Nick Walker - Neuroqueer Heresies: Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Possibilities

When I first got involved in online autistic communities back in 2003, the word neurodiversity had already been around for a little while. Very few non-autistic folks had heard of it yet, but autistic rights activists were having some exciting conversations about the words implications. Over the next dozen years or so, through my participation in these conversations and through my published writings, I had the honor of contributing in some small way to the emergence of a new cultural paradigm. I took to calling it the neurodiversity paradigm , a name which has caught on in some circles.

While the myriad conversations that shaped the neurodiversity paradigm were unfolding, I finished my undergraduate degree and then my masters degree, and began my doctoral studies. In the papers I wrote for my grad school classes, I explored the phenomenon of neurodiversity and the ways it interconnected with other phenomena like embodiment and gender. In one of those papers, in 2008, I coined the term neuroqueer , which became central to my work and eventually became meaningful to a surprising number of other people, too.

In 2013 I created the website Neurocosmopolitanism as a public repository for my short essays on autism and the neurodiversity paradigm. Some of those essays ended up having a lasting influence on neurodiversity-related discourse and on the emergent field of Neurodiversity Studies. By the Fall of 2016 Id drifted away from producing such essays, to focus on finishing my doctoral dissertation and then on writing speculative fiction, comics, and the occasional academic book chapter. I left the essays sitting on the Neurocosmopolitanism site until I replaced that whole site with my current site, Neuroqueer . For several years now, fans of my online writingsa wildly diverse bunch ranging from widely-published scholars to queer neurodivergent teenshave been reaching out to ask me when the heck Im going to put my work on neurodiversity and neuroqueerness into a book.