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

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The author’s arguments against person-first language are eye opening and I am grateful to have been given this perspective. They are no more neurotypical than they are a chemical engineer, because they have the potential to become one in 20 years. i had a few issues with the writing itself, but i would still recommend this one to anyone interested in the connections between queerness and neurodivergence. This book summarizes where we are at now with the "divide" between professionals using the pathology paradigm (medical model of disability) and the neurodiversity paradigm (social model of disability). She coined a lot of the words, or knows the people who did, and gives difinative histories and meanings for the words.

If your personal and professional life intersects with neurodivergent folx (and we are kind of everywhere, I'm afraid) then this is a rocking good guide to the future we're imagining for ourselves.

Walker encourages the reader to be their true, authentic, oddball selves, regardless of what socio-cultural expectations dictate. She's also a professor of psychology at California Institute of Integral Studies, an aikido teacher, and a lifelong zen practitioner. Autistics and other neurodiverse people' could be a powerful thing to say, depending on the other words that follow. If you are Autistic, or care about someone who is Autistic, or in any way an outlier, this book is for you and for them. But unfortunately, by the end of the book, I felt that there were too many chapters with somewhat patronizing over-explanations, and chapters almost entirely filled with ranting.

The kids smearing feces on the wall of the bathroom at target because they were asked to walk to the bathroom because their caregiver could smell the soiled diaper, or dropping their pants to feel the fabric of the couch against their testicles (I’m citing examples all of my own personal experience). I loved the part about how disability should be looked at from the lens of society’s inability to accommodate neurodivergent people.This book has so many great insights and has forced me to begin the work of undoing my internalized pathology paradigm. It is full of Dr Walker's seminal essays which have been incredibly influential in neurodiversity theory, alongside new commentaries and essays with a focus on neuroqueering. While I was annoyed at the extra explanations before each essay, I actually started to really enjoy reading the thinking behind each idea, term, and piece of writing Walker came up with.

As an academic/theoretical book, it can come across as a bit abstract, pedantic, and dry for those (like me) who prefer more interweaving of narrative. This is because an entire population is diverse, including both those with extra privilege and those who don't conform to normative standards.Her expansive definition of what it means to engage in "neuroqueering," and to "be neuroqueer," is refreshing. There is a lot more to say in terms of how Walker also looks at the idea of queer and Neuroqueer as its own paradigm, getting underneath binary ideas of gender and sexuality, but I want to let you know mostly that this is a brilliant book, and if you are interested in any form of neurodiversity, a must read. Early in the text, for example, Walker states the “pathology paradigm consistently results in autistic people being stigmatized, dehumanized, abused, harmed, and traumatized by professionals and often their own families. Walker is co-founder and Managing Editor of the worker-owned indie publishing house Autonomous Press, and has co-edited and contributed to multiple volumes of the annual Spoon Knife neuroqueer lit anthology published by Autonomous Press' NeuroQueer Books imprint.

This was clearly a collection of writings for vastly different purposes (academia, casual blog posts), written at highly different reading levels.Not an easy read, but worth the trouble (and there is the occasional Princess Bride and Monty Python reference thrown in to keep you entertained! For fifty years, she has trained to slay wyrms - but none have appeared since the Nameless One, and the younger generation. Her nonfiction explores the edges and intersections of queerness, neurodivergence, embodiment, and creative transformation.