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

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As someone who has sought to be the latter for many years, I still come away with several important reminders and tweaks I need to make to my approach and internal attitudes.

Neuroqueer Heresies provides hope—even a demand—of a more liberating future for Autistic and neurodivergent people. The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. They are no more neurotypical than they are a chemical engineer, because they have the potential to become one in 20 years. As well as educating readers about terminology related to neurodiversity, you will learn about the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic empowerment, and postnormal possibilities—a challenge to normativity.

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. And yet I'm not a fan of this approach, which is likely to alienate laypeople who would absorb more of her message if conveyed with less pedantry and more compassion. The early essays were flawed and frustrating to read, and I am disappointed that they were published without being edited significantly or rewritten. This book has MANY typos—mostly just missing words that made me reread several sentences multiple times.

But be prepared to sift through vast amounts of over-explaining and a chunky chapter filled with ranting about the incorrect use of language. 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. The more individuals neuroqueer, the more we can neuroqueer spaces and cultures, and resist neurodivergent people being made neurominorities. Throw Away the Master’s tools is a popular essay detailing the reasons we need radical changes to improve the lives of Autistic people.

This was clearly a collection of writings for vastly different purposes (academia, casual blog posts), written at highly different reading levels. As this was actually a collection of essays I felt it sometimes lacked flow and occasionally felt like it needed a tad more embellishment. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. 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.

I was planning on just dipping in and out of this but ended up reading it from start to finish in a day.And finally, I got a little annoyed by Walker explaining the background behind every essay and where it was originally published, etc. Nick Walker has been part of the neurodiversity movement for the last couple of decades, and knows people who were there at the beginning when autistic people started meeting and building culture online.

If you are new to these concepts and wondering what neurodiversity actually is, what each of the terms—such as neurodivergent or neurodiverse—mean, and how this relates to autism and Autistic rights, Neuroqueer Heresies is the perfect place to start.Required reading for any scholar of trans, queer, disability, and/or neurodiversity studies from one of the preeminent scholars on neuroqueerness (and a co-coiner of the term! I simply felt that nobody non-autistic, who had ever had any misunderstanding of autism, would be able to get through the book without feeling downtrodden and heavily criticised. I really recommend this for service providers and allies, a lot of it is certainly written for that audience. I loved the part about how disability should be looked at from the lens of society’s inability to accommodate neurodivergent people. I’m donating a new, un-Rosie-marked copy of this book to the little autistic library I’m building at my work.