Neuro+Queer but not Neuroqueer?

[genderjumper]

Just learned that the person who first coined "neuroqueer" isn't someone whose work I want to be boosting, but I haven't heard any viable alternatives, so I'm wrestling with that.

There is a demonstrated correlation between neurodivergent traits and LGBTQ+ identities, so it only makes sense to have an intersectional term for someone whose neurodivergence affects their interest/ability in performing assigned gender. I doubt she's going to make any money off it at this point, but is that justification enough for continuing to use it?

Comments

[flamingsword]

It’s a useful term that few people who use it know the origins of. I certainly don’t!

I think that stopped clocks are right twice a day, and that if we held out for moral rectitude in inventors and coiners of phrases, we would be waiting a long time for anyone to pass the bars we would wind up setting. So I’ll use the term until the creator gets unmasked as an actual fascist or something. I will draw lines around some stuff (eventually), but mostly I am cool with using any available tools to deconstruct kyriarchal hegemony.

[sabethea]

Nick Walker? Why is she problematic?

[genderjumper]

It came up in a virtual community where I participate, let me see if I can paraphrase:

Dr. Walker seems to embrace some perspectives that are strongly racist, classist, and ableist, and some portion of BIPOC folks avoid using "neuroqueer" specifically because of them.

Having not read her work myself, I don't have much to say other than I trust these community members and am trying to engage cautiously.

Alongside that conversation, others have mentioned that "neuroqueer" is a fairly natural term that has separately emerged in French and German, so there is potential for the term to emerge and stand on its own.

I'm just trying to slow my roll and think more critically since I never got around to reading up as much as I had hoped.

[sabethea]

Ah, thanks. Most of the second hand reviews of her work are positive but then they’re probably written by abled cis white folk, sooooo…

Extending the confusion

[genderjumper]

One of the folks I've been interacting with elsewhere did highlight this link to Nick Walker, which Dr. Walker herself says is one of her most cited: https://neuroqueer.com/neurodiversity-terms-and-definitions/

It sounds like the critiques are not so much about Nick Walker saying and doing things explicitly hostile so much as being deep in an overly prescriptive, highly academic perspective and resisting criticism about how many folks get left out when that discourse happens at a high-level.

I've also been corrected that Dr. Walker prefers to think of "neuroqueering" the verb rather than a noun, though I'm not sure if that's a) true for others who have spontaneously come up with the same term or b) realistic given its widespread visibility already.

More ambivalences about self-applying the term, but now for new reasons! [sigh]