Neurodivergent culture and embodied knowledge beyond neoliberal identity politics

Introduction

Over the past 20 years, the neurodiversity movement has grown from a small network of fringe online forums and message boards run largely by autistic individuals to an increasingly inclusive and powerful cultural force. The idea that traits linked to diagnoses like autism and ADHD are not inherently pathological, but instead represent alternate variations of human biological expression, has had an indelible impact on the ways institutions around the world understand and accommodate psychological difference. Transnational companies like Microsoft and Virgin have adopted phrases like “neurodiversity in the workplace” as part of ongoing marketing campaigns to attract a broader range of employees. Medical departments at universities including Stanford and Duke have incorporated similar terminology into their educational programs and conferences, aiming to make them more welcoming for those who think and learn differently. All the while conversations about neurodiversity remain active across digital spheres including social media platforms, websites, blogs and TV shows.

The term neurodiversity is often traced to sociologist Judy Singer’s 1998 thesis research, which combined personal insight from her experiences being autistic with observations from participant research in online communities maintained by autistic individuals. Singer (1998) noticed that the word autism had come to refer to such a broad range of experiences that it was becoming impossible to distill into a single set of symptoms or even traits. Nor could autism be defined by human deficiencies alone. And yet, for many who had either been diagnosed or otherwise come to identify with the term, it had become inseparable from how they thought of and talked about themselves. Autism, Singer observed, had become an identity. Similar to other forms of disability before it (see Jones, 2022), an autistic culture started to emerge around this identity, whereby greater acceptance and more accurate knowledge was sought regarding the diversity of experiences reported by individuals who have often been relegated to the edges of society.

As Singer (2017) explains in a later book, her unique approach to studying the experiences of autistic people was heavily influenced by the work of journalists like Jon Katz and Harvey Blume as well as other writers/activists including Temple Grandin, Donna Williams, Mertijn Dekker and Jim Sinclair. Some accounts trace the history of the neurodiversity movement generally to Sinclair’s (1993) essay, “Don’t Mourn for Us” (see Pripas-Kapit, 2020). Singer (2017) also cites influence from academics theorizing social models of disability that “opposed what they called the Medical Model which locates disability in impairments of individual bodies and seeks cures rather than social change” (p. 10, emphasis in original), taking a social constructionist, rather than realist, approach to disability.

At the same time, Singer maintained a critical distance from many earlier iterations of the social model of disability. Rather than marginalize the significance of biology and medicine wholesale, as earlier movements (e.g., anti-psychiatry) have, Singer (1998) noticed that many autistic individuals online considered “neither social constructionism nor biological determinism adequate on their own, but instead prefer[ed] to make a new synthesis by picking and choosing the best of both worlds” (pg. 40). During the early 2000s, such hybrid models of autism were gradually refined through discussions across online forums, conferences, and message boards like Aspergia, AutAdvo, Aspies for Freedom, The Autist, Autcom, Wrongplanet and Neurodiversity.com (Dyck and Russell, 2020). The result was a new (largely virtual) counterculture for individuals who had, for various reasons, previously been considered social outcasts, mentally ill, or both. Essays about autism as a social disability encouraged such individuals to share concerns and difficulties, reinterpret experiences that would have otherwise been considered pathological, and reimagine what is possible for themselves and others like them.

Today, it has become impossible to mark a clear and distinct boundary around the neurodiversity movement, as experiences related to an increasing number of diagnoses and types of subjectivity have been included under its umbrella. While some advocates offer guidelines for terms associated with the movement (see Walker, 2014), there is no single set of principles that define neurodiversity exhaustively. Contradictions in how neurodiversity is understood across contexts, as well as points of conflict between the neurodiversity movement and the medical model, are further glossed over as both it and autism have become increasingly commodified under neoliberal capitalism (Mcguire, 2013; Runswick-Cole, 2014). With the term neurodiversity circulating unrefereed across popular media, academia, industry, and clinical settings, it is worth questioning whether the core values and principles of the movement out of which it emerged have become obscured, and if so, at what point might a growing plurality of meanings result in a lack of usefulness as a symbol of identity.

Conversations about neurodivergent identity have become as much, if not more, about the politics of affect and emotional life as they are about the brain. While many have reported the neurodiversity movement having a positive influence in their lives, it likewise serves as the target of criticism by a growing range of researchers, advocates, and practitioners. Areas of disagreement regarding its terminology and their relationship to neuroscience have become proxy battles over longstanding ideological differences regarding binaries like nature/society, individualism/collectivism, and body/mind. While themes related to these binaries have a long history throughout academia, the neurodiversity movement has democratized the sociopolitical questions they evoke, repackaging them in terms of a new psychosocial paradigm that, contrary to popular critique (see, for instance, Vidal & Ortega, 2017), offers concepts that can transcend conventional, oversimplified narratives about disability, mental health, and identity.

After overviewing some common critiques of identity politics and its relationship to the neurodiversity movement, the middle sections of this article build on insights from neurodiversity scholar-activists and cultural theorists to explore how anti-disability discrimination and ableism relate to the ways that more general social expectations are policed under neoliberal capitalism. This sets a foundation for the final section, where these insights are combined with concepts proposed by feminist, post-humanist theorists to argue that the primary reason the neurodiversity movement has become so influential is not because it has established new social categories that can reliably parse one type of brain from another, but because the culture generated through it has successfully altered the way diverse individuals think about, feel into, and relate with their bodies in societies where they have traditionally lacked a sense of belonging. The word, neurotypical—rather than referring to some innate, individual identity—can thus be understood as a set of culturally relative demands to support institutional imperatives to generate capital and police behavior in oneself and others. Such a reframing of both neurodivergent and neurotypical identities allows for a nuanced understanding of how bodily capacities can both shape and be shaped by what can be imagined as possible for oneself and others within a certain kind of (neoliberal) society.

Neurodiversity: Neurological Identity, Collective Advocacy, or Both?

Over the last several decades, identity politics has become an increasingly divisive, yet nonetheless vague, term. Across different contexts, it can refer to a wide range of political positions that take shared experiences of a particular social, cultural, or ethnic group as the point of departure. Some have traced the origins of identity politics, in this sense, to the Black feminist group, the Combahee River Collective, who declared in a 1977 essay that “the most profound and potentially most radical politics come directly out of our own identity, as opposed to working to end somebody else's oppression” (pg. 43). Their intention, however, was not to isolate different groups from one another, ignoring challenges they might share, but to begin their analyses of social power by focusing on how it operates specifically in their own lives. This was around the same time that social identity theory (Tajfel, Henri, and Turner, 1979) and self-categorization theory (Turner, 1985) emerged in UK social psychology circles as novel approaches to rethink relations between language, culture, and sense of self. A common insight offered by these theories is that identity is not simply a personal or individual matter; it is reinforced through culturally specific processes of identification with certain in-groups that can be differentiated for practical reasons from distinct out-groups.

Like autism and its relationship to identity, the term neurodiversity is used in a growing variety of ways. Some use it as a placeholder for a range of neurodevelopmental conditions, including autism, ADHD, and dyslexia (see Lorenz et al., 2017). Others opt for more inclusivity, defining it as a characteristic of any living creature with a central nervous system—akin to biodiversity, although specific to neurological functioning. Neurodivergent scholar Nick Walker (2014) addresses this variability in meaning by distinguishing between what she considers the three most useful meanings of the term: (a) to describe diversity across human body-minds (not just brains), (b) to refer to a particular paradigm of human difference, and (c) to name the corresponding social movement. As a paradigm, Walker explains, neurodiversity can be understood as conceptual framework built on certain presuppositions including, on the one hand, that brain differences are natural and valuable to the human species and, on the other, that common notions about “normal brains” rest on social fictions that have harmed those who, for whatever reason, cannot conform socially without considerable bodily distress. There are thus ethical imperatives built into the neurodiversity paradigm, beyond the idea of neurodiversity as a biological fact, which challenge conventional assumptions that everyone who meets criteria for a neurodevelopmental (or any other psychiatric) diagnosis is necessarily disordered and requires treatment. The neurodiversity movement, then, can include any person or group promoting the values underpinning the neurodiversity paradigm, understood as such.

Walker further distinguishes neurodiversity, as a description of general neurological difference, from the more specific concept of neurodivergence; the latter being an umbrella term that can refer to any pattern of behavior, experience, or ostensive brain activity that diverges from whatever is considered typical functioning by conventional social standards. This, she explains, can include traits that are “largely or entirely genetic and innate,” or those “produced by brain-altering experience, or some combination of the two” (para. 25). Certain forms of neurodivergence, like autism, are considered inseparable from the person’s general experience of the world and are as such considered essential to one’s sense of self. While those in the neurodiversity movement would argue against pathologizing these forms of neurodivergence, it is acknowledged that they can be coupled with undesirable experiences, like inordinate anxiety, overthinking, or depression. Such experiences, however, would be construed as consequences of marginalization in an ableist society as much as, if not more than, effects stemming from any innate condition. Other forms of neurodivergence, like epilepsy, might be regarded as less intrinsic to the identity of the person, with attempts to cure considered more desirable. According to Walker, there is no one-size-fits-all model of neurodivergence. While the concept of neurodivergent identity is largely based on this sense of neurodivergence, I explain below why it is important to maintain a distinction between the terms neurodivergence and neurodivergent insofar as they serve different cultural purposes for those who identity with the neurodiversity movement.

Rethinking Neurotypicality and Neoliberalism as Cultural Expressions of Capitalist Value

In a debate published on the University of Exeter website, Damian Milton (sociologist and autistic/neurodivergent activist) and Sami Timimi (child psychiatrist who is generally critical of the field of psychiatry) cover a wide range of topics related to neurodiversity culture and psychology reflecting much of what has been overviewed so far (Milton & Timimi, 2016). Challenging what he perceives to be a latent essentialism underlying its identity politics, Timimi, for instance, questions why the neurodiversity movement would divide “humanity into ‘neurotypical’ and ‘neurodiverse’ [groups] and [whether] such a categorical division is [even] possible” (para. 5). He then proposes that such an idea “is different to medical diagnostic discourse only in its value judgments about such categorical divisions” (para. 5). Milton disagrees with this characterization of the movement altogether, replying that the “division between neurotypical and neurodivergent (not neurodiverse) is an arbitrary and social one,” adding that:

The term neurotypical originated as a mickey-take of the way medics describe ‘autistic people’– for me it has come to mean an idealised fantastical construction of neoliberal ideology – the ‘mythical norm’ . . . Yes – there are ‘autistic people’ who see this as a distinct biological line – not me – and not many others. (para. 6)

Milton’s longer elaboration on this response reflects a nuanced understanding of neurodivergent identity that does not fit neatly into any critiques of the neurodiversity movement discussed so far. As he explains, there can be no litmus test for neurodivergence in the same way there is no biological test for autism. Rather, neurotypicality exists as what he describes as a ‘mythical norm’ part and parcel with broader ideologies of neoliberal capitalism, reflecting concerns raised by those like Rose and Abi-Rached (2013) and McGuire (2013) about how biologically based narratives regarding selfhood and identity are at the core of most popular models of the self.

This particular use of the term neoliberalism aligns with trends in recent psychological literature (Cosgrove & Karter, 2018; Sugarman, 2015; Teo, 2018) that expand its meaning beyond the conventional sociopolitical sense to explain how structures of governmental authority have gradually become internalized within each citizen’s psyche during the 20th and early 21st centuries. In this way, neoliberalism can be understood as a model for contemporary subjectivity as much as a political platform or guiding ideology. This expanded sense likewise reflects gradual societal transitions from rigid, top-down disciplinary mechanisms like punishment and brute violence—ala Foucault’s (1977) disciplinary societies—to more decentralized systems of regulation, which combine disciplinary techniques with newer mechanisms of self-management—a transition which Deleuze (1992) described as one towards societies of control. As others (e.g., Osbeck, 2004) have explained in more detail, the ideological push to privatize economic markets has thus become a mandate to market (and fashion) oneself, with the individual mind being reconceived as an information processor whose primary purpose is to support this self-marketing.

Historically, such conceptual changes to the term neoliberalism have occurred alongside growing austerity measures and the expansion of insurance mediated mental health care, which authorizes private companies to determine how diagnoses in the DSM are defined as well as which treatments can be implemented and reimbursed for (Cosgrove and Karter, 2018). The mechanisms linking neurotypical culture and neoliberalism under contemporary capitalism are thus psychosocial and economic in nature, operating to both create and enforce perceived lines between normal and abnormal by way of the cultural values we assign to diverse bodies, behaviors, thoughts, and emotions. To call such narratives about neuro-normalcy ideologies or myths, as Milton does above, does not necessarily mean that they present lies as facts—there are certainly statistical norms that can be measured in both biology and human behavior—but that they determine which facts are most culturally relevant and which should be ignored. As Adams et al. (2019) outline, American psychologists historically have served an essential role in upholding the values of this culture of neoliberalism, insofar as notions like individualism, growth, and affect management have been presented as psychological facts rather than cultural artifacts.

Staying true to the initial ideas about neurodiversity outlined by Singer (1998), Milton carves out a middle ground between social constructionism and biological science, noting that if he were pressed to pinpoint an essential distinction between neurodivergent and neurotypical individuals, he would say that:

autistic culture is a subculture that has developed in reaction to being so labelled and the various constructions of ‘autism’. I do think there are also embodied differences between people in terms of ‘disposition’ though, and that some of this has a biological aspect.

As with Sherry’s (2004) discussion about non-essentialist identity across queer theory and disability studies, neither neurodivergent identities nor neurodevelopmental diagnoses are understood by Milton as concrete things that exist somewhere specific in the brains or bodies of individuals. The boundaries around either are fluid, yet Milton emphasizes that each body and hence brain nonetheless possesses singular capacities to sense, experience, and act upon the world. Such embodied dispositions are likewise not static, but shaped variably across social institutions through forms of conditioning that are alternately intentional and unintentional—reflecting contemporary ideas about culture and embodiment in cultural psychology (e.g., Adams et al., 2019).

As social learning theorist Etienne Wenger-Trayner (2013) explains in more detail, such embodied dispositions are essentially what constitute Pierre Bourdieu’s notion of habitus, which Wenger-Trayner describes as the “subconscious aspect of identity” (pg. 112) and contrasts with identity in a more general sense insofar as the latter “involves more negotiated processes of identification” (pg. 112). Wenger-Trayner proposes the idea of communities of practice to ecompass the way social norms, cultural practices, and bodily capacities all contribute to our sense of subjectivity in ways that are too often unacknowledged in psychological literature. For many neurodivergent individuals, for instance, conditions that have shaped their unique embodied dispositions often includes bullying encountered from early in life, which for Milton, personally, started “before [he] was labelled autistic,” being labeled terms ranging from “lazy, stupid, underachiever, BPD, catatonic schizophrenic” to “such nicknames as ‘Frankenstein’ and ‘Herman’ and ‘Bolts’ at school due to the way other children perceived [him].” The way others treated him had nothing to do with psychiatry or biomedical science, Milton suggests, but with the way his bodily comportment and sensations were interpreted as being somehow ‘outside the norm’ by those in his everyday life—something reported by many neurodivergent individuals (Milton & Sims, 2016). Going further, Walker (2021) explains how “most autistics today constantly received the message—again, starting in very early childhood—that the ways they naturally think, feel, move, and communicate are all wrong; that who they are is wrong” (p. 89). Attempts to attribute any and all distress experienced by autistic people to their own neurobiology or genetics is, therefore, bound to ignore a broad range of social, cultural, and economic variables that unavoidably condition human experience in ways that psychological researchers have traditionally struggled to parse.

Queering Neurological Identity by way of Karen Barad’s Concept of Agential Cut

Beyond questioning whether each person’s identity is determined by their brain, or who benefits most from such a conceptualization, there are good reasons to question, on the one hand, whether we can know with certainty what any brain is capable of and, on the other hand, whether knowledge about the brain, mind, and/or body serves the same purposes outside of neuroscience as within. In a series of interviews, Des Fitzgerald (2017) poses similar lines of questioning to neuroscientists directly, learning very quickly that:

despite my own self-consciously bland and uncritical presentation, interviewees from cognitive neuroscience consistently, and often with some vehemence, drew my attention to the problem of false positives, the distance between what their methods measured and what they purported to measure, the degree to which neuroimaging simply replicates what is already known through other means, and even the basic inadequacy of brain imaging to phenomena like autism in the first place. (pp. 67).

Given the inherent limits of brain-imaging technologies and the high degrees of subjectivity involved in interpreting data they produce, critics like Rose and Abi-Rached (2013) have gone even further, describing the “visual imaginary that is the result [of neural imaging as] . . . no different from that of the phrenologists of the 19th century” (p. 79). Essentially, such critiques suggest that the tools available to neuroscientists are, at least at this point in history, relatively blunt and the knowledge we have about the brain not only incomplete but influenced by a range of factors related to culture, history, and economics in ways that double back on, and hence influence, these same domains (see Choudhury et al., 2009).

In Meeting the Universe Halfway, Karen Barad (2007) takes a similarly reflexive and critical approach to scientific research more broadly, suggesting that most attempts on the part of Western academics to create reliable categories of knowledge have presupposed that “the world is composed of individual entities with separately determinate properties,” whether they be atoms, bodies, or monads. Barad explains furthermore that “most forms of realism [e.g., biological determinism] presuppose a metaphysics that takes for granted the existence of individual entities, each with its own roster of nonrelational properties” (pg. 55). In other words, most Western philosophers and scientists have taken for granted that each object in the universe exists independently from all others, possessing attributes unique to it that can be observed and measured apart from its corresponding ecologies.

Drawing on new research across various fields of science, however, Barad paints a much more complex (and perhaps for some, counterintuitive) picture of reality. Here, the building blocks of nature are not pre-existing objects with intrinsic properties, about which scientists invent theories to test; rather, “experimenting and theorizing are dynamic practices that play a constitutive role in the production of objects and subjects and matter and meaning” (p. 56). From this perspective, concepts, objects, and individuals are said to emerge out of complex networks of cultural meaning and physical forces and it is only from within a given ecology, as such, that any object can be observed and categorized as an individual (brain, body, or otherwise). As opposed to attempts at intervention, defined as something that happens to a thing from outside of it, Barad describes scientific knowledge as being constituted through intra-actions that occur, simultaneously, within and in relation to the circumstances needed to produce the object of interest. In other words, researchers unavoidably become part of the ecologies they study to generate meaningful knowledge about the world, but upon doing so, they both change and are changed by the very “things” they intend to objectify through their research.

Barad describes the way otherwise disparate things become simultaneously harmonized and differentiated in this way as an agential cut, signifying that, similar to the concept of neuroqueering described above, agency can be produced momentarily, at once locally and non-locally, through a disidentification with normative forces that might otherwise fade into the background without being noticed. Agency, in this sense, is conceived as a process rather than a thing, which emerges out of a particular sociomaterial arrangement and sets a frame around which certain elements of this arrangement are infused with cultural value. There is, as such, always more matter or force included within any given situation than can be made explicit through existing mediums of human meaning-making, rendering knowledge about nature always partial and our stories about the world incomplete.

Using neuronal receptors cells of stingrays as an example, Barad (2012) alludes to the “mysterious clairvoyancy” biologists are beginning to learn underpins brain processes in general, insofar as such cells appear to act in concert with each other in anticipation of electrochemical reactions that have yet to occur, only to adjust their arrangement in unpredictable ways as new signals arrive. In analogous fashion, Barad explains how lightning is not generated via electricity propelling itself down from the sky, instead “the ground responds next with an upwards signal of its own,” informing the downward electricity where to flow next (pg. 35, italics in original). Within such intra-active ecologies, responsibility for the dynamics of any given situation cannot be attributed to any single element; causality is distributed throughout the local area and conditioned by the ways diverse entities act and react together.

Meeting the notion of neuroqueer halfway, Barad (2012) describes phenomena like those above in terms of “nature’s queer performativity,” not to “invite nonhuman others into the fold of queerness, but to interrogate the binaries that support the divisions that are at stake” (pp. 29–30). In this sense, the universe is (by nature) queer in the way it subverts scientists’ expectations about human constructed categories like identity, essence, and causation, while directly implicating scientists’ subjectivities in the very processes they intend to control and observe. While this certainly does not diminish the value of neuroscience, per se, it does force us to acknowledge certain inescapable limits to claims neuroscientists make about people and their brains. Scientific research, while useful for generating knowledge and creating technology within a certain scope, is necessarily constrained by assumptions unique to each discipline and field of study. In neuroscience, this might include assumptions like “brain areas showing greater glucose metabolism or differential disturbance of hydrogen ions during a particular thought process are causally involved in that thought process” or “thoughts can correctly be attributed to the participants and then that those thoughts are suitable proxies for the behaviors that are the ultimate object of interest” (Longino, 2013, pg. 77). Conclusions about the ways brains, thoughts, and behaviors relate to one another, however, cannot be reached through empirical research alone. They require certain agential cuts on the part of researchers that can sometimes obscure the uncertainty underpinning neuroscientific knowledge.

As aforementioned writers about neurodiversity illustrate, neurodivergent activists have not only shined a spotlight on this uncertainty but relish in the possibilities it affords for recreating oneself, engendering spaces for what can be very novelforms of agential cut. At the very least, such uncertainty warrants a degree of intellectual modesty in line with calls made by growing numbers of feminist scientists and philosophers (see Keller & Longino, 1996) over the last several decades. Donna Haraway (1988), for instance, explains how theorists working towards such a feminist informed materialism:

seek [knowledges] ruled by partial sight and limited voice—not partiality for its own sake but, rather, for the sake of the connections and unexpected openings situated knowledges make possible. Situated knowledges are about communities, not about isolated individuals. The only way to find a larger vision is to be somewhere in particular (p. 590).

Haraway’s concept of situated knowledges, which has become popular in social justice circles (see Grasswick & McHugh, 2021), is meant to underscore the simple fact that every idea we believe to be true—whether it is about a brain, a person, or an atom—must come from somewhere. Some person, somewhere, must perceive and interpret whatever evidence is used as a basis for any truth, and this process will invariably be influenced by more variables than could ever be accounted for by scientific methods alone. In terms of our knowledge about the brain, for instance, neural imaging data cannot generate and interpret themselves. To find meaning in them, neuroscientists must first train their sight over decades by reviewing countless already-generated images, while memorizing the highly technical vocabularies required to identify patterns in the data that laypersons would be unable to perceive at all. In short, what neuroscientists see in ‘the brain’ is unavoidably going to have a different significance within their unique communities of practice than how neurodivergent non-scientists experience their neurological processes, whatever this might be like for them.

The approaches to knowledge construction offered by those like Barad and Haraway could have wide reaching implications for social movements in the vein of the neurodiversity movement, as well as how psychologists think about psychosocial distress more generally (see Traversa, 2022, for more discussion about Barad and psychology). As Barad (2007) explains, it is all too common, even among feminist researchers, for “social variables like gender, race, nationality, class, and sexuality [to be considered] properties of individual persons, thereby reinstalling the metaphysics of individualism” (pg. 57). With obvious overlaps with the concept of intersectionality (see Strand, 2017), discussions about neurodiversity (especially as it relates to the concept of neuroqueer) traverse back and forth across cultural, economic, and scientific fields, challenging common sense notions about how mind relates to the body, and identity to society.

Elaborating further, Barad (2012) suggests that:

what is or isn’t an “in-dividual” is not a clear and distinct matter, and that seems to be precisely the scientific sticking point: the question of the nature of identity is ripe here – it’s what’s so spectacularly exciting from a scientific point of view. (p. 26)

Mind, culture, and matter are always enmeshed in collective ecologies such that it is impossible to neatly separate them into clearly demarcated categories, despite it being at times useful to assume otherwise for convenience. This poses conceptual challenges to the conventional notion of social identity, as an identification with certain pre-determined physical or cultural attributes, which seems to be the true target of many critiques directed at the neurodiversity movement. Rather than premising agency on the autonomy of any individual person or social group, however, Barad’s framework construes agency as a power that emerges out of the transitory coordination of irreducibly different entities and forces. There is no need to either pit the individual against the group or make one dependent on the other—there are more complex and dynamic networks at play.

In terms of neurodiversity, then, conversations about ‘the brain’ are unavoidably also about culture, science, our capacities to think and interact as well as so much more. For neurodivergent identity to continue to have utility for socially marginalized groups, it must allow for an appropriate degree of cultural indeterminacy, whereby those included under its umbrella can become capable of acting fluidly in coordination with each other over and against the normative imperatives of neoliberal capitalism. Just as importantly, though, it must help such groups express collectively the effects stemming from both overt violence and the violence of positivity described above, as well as any associated trauma lingering from such encounters. Diagnostic categories traditionally associated with neurodivergence (e.g., autism, attention-deficit disorder, etc.) have tended to trouble clinicians’ attempts to define them; all the while the bodies to which such diagnoses have been applied continue to exhibit capacities that previous generations of scientists agreed, almost universally, they could not. It is thus also necessary to acknowledge the particular ecologies of knowledge out of which the neurodiversity movement itself emerged, spurred by activists and writers at the edges of society when ideas about the brain were being popularized over the internet and around the world to an extent never before possible (see Rose and Abi-Rached, 2013). For most of these activists, the goal has never been to create a framework that satisfies academics and/or mental health professionals; their emphasis has always been on supporting marginalized communities through grassroots education and engendering cultures in which those who experience the world differently can reimagine what is possible for themselves.

Donna Haraway’s conceptualization of situated knowledges goes beyond questions about meaning and interpretation, designating an integral role for the whole body-mind-culture system (and not just the brain) in how we think, talk, and feel ourselves into existence. From this perspective, capacities for emotion, affect, and sensation in general are considered as important to sense of self as those for cognition and rationality, with each of our variable styles of thought and feeling rendered meaningful only insofar as they are distributed throughout our bodies and into the social world where they link us with one another in community. The intersectionality underpinning neuroqueer disidentification presents possibilities to counter taken-for-granted assumptions about what constitutes identity within neoliberal politics. It likewise illustrates why the neurodiversity movement has become so successful, given how it continues to evolve across intra-actions with diverse individuals and emerging technologies and integrates a growing variety of experiences and cultures in ways that sustain vital life-threads.

To say that the neurodiversity movement can engender community through a counterculture of embodied knowledge is thus meant to highlight how it provides otherwise marginalized individuals new ways of imagining what their unique body-minds are capable of, all the while reorienting their actions in relation to the world and allowing them to better anticipate each other’s needs and desires. The irony that such a social movement is sustained largely by those who scientists have, even quite recently, described as devoid of basic human capacities like empathy and understanding other’s motivations should be evident to anyone familiar with this troubling history. Unfortunately, insofar as assumptions about what constitutes ‘normal behavior’ remain tethered to neoliberal models of individual identity, certain categories of people are more likely than others to be marked as abnormal and, in turn, excluded from public discourse simply because their embodied expressions trouble the status quo.

Conclusion

This article has explored how the neurodiversity movement can provide a sense of culture for marginalized individuals to rethink what is possible beyond the boundaries of their individual brains and facilitate community despite ableist maxims reinforced by mechanisms of neoliberal capitalism. Rather than follow popular critiques of the movement that evaluate it in terms the accuracy with which it represents characteristics of certain individual people and/or their brains, this article has argued it would be more relevant to consider how neurodivergent identity can facilitate a certain form of agency that emerges out of complex ecologies that can include trauma, ableism, diagnostic terminology, neuroscientific knowledge, and economic imperatives related to capitalism. Given our increasingly global capitalist society where norms related to positivity and ability are continually policed by both oneself and others via intra- and inter-personal interactions in everyday life, I have suggested that the neurodiversity movement can present opportunities for reimagining agency by way of challenging the neuroscientific status quo and the cultural assumptions underpinning it, which have come to dominate global discussions about neurological development and disability.

The neurodiversity movement has spawned a unique form of identity politics, evoking important questions about the body and society that are too often ignored in popular critiques of it. Many of such critiques are aimed at the way neurodivergence is sometimes defined as an act of identification made with some particular group or type of brain, implying that neurodivergence is an essential identity inherent to some people but not others. This article, by contrast, has drawn on neurodivergent activists and scholars to trace a concept of neurodivergence as a process of disidentification rather than identification, a verb representing action in opposition to neoliberal norms (e.g., neuroqueering) rather than a noun or stable trait. In this sense, what it means to be neurodivergent will necessarily differ depending on how the dominant culture (e.g., neoliberalism) conditions what is considered possible for one’s own body within the local community. As a nexus of biological, psychological, and sociocultural events, the intersectionality of neurodivergent identity complicates any attempt to distill it to a certain set of attributes in ways that mirror the history of neurodevelopmental diagnoses themselves. While some critics have alluded to Audre Lorde’s (1983) famous maxim that “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” (see Russell, 2020, pg. 94) as a way to challenge the neurodiversity movement’s use of brain-related vocab, neurodivergent activists like Nick Walker and Damian Milton highlight a subterranean potential in the intersection of neuroscience and activism that has until now remained mostly latent in contemporary scientific models of the brain. Exemplifying Barad’s concept of an agential cut, the queering influence that the neurodiversity movement has had on how we can think, talk about, and identify with our bodies highlights new cultural arrangements for living and expressing life together, particularly for those who have traditionally been excluded from public discourse about what their unique bodies are capable of.