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It’s an useful term given that, along the spectrum we have more LGTBQIA+ people around in terms of percentage. The correct word here would be neurodivergence, rather than neurodiversity. An individual, by definition, cannot be “diverse” or “have diversity.” And, as I increasingly find myself in the position of reviewing other people’s writing on neurodiversity – grading student papers, reviewing book submissions or submissions to journals, consulting on various projects, or even just deciding which pieces of writing I’m willing to recommend to people – I’m getting tired of running into the same basic errors over and over. Neurodiversity is a biological fact. It’s not a perspective, an approach, a belief, a political position, or a paradigm. That’s the neurodiversity paradigm (see below), not neurodiversity itself. In addition to being thoroughly neuroqueer, these fabulous books are also gripping space opera tales grounded in the best classic sci-fi traditions. Hoffmann has also produced a lot of extraordinarily good and thoroughly neuroqueer short stories and poetry, much of which can be found in the collection Monsters in My Mind.
On the first day of that class, Dr. Grand summed up the underlying premise of somatic psychology like so: The psyche is somatically formed and organized. Meaning, in other words, that one’s psyche and selfhood are developed through processes of bodily experience and action, with the implied corollary that new bodily experience and new habits of bodily action have the power to effect significant mental transformations. From the Houses of the Kiki Ballroom Scene, to the sisterhood forged in Lesbian Bars, Queers have experience creating home and family in a world not built for us. To come the the point, then: Neuroqueer Theory is what emerges when one takes an approach to the topic of neurodiversity that’s based largely in the fields of queer theory and somatic psychology.Like Raymaker, Hoffmann’s also got a delightful story in Spoon Knife 3, “The Scrape of Tooth on Bone,” which genre-wise might be best described as “neuroqueer steampunk.” Shannon, D. B. (2019). ‘What could be feminist about sound studies?’: (in)Audibility in young children’s soundwalking. Journal of Public Pedagogies. (4) (Open Access)
Shannon, D.B. (2023) ' ‘Trajectories matter’: affect, neuroqueerness and music research-creation in an early childhood classroom.' Qualitative Inquiry, 29(1) pp. 200-211. This left autistic activists with the question of how best to describe the nature of our minority status. Being autistic isn't an ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, religion, or nationality—so what sort of minority group were we? Autistic scholar Judy Singer, writing on this topic in the late 1990s, provided an answer when she coined the term neurodiversity. 1 Just as humanity is ethnically diverse, and diverse in terms of gender, sexual orientation, and numerous other qualities, humanity is also neurocognitively diverse, and autistics are a neurominority group. I coined the term neurominority a few years after Singer gave us the term neurodiversity 2; it seemed like an obvious extension of Singer's concept, and I'm sure others also came up with it independently. Another essential term is neurodivergent, coined by Kassiane Asasumasu somewhere around the year 2000; to be neurodivergent is to diverge from dominant cultural standards of neurocognitive functioning. 3 So, as a public service, I’m posting this list of a few key neurodiversity-related terms, their meanings and proper usage, and the ways in which I most commonly see them misused. NEURODIVERSITY What It Means: Truman, S. E. and Shannon, D. B. (April 2021). Counter-archives of feeling: In-school speculations on queer pasts and anticolonial futures. American Education Research Association (AERA). Virtual conference. National Professional Qualification of Middle Leadership, Institute of Education (UCL), 2016 (part-time).
Mind is an embodied phenomenon. The mind is encoded in the brain as ever-changing webs of neural connectivity. The brain is part of the body, interconnected with the rest of the body by a vast network of nerves. The activity of the mind and body creates changes in the brain; changes in the brain affect both mind and embodiment. Mind, brain, and embodiment are intricately entwined in a single complex system. We're not minds riding around in bodies, we're bodyminds. 4
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