid speaking engagements.

I've been thinking for over six years in scholarly silence and I'm only giving this talk once,

and it's the only thing I'm doing, so it will, naturally, be evolving.

I'll be going from criticizing Steinbeck and locating Lenny as someone lovable

despite the condescension with which he's written and his inhumane treatment,

to bringing flowers for Algernon and cricizing Charlie's regression symptoms;

I'll be on Alice Walker too, and reading The Color Purple to compare to Sapphire's Push

for a generational point of view. I'll bring Borges alongside Nas and Boy George,

doing gender studies on Sam Shepard's drama and making new theories

about disability as presented in cinematic Dada,

but then I'll be situating these observations in character perceptions

or embedding quotes in rhymes on spoken word albums,

making hidden attacks in the lyrics on purpose in places

to comment on appropriation, and trusting my audience, presuming competence,

and creating texts that embed moral rhetoric as literary allusion

or through juxtaposition of different figures, creating a tapestry

with more representation in it than I got to see as a kid,

trying to bring visions of interacting histories in the background of developmental narratives

that don't exist to reinforce normative structures, but to deconstruct heterosexist cis whiteness,

showing how it is that teenaged, working-class, undereducated teen parents could miss

the queer autistic experience of one of their kids.

They are the parents who would view a child's quietness as a blessing

after a day of unrelenting expectations

and whose reliance on their working class, white social networks

reinforced bad values that led to them paying more than their dues,

guilting them out of asking for help when it was the right thing to do,

using peer pressure and racism, homophobic hatred, gender policing,

and a healthy dose of talk radio with inappropriately imbalanced news

to keep them in suspension until their will to think vanishes

and they wind up with only short-term thinking strategies,

which makes them impulsive and selfish,

which is what they teach to their kids,

and those kids grow up not knowing what a coping mechanism is

or having a real sense of who they should be, beyond the tough guy exterior

and the refusal to treat other people decently.

The fact that this identity exists is my criticism of the entire culture that could produce him,

and since he's a painting of my emotions during my upbringing,

his existence on the page should be doubly troubling,

and should inspire us to move together in unison,

dismantling the cognitive dissonance, placing expectations of conformity

outside of our shared experience.

This is why we need to make sure people know my ideas came from

The Invisible Man, and not the slim one that H.G. Wells did,

but the one I read over years and in excerpts, always too busy to give it sustained attention.

Still, I'm glad I got what I did of it.

I'm also looking into The Joy Luck Club, the criticism of Wayne C. Booth,

and some of the early essays of Jim Sinclair too.

When it comes to my understanding of feminist theory, though,

I get worried. Not that I think I lack understanding,

but because some ideas have been trickled up into inappropriate appropriations,

and others have become so common that I can't even tell their beginnings,

so what the hell am I supposed to do? If I'm looking into media theories,

do I talk to the blogger or talk about books?

Do I cite Kerima Cevik or do I cite bell hooks?

It matters how we do this, and who we trust in it and with it,

because we don't want to leave anyone out of the conversation

but we need to make sure we don't get appropriated.

This is why I won't even respond to a rhetor who doesn't read my work in all of its places,

because you can't know enough about it to grasp the basics,

and you're sure to miss the extended arguments

in hypertextual rhetorics of arranged and selected setting mosaics,

Luddite links like Finneganswakeanism filtered through the ears

of a kid who couldn't stop listening to Rakim,

links you can't click, but you might perceive if you have the training.

They are programming connections in imaginations,

creating alternative intranets in the webs of our thought complexes,

restructuring the architecture of solitude to reflect the world around you,

a seamless interior blended with a digital environment.

Fingers talking, unspoken communication, are the tumblrs falling into place yet?

Even if you can't respond in all of my modes,

you'd better taking responsibility for knowing that's how my argument will go.

You gotta start with Nothing is Right as the first one that I did,

then go to Defiant and compare him to what he was as a kid.

Read Mirror Project next, and then jump contexts,

because I immediately went into the poetic mode when I emerged from my post-traumatic hole.

Start with environments like Pollocks, and read every painting,

every discourse and dedication,

the Thoughts on Writing, Barking Sycamores publications, and A Waking Narrative.

Then return to Clay Dillon as a kid,

and while you're busy reading Imaginary Friends

I'll pen a piece on gender and speech for a text communication collection, then write this.

And all of this is what I think NeuroQueer Theory is.

And it will be ongoing for as long as Clay Dillon is.

Every story is discourse, and it discusses the progression of an identity

as a combined narrative about multi-modal media literacy,

with books and magazines, TV and music, the birth of the internet,

pamphlets, library book sales, and dumpster dived paperbacks

all influenced by a setting and a lack of direction,

a lack of social context for his texts

and a solipsistic interpretation.

And somehow, there still will emerge a beautiful human

after they stop sorting through all of the hatred and find a way to let go.

You'd better believe that when Clay Dillon misunderstands things,

it's appropriate, to illustrate the level of his textual comprehension

in context, and next to his actual navigation of the construction of a sentence's grammar.

I'm not being lazy or taking pot shots,

I'm showing a point of view with all of its pitfalls and intellectual inconsistencies,

showing maturity multidimensionally to illustrate early reading in a realistic setting.

How long will that take? Who knows?

I'm not done speaking,

but it's time I concede

that the only way this will have any meaning

is spaced out between similar musings from a variety of other beings.

Corbett OToole's Fading Scars: My Queer Disability History is #mustread

[Editorial note: This is the preface I was moved to write about the world-changing excellence that is Corbett OToole's new book, Fading Scars: My Queer Disability History. It is an indescribable honor to have had a small part in bringing this much-needed book to you. Love, Ib]

ONE ELDER IS A WHOLE LIBRARY

When I was in grade school in Portland, Oregon, I was lucky enough to be included in outreach activities by a coalition of local Native American tribes who made a practice of inviting children on field trips to traditional Potlatch events, to share between cultures. Like many cities in the US, Portland was constructed on ground—some of it holy —taken from a variety of tribes. While many people went to reservations in the middle of the eighteen hundreds, a relatively large number remained in the growing urban center, and helped give it the character for which it is still now known.

A Chinook woman told me I was bound to like fry bread, despite my idea that very few things were actually edible, and unlike myself, I rightly believed her. Then, having discerned my love of reading, she told me a much more important thing.

“Respect your elders,” she said, “And hear what they have to say. One elder is a whole library.”

This has stayed with me always, and it is why I became interested in epistemology, which has to do with how people know things, and what it means for them to know them, and what kinds of knowing there can be.

People can know by thinking, and also by doing, for example. The knowledge held by an elder is doubly powerful: elders have done the things, and also thought about them. More is written about this elsewhere, but what must be said here is that Corbett OToole was there in key moments of disability culture even before people had written that there is such a thing as disability culture and named it. She is also friends with other people who write about disability culture and history, and so knows in a lot of detail what she thinks about the things she has done and seen in many different ways.

This book spans decades, major events and topics, and comes from a point of view called “autoethnographic,” which is another word for writing about one’s own life in order to show larger culture to the reader. It is a memoir with educational purpose. It is from the horse’s mouth, as they say: a play-by-play written by someone inside the action, telling us what happened then and there.

Fading Scars is absolutely essential reading in courses of disability studies and provides an excellent voice to complement histories written by historians, who have access to other kinds of knowledge about our collective past. Karen Nakamura is right to say that this is not only to be read by students of disability culture and history, but also by everyone. As Kim Nielsen says in A Disability History of the United States, disability history is the story of our nation. And the future of disability history (and queer history) is the kind of intersectionality and coalition we learn about in these exciting pages. 

Neuroqueer: An Introduction, by Nick Walker

This piece was originally published on the author’s blog, Neurocosmopolitanism.

The term neuroqueer was coined independently and more or less simultaneously by Elizabeth J. (Ibby) Grace, Michael Scott Monje Jr., and myself. Having coined it, all three of us managed to spend a few years not getting around to using it in any published work, even though the set of concepts and practices represented by the term came to heavily inform our thinking. I almost used Neuroqueer as the title for my blog, but decided to go with the title Neurocosmopolitanism instead. Michael almost used Neuroqueer as the title for a novel, but decided to go with the title Defiant instead.

It wasn’t until Michael mentioned this last fact, in an online conversation in which he and Ibby and I were all involved, that we discovered that all three of us had been playing around with the same term. Happily, though we were all approaching it from different angles, our various interpretations of neuroqueer (or neuroqueerness, or neuroqueering) were in no way incompatible. In the same conversation, we learned that another friend and colleague of ours, Melanie Yergeau, while she hadn’t yet stumbled upon the word neuroqueer, had been thinking along quite similar and compatible lines in playing with the concept of neurological queerness; Melanie’s contributions have been extensive enough that even if she didn’t come up with the actual word, I consider her - along with Ibby, Michael, and myself - to be one of originators of the concept of neuroqueer (or neuroqueerness, or neuroqueering).

All four of us - Ibby, Michael, Melanie, and I - emerged from that conversation freshly inspired to begin introducing the term, and the set of concepts and practices it describes, into our public work and into our communities and the broader culture. Since then, we've been following through on that intention in various exciting ways. Ibby, Michael, and I, along with Bridget Allen and Corbett O’Toole, founded the independent publishing house Autonomous Press, to publish books in which neuroqueerness of one sort or another tends to play a prominent role (starting in 2016, Autonomous Press will also have an imprint called NeuroQueer Books). Ibby founded the NeuroQueer blog, with Michael and Dani Alexis Ryskamp and I later joining as co-editors. Melanie is working on a book that I can’t tell you about yet, but it’s going to be extraordinary and most definitely relevant. We’ve all started talking about neuroqueerness and neuroqueering in our academic conference presentations and public speaking engagements. Ibby and I are now co-editing the NeuroQueer Handbook, which will be published by Autonomous Press in 2016.

Meanwhile, the term is catching on in various circles and communities, taking on a life of its own, as terms and concepts tend to do when the time is right for them. It’s showing up in academic papers and conference presentations, creative projects, Facebook communities, blogs and Tumblr accounts and all manner of social media platforms. It’s been adopted by a whole lot of people I don’t know - and when a new term/concept spreads beyond the social circles of its originators, that’s generally a sign that it’s “got legs,” as they say. In other words, it’s a term that you’re likely to be hearing a lot more of in the years to come.

(The day before I wrote this piece, I was at California Institute of Integral Studies for the first meeting of a course I teach called Critical Perspectives on Autism and Neurodiversity. I was introducing my students to basic neurodiversity-related terminology like neurotypical and neurodivergent, when a young undergraduate excitedly asked me, “Have you heard of the term neuroqueer?”)

I’ve already seen a lot of interpretations of neuroqueer and attempts at definition from folks who’ve adopted the term. Some of those interpretations miss the point, sometimes in ways that are truly facepalm-worthy. Other interpretations are more on-point but overly narrow, such that Ibby, Michael, Melanie, and I look at them and say, “Yeah, that’s part of what we were getting at... but only part of it…”

So what were we getting at? What is neuroqueer (or neuroqueerness, or neuroqueering)?

I should first of all acknowledge that any effort to establish an “authoritative” definition of neuroqueer is in some sense inherently doomed and ridiculous, simply because the sort of people who identify as neuroqueer and engage in neuroqueering tend to be the sort of people who delight in subverting definitions, concepts, and anything “authoritative.”

That said, the definition that follows is as close to an “authoritative” definition of neuroqueer (and neuroqueerness, and neuroqueering) as is ever likely to exist. I wrote it with the input and approval of the other three originators of the concept. So it’s the one definition out there that all four of the originators of neuroqueer have agreed is not only accurate, but also inclusive of all of the various practices and ways-of-being that any of the four of us ever intended neuroqueer to encompass.

Neuroqueer is both a verb and an adjective. As a verb, it refers to a broad range of interrelated practices. As an adjective it describes things that are associated with those practices or that result from those practices: neuroqueer theory, neuroqueer perspectives, neuroqueer narratives, neuroqueer literature, neuroqueer art, neuroqueer culture, neuroqueer community. And as an adjective, neuroqueer can also serve as a label of social identity, just like such labels as queer, gay, lesbian, straight, black, white, hapa, Deaf, or Autistic (to name just a small sampling).

A neuroqueer individual is an individual whose identity has in some way been shaped by their engagement in practices of neuroqueering. Or, to put it more concisely (but perhaps more confusingly): you’re neuroqueer if you neuroqueer.

So what does it mean to neuroqueer, as a verb? What are the various practices that fall within the definition of neuroqueering?

1. Being neurodivergent and approaching one’s neurodivergence as a form of queerness (e.g., by understanding and approaching neurodivergence in ways that are inspired by, or similar to, the ways in which queerness is understood and approached in Queer Theory, Gender Studies, and/or queer activism).
   
   
2. Being both neurodivergent and queer, with some degree of conscious awareness and/or active exploration around how these two aspects of one’s identity intersect and interact.
   
   
3. Being neurodivergent and actively choosing to embody and express one’s neurodivergence (or refusing to suppress one’s embodiment and expression of neurodivergence) in ways that “queer” one’s performance of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, occupation, and/or other aspects of one’s identity.
   
   
4. Engaging in the “queering” of one’s own neurocognitive processes (and one’s outward embodiment and expression of those processes) by intentionally altering them in ways that create significant and lasting increase in one’s divergence from dominant neurological, cognitive, and behavioral norms.
   
   
5. Engaging in practices intended to “undo” one’s cultural conditioning toward conformity and compliance with dominant norms, with the aim of reclaiming one’s capacity to give more full expression to one’s neurodivergence and/or one’s uniquely weird personal potentials and inclinations.
   
   
6. Identifying as neuroqueer due to one’s engagement in any of the above practices.
   
   
7. Being neurodivergent and producing literature and/or other cultural artifacts that foreground neurodivergent experiences and perspectives.
   
   
8. Being neurodivergent and producing critical responses to literature and/or other cultural artifacts, focusing on intentional or unintentional characterizations of neurodivergence and how those characterizations illuminate and/or are illuminated by the lived experiences of actual neurodivergent people.
   
   
9. Working to transform social and cultural environments in order to create spaces and communities – and ultimately a society – in which engagement in any or all of the above practices is permitted, accepted, supported, and encouraged.

So there you have it, from the people who brought you the term. This definition is, again, not an authoritative “last word” on the subject, because that would be a silly thing to attempt. Rather, I hope this will be taken as a “first word” - a broad “working definition” from which further theory, practice, and play will proceed.

Happy neuroqueering!  

Four Pieces, by Barbara Ruth

Tallying

here it is, my desiderata:

spiritual progress; the skill of surreptitiously sliding

along; sustained resistance in the face of oppression;

an accurate map to scale; indulgence for my shortcomings; sudden sunshine after long rain; no scrape I can’t get out of.

I am an ordinary, unheroic tourist.

I am native to this place, I shift shape, ceremoniously make magic

out of words. I travel far.

my maladies, my victories, both acute and chronic.

I climb mountains and I can’t get out of bed.

Now/Instead

Now

when I’m anxious for no reason

I clean the one corner of one room of the house

instead of drugging

myself to death.

When I’m so depressed I can’t stand it

I pull the blankets over my head

instead of drugging

myself to death.

When I haven’t slept for four days and four nights

I write as the tears sting my burning eyes

instead of drugging

myself to death.

When I can’t think, can’t rest, can’t write, can’t read

I wait instead

of drugging

myself

to death.

Loma Prieta Epilepticus

    I was by myself that day. I’d been hanging out on my hospital bed, with the back raised, reading maybe, or doing paperwork. I know I was using the bed because it was days before the electricity came on again and I could return it to the flat position. I remember afterwards, yearning to stretch out, in my bed, and pull up the covers. Just that. I got up to go to the the kitchen. Then the lurch, the roll of the room. But that was one of my symptoms.  I’d said it  to my neurologist: my own personal earthquakes.

    I think it was warm. Afterwards, didn’t we say earthquake weather? But didn’t we often say that, here in California?

    After the quaking stopped, my neighbors checked on me. Shame, embarrassment, uncertainty as to exactly what DID happen; I didn’t tell them much. It hurt my brain to look for words. Even if I tried to explain - what could they do about it? I had a few scratches; someone got a first aid kit when I couldn’t remember where my band-aids were. No scars; the bruises didn’t show till the next day.

That evening the gas lines were turned off and the power was out so all my neighbors were cooking on their barbecues outdoors, and that just made matters worse as far as I was concerned, the air reeking of lighter fluid and charcoal and meat.

    Darlene came that night. She wasn’t even my attendant any more, but she was my friend and the phones were down and she was worried about me. She got me some food, cleaned up the broken glass on the kitchen, and settled me on the couch for sleeping.

    But the earthquake, the big one, not just my personal quaking, but this: the black and white of the linoleum smearing into each other, the black engulfing the white, and the black grew larger and larger, coming for me and the white shimmered and squeaked.

    I remember backing up from it. I didn’t want that black maw to reach me. But it did, as the lurching jolted me, and the black, the absence of color, the black, the absence of balance, the black and a color past black I do not know the name for  swallowed my brain and the place past black was all there was.

    Seizure. It will seizure. Seize your partner throw them all around. Seize her. We’re all having a seizure. The world is a seizure and all of us are seized.

                               

Full Moon In Scorpio

    Adaptive yoga class, and I can’t make sense of the teacher’s words. I can hear her; we share the same California accent; she calls out the poses in English, not Sanskrit. But words and meaning keep drifting apart. When I do understand, I can’t figure out how to move my body into those poses I’ve done a hundred times. I’ve lost the file marked “Following Directions.” Am I having a stroke?

    Yesterday, on my way to an emergency dentist appointment, my attendant’s car broke down. It was over 100 degrees by then. We had to open the windows, even though we were right beside the cacophony of leaf blowers.   

I managed to postpone my collapse until safely home. Once in bed, I fell into a deep sweaty sleep. I awoke paralyzed, couldn’t turn my head, let alone find the grab bar to pull myself up out of bed. How long did that last? Five minutes? An hour? Maybe I had a seizure. Or maybe I dreamed it.

    Often my mind goes off on a tangent. Most times I like that.

    Yoga class is over. I’m home, still unsure what to do.

    I  could call 911. I’d have to tell the dispatcher, “Silent approach, no flashing lights, those things can trigger my seizures.” Sometimes that works. But they’ll pound on my door, stomp into my house, swirling my brain and polluting my home with the fumes of dryer sheets and shampoos, sunblock and gum: the smells of normal people. They’ll talk too loud, too fast. “When was the last time you took your medication? What else have you taken? What are you on right now?” Sometimes they complain that the house numbers on my street are out of order. “You should move,” they’ve told me, three different times, at different addresses in three different towns, when all I wanted was to quietly talk to an paramedic who didn’t reek of fabric softener, get a little help deciding if I needed to brave the ER.

    I’ve done hard time in the nearest hospital, the one they’ll take me to. The ER is always packed, overflowing with human misery, patients and staff stinking far worse than the First Responders. The moon is full, in the sign of Scorpio, they’re bound to have even more business than usual.  The cleaning carts relentlessly employed, never quite defeating the stench of death. And when they release me - how will I get myself home?

    I could call 911. But I can’t figure out how to answer the first question the dispatcher always asks: “What is the nature of your emergency?”

Anarchist Neuroqueeritude, by Susan Song

[Editor's Note: This is the transcript of a talk given at the Disability Studies in Education 15th Annual Conference, April 14th, 2015, at National Louis University in Chicago, Illinois.]

 

My talk seeks to discuss queer and anarchist theory as they intersect and lend to

neurodiversity theory. I will start with a short discussion about what I mean

when I talk about queer anarchism and continue into a way of looking at neuroqueer through that

lens. I argue for an anarcha-feminist theoretical impulse in creating relationships based on love

and mutual aid.

Queer anarchism and disability have similar understandings in the ways they trouble the

boundaries and borders of identity. Classical anarchism is mostly focused on looking at power relations between people, the economy and the state. Feminist theory adds to this by encompassing the idea that gender is not natural, stable or “innate” and queer theory opens this up further. Queer theory opens up a space to critique how we relate to each other socially in a distinctly different way than typical anarchist practice. Queer theory understands people in relation to the normal and the deviant and troubles those borders surrounding identity instead of simply focusing on issues of economy and capitalism. Queer theory seeks to disrupt the “normal” with the same impulse that anarchists do with relations of hierarchy, exploitation, and oppression. We can use queer theory to conceptualize new relationship forms and social relations that resist patriarchy and other oppressions by creating a distinctly “queer-anarchist” form of social relation. I see this intersect with disability theory in how both perspectives de-stabilize what it seen as biologically normal or natural in the physical body and identity. Identity exists on a continuum of experiences and not in discrete binaristic terms.

I ground this queer-anarchist understanding in some of my favorite anarchist theorists:

Peter Kropotkin, Emma Goldman and Gustav Landeur. The classical anarchist Peter Kropotkin

in his book Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution critiques social Darwinism’s conclusions that the

“fittest” in nature are those that compete and dominate over others. Kropotkin writes, “[If] we resort to an indirect test, and ask Nature: “Who are the fittest: those who are continually at war with each other, or those who support one another?” we at once see that those animals which acquire habits of mutual aid are undoubtedly the fittest”[1]. From this, we can see the roots of

relationships built on the strength of community interdependence which contrasts with a

capitalist logic of individualist production.

I find the work of Gustav Landauer and Emma Goldman also compelling in theorizing

the kinds of relationships I believe we should create. Landauer in Revolution and Other Writings writes that “The state is a social relationship; a certain way of people relating to one another. It can be destroyed by creating new social relationships; i.e., by people relating to one another differently.”[2] And Emma Goldman in Anarchism and Other Essays writes about free love. She discusses the power of love, writing “Man has subdued bodies, but all the power on earth has been unable to subdue love. Man has conquered whole nations, but all his armies could not conquer love.”[3] From these writings, I find that social relationships based on radical love and a shared sense of community create a model for the kind of world I wish to create.

I have recently asked myself the question what is it that we are supposed to be able to do

under capitalism and for what reason? It is not simply that we are to produce labor or to consume

goods. We participate in this system that has been intentionally structured to create power differentials that reinforce social difference designed to divide us. I see the way this system works too in how I have internalized ableism about how I link work and production with my value as a person and also see this ideology in the professional work that I do working in mental

health social services. I feel as if I cannot take sick days for my mental health and feel pressure

to be a “good” worker.

So what are we to do with this to combat this practically? I find the work of Liat Ben-

Moshe in her essay “Queer-Cripping Anarchism” particularly refreshing. She writes that

“through a queer-crip lens we should perhaps focus more on DIT—do it together. The focus on

independence, we would argue, is an adoption of capitalist values. […] This ideology, however,

is a lie as all of us are interdependent and rely on each other not only for our food, shelter, and clothing, but also for our emotional, physical, and intellectual needs.”[4] This is a critique on a

prevalent individualist punk ethos of DIY or do-it-yourself and articulates what I feel we must

have in the relationships we build with each other. To me, being in community means that we

must create a space where we are accepted, supported and loved and we cannot participate in a

meaningful world unless we do it together. Unless we do it together, we cannot do it ourselves.

---

[1] Kropotkin, Petr. Mutual Aid, a Factor of Evolution. London: William Heinemann, 1902. Print.

[2] Landauer, Gustav and Gabriel Kuhn. Revolution and Other Writings: A Political Reader.  Oakland, CA: PM Press. 2010. Print.

[3] Goldman, Emma. Anarchism and Other Writings. New York: Mother Earth Association. 1917. Print. 

[4] Ben-Moshe, Liat, Anthony Nocella II and A.J. Withers. "Queer-Cripping Anarchism:

Intersections and Reflections on Anarchism, Queerness and Dis-ability". Queering

Anarchism: Addressing and Undressing Power and Desire. Oakland, CA. AK Press: 2012. Print.

Schizo-Queer, By Praecoxious Queer

Schizo-Queer

By Praecoxious Queer

Author is a schizoaffective, queer, genderqueer, Latin@ witch living in Tacoma, Washington pursuing undergraduate degrees in Gender and Queer Studies and Political Theory. Aspirations include graduate school and an eventual visit to family in Argentina.

Abstract: This piece is an expository, associative description of a tendency within neuroqueer thought to undermine the expectations and norms governing behavior for particular neurotypes. Aiming to avoid harsh definitional maneuvers, I hope to offer a wager to neuroqueer whereby it may embrace/enjoy what I theorize as schizoqueerness to make salient the political and communitarian value of fragmentation, both as a method for escaping systems of constraint and control but also as a method for bringing communities of resistance together in a strengthened commitment to intersectionality. Positing fragmentation as foundational to some modes of consciousness or perception rather than as a contingent affliction befalling some and not others and avoiding the temptation to position whole-ness or holity as beneficial or “natural”, I hope that this piece may deepen the redemptive possibilities of neuroqueer by offering schizoqueerness as a tool within conceptual repertoires of a neuroqueer vocabulary.

“Queer thinkers have brought into sharper focus than ever before the problematic nature of what we nevertheless continue to take for granted: the very notion and value of community itself. And it is in doing that that queers should command the attention of straights—that is, not because we have anything to tell them about the value of relationships or community … but rather because of our exemplary confusion”

--Leo Bersani, Is the Rectum a Grave? And Other Essays

I remember when I realized I was not straight. I also remember when, though I wouldn’t think of it this way at the time, and still don’t all the time, I realized that I “hear voices.” I know when I decided I was queer: but I never decided I was schizoaffective. I was told that I am. I now decide that I am schizoqueer, deploying a tendency within neuroqueerness to queer the neurotype offered by medical science to explain the phenomenology of schizophrenia through an intentional refusal of the normalizing forces at work in a social sphere embrocated by psychiatrization.

I decide I am schizoqueer when I reflect upon the reality of my psychosis. And when I say the reality of my psychosis, I do not mean the reality of my experience as a psychosis in the terms of medicine; rather, I queerly inflect reality to the effect that I mean: my psychosis was and is real but remains a psychosis nonetheless. Schizoqueerness will therefore be concerned with queering not only the expectations of a given neurotype, but also must be concerned with queering the construction of reality as reality.

Through this essay, I have chosen to resist the imperative to provide a strict definition of neuroqueerness. What I offer instead is nothing but an exposition of certain tendencies already at work within neuroqueerness; I hope to persuade any who read this of another, partial, but nonetheless insistent imperative toward fragmentation operative in the communitarian efforts of neuroqueerness, a tendency that I hope to amplify and make visible through such poetic exposition.

I will not pretend to hold the answer to the riddle of schizophrenia or psychosis. I will not pretend that I know anything about the generalities or formal structures at work within what it is that we call “schizophrenia,” and I will not pretend that what I hope to articulate here is anything but phenomenological description of what this experience may be. However, I refuse to cast off the experiences of psychosis; I refuse to relent to the pacifying sway of doctors who will tell me that this psychosis-reality is in, fact, a fiction; there is value in which I experience insofar as it informs my action.

i.               The world is ruled by straight people, for straight people|straight people bash me at every corner|the corner becomes a coroner, when? Well: I hear them talking about me, to me, reminding me of…my queerness, their straightness….

“Sir, have you ever had any delusions of persecution?”

“I’m not a sir, please do not call me that” per-se-cu-tion lo-cu-tion per-SIR-cution Sir sir sir sir sir sir sir sir sir sir sirrrrrrrrrrrrprise demise, reprise!

“Sir, have you ever experienced auditory hallucinations?”

                                    ii. Is this the condition of Being

                                                      queer? In the absence of the words to state

iii. that I know what it is I am talking about,

 I can only

recourse to re-course the whole syntax

of this thing that is the state, or “this reality.”

The Greek word “schitzein,” from which we get the prefix “schizo,” refers to an act of splitting articulated in the verbal mode, which is to say it describes a doing. Like “queer,” it is an action, not a mode of being; it is, in a sense, a process of splitting. “Schizo” becomes in other utterances a noun-as-slur describing one who is split, but also one who is split off (from us), one whose personality is split (in two, or more), or one (really several) who is/are ‘psycho’. Like “queer” and “crip,” then, terms of violence reclaimed as words and strategies of resistance, “schizo” names a sometimes futural, often anti-social, affectively ambiguous method that can also be a way to split a thing, whether that means to split it off from resources of domination, split it off from the privileges it may enjoy, split against an erasure, naming a further division within any project aspiring to universality: a way of doing that is both an un-doing (of something whole/”complete”) and the rearrangement of the parts of a thing to the effect that the thing itself, formerly whole, is no longer the same, has become different and queer, a thing has been made schizo. 

What I hope to articulate is the possibility of a schizoqueerness, to offer “neuroqueerness” a wager whereby it might not only be broadened definitionally or conceptually, but also to deepen it by bringing a schizomatic tendency of internal fragmentation, to consider the force of fragmentation as generative of affective tendencies that may be deployed toward social and political ends.

 Here fragmentation must not be conceived of as a factionalist turning-away from one another: to reproduce such a narrative would legitimate the entire discourse that has tended toward the forcible hospitalization and incarceration of schizophrenics/schizoaffectives and others with Schizophrenia Spectrum Disorders.

Rather, the wager of schizoqueerness is an opportunity to delve into the depths of community-making, to consider “why do we desire to come together when coming together is itself so terrifying?”

To schizoqueer something is: to analyze and sometimes reverse, or, alternately, re-verse, the processes whereby identitarian similarities and the pragmatic demands of political engagement may disappear the productions of suffering, isolation, alienation, and loneliness intrinsic to the naming of a community/consciousness united and named as such, where integrity or wholeness are posited on the side of typicality, banality, and therefore on the side of terror? That will have to do for now. But we can’t let this attempt at articulation come to limit schizoqueer critique.

By all this I mean to ask: what are the reparative possibilities of splitting itself, what might splitting signify when schizo is itself split off from its use as a weapon of domination, and re-versed in a tone dis-affect(able) to the melodies of an architecture of inaccessibility, when this architecture is broadened to include reality, the construction of reality, itself?

Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari take one thousand plateaus to make the same argument stated at the beginning of Anti-Oedipus, that: “The code of delirium or of desire proves to have an extraordinary fluidity … It might be said that the schizophrenic passes from one code to the other, that [they] deliberately scramble all the codes, by quickly shifting from one to another, according to the questions asked [them], never giving the same explanation” (Deleuze and Guattari, Anti-Oedipus, 15).

But what is this insistence on explanatory drift, whereby the schizo is presumed to offer ever-new explanations for constantly variant codes of being? What is salient about schizo in schizoqueer is the expansion of psychotic fragmentation into the conceptual domain of a political weapon or tool. For Deleuze, Guattari, and a whole host of thinkers influenced by their work, this element of delirium is coded into schizophrenia and therefore the schizophrenic themselves drifts from the explanations they themselves have offered before, in the past.  

But do we deliberately scramble these codes?

                  iv. Do I choose to engage this psychosis?

How can it be that my very existence scrambles every code, when all I can do is lock the door to my bedroom—check the windows, look for the crowd gathered beneath my house screaming Faggot! Sissy! Queer!—how is it that Deleuze and Guattari can posit this delirious nature of schizophrenic thought when my schizophrenic psychosis anchors itself around the very same, similar and recurrent experiences of antiqueerness; experiences which, too much for my childhood, adolescent consciousness to resolve by any way aside from what must have been only a total and absolute repression at the level of experience, and locked them away into a domain of my psyche so totally foreign to myself that it haunts in the form of, at times, persecutory, “delusional” feelings of subordination, annihilation?

v. What wager had I gambled when I became persuaded by the delirium conjured from within my own being? Was it that

 I knew this would happen? I was told this would happen? Do I not invite this fragmentation by failing—but what/who is it “I”/we fail?

(If hallucinations are my mind’s compensation, is it compensating for my queerness? Is my queerness not then an impairment that becomes disability, insofar as it necessitates this compensation?)

Against this assumption, I cannot and will not posit delirium as foundational to my experience of psychosis, fragmentation, or schizophrenia. On the contrary, I must posit my queerness as an aspect of my disability. My disability is therefore queer; my disability is neurological, or at least all my psychiatrists think so; therefore, is my queerness, as disability, wired into the cortexes of my brain, and, if so, what must I now think, reconsidering all the theories of performativity I had learned in Gender Studies courses, reading feminist theories?

Delirium may occur in some, it may manifest at times, but the explanatory drifting instantiated by Deleuze and Guattari offers little by way of reparative possibilities for schizos who, queerly, nonetheless desire a community, a queer community, a community which may itself queer the very typicalities which underlie the construction of reality as inaccessible. In other words: by deploying neuroqueerness within the frame of schizoqueerness, simultaneously offering schizoqueerness the queering of neurotypicalities implied within neuroqueerness, l hope that this deepening of the neuroqueer community can be the starting point for a new, queer orientation within schizophrenic thought.  Situating schizoqueerness as my neuroqueerness is how I re-verse the narratives of performativity that were themselves thrown into delirium in my experience of psychosis. My queerness, then, becomes disabled in the course of engaging with a reality architecturally structured by co-constitutive forces of straightness (which make our understanding of reality narrow, confining) and neurotypicality (which summon a naturality to one mode of experience while pathologizing others as deviant).

If “neuroqueer” can be understood to act as a form of doing, where the actions of people “who are intentionally ‘queering’ their neurotype through a refusal to conform/assimilate […] an assertion of identity, or as a way of asserting an accommodation need without invoking the usual procedural legal channels,” what might such a queering have to offer to bodies not only positioned beyond the “shared” reality architecturally created as inaccessible, but also to modes of consciousness which split from intersubjective reality-creation? I defend that schizoqueerness is a tendency already at work within neuroqueer communities: it is a radicalization of the deployment of disability as a queer act of political resistance, where particular|individual aesthetics, modes of perception, ontologies, modes of consciousness, whole ways of being are summoned by individuals but also the differences of each from the other, uniting these modes/thoughts/beings through the queer “nosology” of neuroqueerness.

In other words: when schizoqueerness comes to be understood as already in conversation with neuroqueerness, what reparative possibilities might the two have to offer one another? What projects become possible when the schizomatic tendency toward re-organization engages with this political inclination located within neuroqueerness, to queer this neurotype by deploying neuro-schizo-queerness as an aegis of resistance?

Imagine: a Rubix Cube rotating upon itself, rotating and re-arranging even the distribution of colors on the surface, the colors themselves sinking into undifferentiation, passing into a depth from which the morass of identity can later come to embellish the surface? This is how I envision a schizomatic tendency operating within a community of neuroqueerness: offering to neuroqueer this velocity, a principle of re-making, making through splitting, splitting which itself strengthens community by providing an impetus for re-making, re-modeling, re-constructing by fragmenting. This means that splitting|fragmenting might be properly understood as a splitmending, the mending of terror through a compensatory splitting that is no longer pathological.  

                  vi. Fragmentation occurs: unable to cope with the tendencies of reality to demand blood,

                                    consciousness wavers: insomnia roils; mania commands—itself

                  vii. Before hopeless, before powerless, in face of the reality-bashing-in|on-me that is what

                                    THEY call “sanity”

                  viii. This is the most beautiful compensation, I could have thought.

Within my “split” consciousness, and even in the harshest throes of a manic psychosis, I never experience myself as several entirely different entities. In the same way, the fragmentation that schizoqueerness offers to neuroqueer should not be taken as a threat to the “singularity” of communities of neuroqueerness, since what this fragmentation has to offer is a coming-together by coming-apart, a coming-apart that reveals our modes of doing neuroqueerness as motivated by this velocity-toward-differentiation: it is, as all psychosis is, a wager where we risk the coherence our selves and our communities in order to deepen the conceptual definitions we offer in the name of lateral inclusion.

I will gamble here on a post-structuralist turn-of-phrase, but, in my florid episodes, any signifier which might name this entity called “myself” that would attempt to unify the fragmentations of consciousness would always only fail to name the experiences of non-existence constitutionally present in many expositions of schizophrenic life.

Language tumbles forward on itself when vocabulary attempts to define any experience of psychosis, recourse to metaphor is insufficient, and simile is rarely satisfying to reflect upon outside the mania of a florid episode. In the same way, any explanation of feelings of loneliness, isolation, alienation, and fragmentation felt by members of any community—whether communities of neuroqueerness or neurotypicality—fail to find themselves represented in the names or values that would come to constitute the community as such. The splitmending tendency of fragmentation, then, should be deployed as a way to bring ourselves closer to one another even as we recognize the conceptual difficulties we have in communication, the differences in realities that we live in, the reality that we are different from one another as well as different from the expectations of hegemonic neurotypicality.

ix. How can we re-turn the phrase, re-verse the tendencies of exclusion, when this tendency is inscribed within reality?

x. Fragmentation has its costs; splitting does not happen without pain, but a splitting is always a chance to do something new with something that was not there before. If neuroqueerness will accept the wager of schizomatizing itself, or embracing|enjoying the schizoqueer flows still hiding, even within communities of neuroqueerness, what new worlds can we, together, create?