Neuroqueer theory and what it is to be human
I understand now that boundaries between noise and sound are conventions. All boundaries are conventions, waiting to be transcended. One may transcend any convention if only one can first conceive of doing so.
David Mitchell, Cloud Atlas
The question of what it is to neuroqueer oneself is a question of the limits on humanity. What are the boundaries around what constitutes a human? Is there a limit to what a human can be?
Humanity and me: Neuroqueer Humanness
To be human is to be me. To be me is to understand the human experience through the bodymind I exist within. This experience constitutes my life. Therefore, to neuroqueer is to fundamentally alter my human Self. I am testing the conventions that we have been taught define a human. Any change to my neurocognitive style fundamentally alters my humanity. By neuroqueering we are creating new iterations of human life.
Ocean and Air: Neuroqueer Mortality
Buddhist Teacher Daisaku Ikeda suggests that we imagine life as a wave. It takes form within the ocean, follows it’s path, and eventually crashes into the shore before returning to the ocean. If the wave is a human life, the question that lies beneath my own journey through neuroqueer theory and practice is this:
How could one change their trajectory? Further to that, what if I wish to be air rather than water? Does the definition of what it is to be human restrain me in the ocean?
The boundary between air and liquid is a matter of the behaviour of it’s constituent atoms.
Atoms and Rhizomes
I have written in the past of the Autistic Rhizome. Our own mind can be thought of as rhizomatic. Each neuron connected to the others through intricate paths. Each experience and thought linked to the others. Each point like the atoms of the wave. My human life takes form.
Neuroqueering allows me to change the behaviour of that rhizomatic thought structure, moving freely between solid, liquid, gas. Earth, water, and air.
Undefining Humanity
If one can transcend the boundaries definition of what it means to be human, we are doing more than writing a new definition. We are undefining what it means to be human. Through intentional acts of subverting meaning and intention, we deconstruct the masters house of Walker’s (2021) Neuroqueer Heresies.
We deconstruct the boundaries around what it means to be human. Thus, neuroqueering is more than the changing of one’s neurology, or the alteration of one’s embodiment. It is embracing a reality within which the only boundaries, the only convention, on what it is to be human are the limits of one’s imagination.
Isn’t that a liberating thought?
References
Mitchell, D (2004) Cloud Atlas. Sceptre
Walker, N. (2021) Neuroqueer heresies : notes on the neurodiversity paradigm, autistic empowerment, and postnormal possibilities. Autonomous Press
