• Relationalities of Refusal: Neuroqueer Disidentification and Post-Normative Approaches to Narrative Recognition

    Author(s):
    Christopher Griffin (see profile)
    Date:
    2022
    Group(s):
    American Literature, Critical Disability Studies, Narrative theory and Narratology, Queer Theory Group, Speculative and Science Fiction
    Subject(s):
    Neurodiversity, American literature--African American authors, Novels, Queer theory, Narrative inquiry (Research method), Dialectic, Autism, Speculative fiction, Afrofuturism, Decolonization in literature
    Item Type:
    Article
    Tag(s):
    critical disability studies, disidentification, master/slave dialectic, neo-slave narratives, neuronormativity, Neuroqueer, post-normative, recognition, Rivers Solomon, subjectivity
    Permanent URL:
    https://doi.org/10.17613/6yfv-x618
    Abstract:
    The proliferation of work by autistic writers continues apace, defying a long and multidisciplinary tradition of constructing autistic people as lacking the capacity for narration. To study neurodivergent literature, then, is to witness the refusal of these exclusionary narrative conventions, and to register the ideological presuppositions that underpin pathologization. In this article, I engage with recent insights from Neurodiversity Studies to explore the connections between narrative neuronormativity and other discourses of oppression, especially those that have generated racialized, gendered, and colonial narratives of desubjectification. Focusing on the neuroqueer movement – an emergent practice of disidentification that refuses the interpellations of neuronormativity, ableism, heteronormativity, and cisnormativity – I discuss the concept of allism, arguing that this satirical critique of pathologization harbors a deconstructive force that denaturalizes the dialectic of recognition. Pursuing the discursive context and theoretical implications of this critique, I provide a short genealogy of narrative neuronormativity, connecting the operation of the dialectic in the early novel to the clinical texts of child psychology. To demonstrate the neuroqueer subversion of this tradition, I then read An Unkindness of Ghosts, by Rivers Solomon, a text that stages a disidentification with storytelling. Protagonist Aster’s neuroqueer refusal reveals a similarity between the construction of Blackness as an ontological foil for whiteness, and the construction of autism as a standard of disordered sociality that neuronorms can be measured against. My reading of Unkindness suggests that the extant techniques of literary narratorship are political instruments that will, unless repurposed, continue to disseminate these dispossessive dialectics.
    Metadata:
    xml
    Published as:
    Journal article     Show details
    Publisher:
    South Atlantic Modern Language Association
    Pub. Date:
    September 2022
    Journal:
    South Atlantic Review
    Volume:
    87
    Issue:
    3
    Page Range:
    89 - 110
    ISSN:
    0277335X
    Status:
    Published
    Last Updated:
    5 months ago
    License:
    Attribution
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