CIIS Public Programs Podcast

TRANSCRIPT

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This is the CIIS Public Programs Podcast, featuring talks and conversations recorded live by the Public Programs department of California Institute of Integral Studies, a non-profit university located in San Francisco on unceded Ramaytush Ohlone Land. 

Over the past 17 years, queer autistic author and educator Nick Walker has played a key role in the emergence of the neurodiversity paradigm—a framework for scholarship, practice, and social justice work where treating human neurocognitive variations such as autism, dyslexia, and ADHD as medical disorders is understood to be a form of systemic oppression along the same lines as the pathologizing of homosexuality in the 19th and 20th centuries. In this episode, Dr. Walker is joined by writer Dan Glenn in an uplifting conversation exploring the edges and intersections of neurodiversity, gender, Queer Theory, embodiment, creativity, somatic psychology, and the human capacity for transformation. 

This episode was recorded during a live online event on February 16th, 2022. A transcript is available at ciispod.com. To find out more about CIIS and public programs like this one, visit our website ciis.edu and connect with us on social media @ciispubprograms. 

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Dan Glenn: Hey, Nick. [Nick: Hey!] Hey everyone out there. This is great. I'm so excited. And so honored to be able to be part of this. And I'm just going to hold up your book, real briefly here. I am super inspired by this and really excited to talk to you about it. I think your work is so timely, and powerful right now, and it's very needed. So, thanks for putting it out there and thanks for being here with me. 

Nick Walker: Thank you for being here with me.  

Dan: Why don’t we just begin by hearing a little bit about your new book, Neuroqueer Heresies, and just, you could tell us a little about how it came to be. 

Nick: Yeah, absolutely. So, our full title is Neuroqueer Heresies: Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Possibilities and there's actually three sections to the book. There's a neurodiversity paradigm section, an autistic empowerment section, and this postnormal possibilities section, kind of what happened was this book really is the result of a decade of work. I've been involved in autistic community and culture and in the development of the neurodiversity movement since 2003 and this, you know, this idea of neurodiversity emerged in the 1990s, this idea of neurodiversity as the diversity of body-minds, diversity of human minds and modes of neurocognitive functioning and this is you know, an axis of human diversity like ethnic diversity and cultural diversity.  

And a neurodiversity movement emerged, which was largely, emerged really over the course of the early 2000's and beyond over the course of this century. So far this neurodiversity movement has emerged as largely a social justice focused movement of looking at the social inequalities around, you know, how autistic people and other neurodivergent people are marginalized and abused within the dominant society and how that intersects, you know, other axes of marginalized identity. I was like I said involved in autistic community and culture from very early on and in the emergence of the neurodiversity movement and I started talking and somewhere in the early 2000s about the Idea of this emerging neurodiversity paradigm. The idea that there was a paradigm shift that needed to happen between what I called the pathology paradigm shifting over to the neurodiversity paradigm.  

So, the idea is the dominant cultural paradigm around neurodiversity is this idea that there's yes, there's this wide diversity of minds, but there's one right way to be. There's one right way for minds to work. And if you deviate too much from that in certain ways, then there's something wrong with you and it's pathologize and it's like, okay, how can we cure you, how can we make you normal? And so, the neurodiversity paradigm in contrast, is like this is no this is another axis of human diversity to say that one type of mind is superior one mode of functioning of the body- mind is superior to others is like saying, well, one ethnicity is superior, or one culture is superior.  

You know, it just leads to these social power inequalities and to society not getting the benefit of human diversity and the creative synergy that it fuels. So yeah, coining this term the neurodiversity paradigm. It's like because there was already this neurodiversity movement, so I'm like, okay, neurodiversity paradigm is what we're aiming for. What is the movement aimed for? It aims for a paradigm shift away from the pathology paradigm to the neurodiversity paradigm. And there is a kind of a whole vocabulary around that of, what is neurodiversity? What is a paradigm? What does it mean to be a neurotypical, you know a member of this dominant way of functioning versus neurodivergent various ways, being a neuro minority group? How do we talk about this? How do we, how do we shift our language away from the language of the old paradigm that frames, you know, say autism or dyslexia as disorders or medical conditions?  

And I was also doing a lot of work at the same time around just autistic empowerment and what it means to be autistic when you don't view it through a pathologizing lens. What does it mean to thrive as an autistic person? Because the pathology paradigm kind of has built into this idea that you can't thrive as an autistic person because you have this terrible disorder. So, what does it mean to thrive as an autistic person and how do we create spaces where that can happen? So, there's all of this work around 2011. I first wrote up this essay called Throw Away the Master's Tools inspired by Audre Lorde's famous saying, “The master's tools will never dismantle the master's house.” I wrote this essay first cause I’ve been writing in, you know, online autistic forums and such and I was like, okay, let's write something for publication, let’s write something to put out there that defines the pathology paradigm, the neurodiversity paradigm and what it means to shift from one to the other. And that really took off in a big way, in terms of the influence it had culturally and on the development of the movement.  

So, I wrote more stuff and so over the course of the decade or so. I produced over the course of the past decade. I produced a bunch of different essays addressing various aspects of autistic empowerment and the neurodiversity paradigm. A shift happened for me in 2008, when I came up with this term neuroqueer, or this term neuroqueer came to me. And that was very much less about the social justice aspects of the neurodiversity movement and more about the creative aspects of it. And what, okay, given this existence of, you know, this concept of neurodiversity and of neurodivergence. What does it mean to play with that creatively and to creatively play with their own psyches and our own embodiment?  

And just sort of my ongoing fascination has always been transformation, personal and cultural and especially personal embodied transformation. And so, yeah. I talk more a little bit about that this development of neuroqueer, but that, that became really more and more, the focus of my own interest. And so, in a sense, this book is a bridge, because it starts with that old, you know, decade-old essay or dozen year-old essay, Throw Away the Master's Tools to finding the paradigms has this whole section about, you know, the neurodiversity paradigm. What it means to make that shift in the paradigm, the language around it and it goes into these writings on autistic empowerment and this non pathologizing view of autism in particular and that's sort of like I wanted to get this out there. I wanted to get all the stuff in one place and make this my gift to the autistic community and to the neurodiversity movement, to the culture and society in which I live and the final section of the book which is called, Postnormal Possibilities, is focused on neuroqueering and has this, you know, really long, final essay that’s new about what I call neuroqueer theory and so in a sense the book was a way to get all of my all of my old work in one place and to sort of about half of it is old stuff. The book is old stuff and half is brand-new stuff that I just wrote over the past year, just for the book because I started thinking like this is my last chance to say something about this stuff. This is the last time I want to write essays about neurodiversity. What do I want to make sure to say and there was just more and more of it. So, mix of old material, new material, new commentary on old material but it's like I say it’s a bridge between my old work and this increasing focus I have on the idea of neuroqueering and the creative potentials of the concept of neurodiversity. 

Dan: Wonderful. Yeah, I think I was impressed how seamlessly the new and old material kind of is woven together throughout and I love these little, there's intro sections to each piece which almost feels like a little behind the, like the VH1 Behind the Music or something like kind of contextualizing as I date myself, but contextualizing like, you know what it particularly the older pieces, you know, and even in some way, in some sense, you're mentioning certain aspects of your thinking that have evolved further since that time or something that has changed or the wider scope of the field as well. And yeah, the third, I'm definitely a huge fan of that third and final section, the postnormal section because that creative energy that you talk about. The transformative quality is so palpable in there and it just makes I think it really makes the reader excited to explore. And like I think there is this, you know, you mentioned like this phrase, a horizon of creative possibility, or transformative possibility, and I think that's so woven deeply into the material. Maybe you could, as you mention you talk, talk a little more about it and maybe you could do that now, this term neuroqueering and neuroqueer. Where did it come from? And how can people think about it? 

Nick: Yeah. Okay. Well, it actually, I mean, this is great advertising here given that this is a talk through CIIS Public Programs, but it actually came to me in a CIIS class. So, it is the product of the CIIS graduate education. So, I was, you know, I've been teaching in the somatic psychology program, and I love somatic psychology and this whole idea of transformation through true embodied practice and I'm a graduate of the somatic psychology program.  

So, in the spring of 2008, I was a first-year student in the somatic psychology program at CIIS taking a psychodynamics class. A class which I now teach. But I was taking the psychodynamics class with Dr. Ian Grand, who was a core faculty in the somatics program for many years and passed on a few years ago now. He was a tremendous influence on me, just a wonderful, fascinating guy and such a force for creativity and transformation in everything he did, really wanted to bring out the creative in his students and get people engaged in the creative possibilities of the work that we were doing. And so, I was in Ian’s class, and he assigned, we were talking about this particular thing, that was a point of fascination for Ian, and it was a fascination that he definitely passed onto me and changed my life with. Which is how do we get cut off from our natural vitality, and spontaneous creative flow and spontaneous creative responsiveness to the world and are our joy, our vitality, our joy, our ability to make a spontaneous authentic response to the world and an authentic spontaneous unique contribution to the world from, that comes from something authentic, and in, who we are, that emerges through the body, in a sense. Through, you know, how do we, how do we tap into the heart and the gut and all of the parts and potentials of our conscious and unconscious minds. And just live a life where we're continually, joyfully birthing the spontaneous and novel and creative and this is I think the natural birth right of every human being and we can see it in the, you know, in the play of small children and such and it's, we get cut off from it.  

People get cut off from that by the traumas of growing up, and by the fact that certain parts of themselves are not welcome, that they're trained to a particular style of embodiment and particular like, oh no, you can't do that, you have to act this way. Act normal, you know, act this way, comply with these cultural norms and depending on who you are, and what sort of family, and society and cultural environment, you're living in, you know, there could be dire consequences for falling, slipping out of the cultural norms, which can be anything depending on who you are again from, you know, a rejection by parents, to being shot by police. You know, there's so many reasons that people are- so many and so many ways in which people are trained to be fearful and to have to repress certain aspects of the self and that happens when a bodily level like what are the tensions that people unconsciously hold onto to keep themselves from gestures of spontaneous expression because it's not safe to be spontaneously expressive of one's full self, in one's developmental environment.  

And so, then the question becomes, how do you reverse that process? How do you free yourself from those tensions? How do you liberate the psyche, through liberating the embodiment, and regain access to that joyful creative vitality, and to this authentic self-expression? And you know, loosen up all of those, all of those deep tensions that are the physical mechanism of psychological repression and free oneself from that. We say, wow Okay, who am I really and what is the fluid, the fluid protean being underneath that, underneath all these tensions? So that fascinated Ian and it fascinates me and really is like kind of the primary focus of my life's work.  

So anyway, Ian had us in the psychodynamics class playing with this idea and writing essays about, about our own experience with this. What is your own experience of having to learning to repress aspects of yourself of having to put up some facade and the tensions that hold that in place having to put up some facade for survival reasons, to comply with external demands? Do you have an experience of liberating yourself from that or discovering how you're stuck and how you've become fixed in a particular embodiment that limits you? So, I'm writing into that and thinking about my own childhood, and I was thinking at the time, I was very focused again. I've been, you know, at that point I had been very immersed in the autistic community and culture for about five years, and I was really thinking a lot about autistic self-liberation. And so, I was thinking how autistic people have very distinctive ways of moving and how you know, how I learned as a child that I had to hide that. You know, how I, how I had to suppress my natural embodiment and ways of moving and develop this pulled inward tension to keep from being targeted and abused by kids and adults alike. And I carried that, you know, for many years and had started this process of breaking out of it and rediscovering how my body wanted to move and discovering all this creative access and improvement and mental functioning and psychological well-being, as a result of that.  

So, I'm writing about that. And then I started thinking about my, what I thought about the time was my gender queerness, which eventually turned out, as I got deeper into it, you know, eventually figure it out. Oh my God, I'm a trans woman, you know, but at the time, I just thought about my gender queerness and my androgyny in my youth and how I'd put on for survival, you know, growing up in very violent surroundings, very violent neighborhoods, and being homeless for a lot of my 20s. I really had put on this intense facade of toxic masculinity as a defense and I was thinking about that. And what it would mean to break out of that and what hit me was, the process by which I put on a facade of neurotypicality and, you know, put on this, this facade where I suppress my autistic embodiment and the process by which I repressed my feminine embodiments, under this facade of masculinity, those processes work the same.  

And you know, we have this idea from like, you know in queer theory, you know from thanks to Judith Butler who I adore. We have this idea of gender as an embodied performance. That's learned and deeply ingrained in our bodily habits. And so I was like, okay, you know, there's this heteronormative performance that we get trained into whatever, you know, you get assigned a binary gender at birth, based on your, you know, the shape of your genitalia and then it's like you get trained to embody this particular thing that's unnatural to you and there's you know punishments, you know, anything from ridicule to physical attack for deviating from your assigned gender role and from the embodiment of it. You know, as a boy I got regularly, you know, attacked for moving like an autistic person but also for moving like a girl.  

So, what I saw was these processes were the same and I started exploring that idea in this paper, in this essay I was writing for Ian Grand’s class about how those processes paralleled each other. The process of heteronormativity, you know, being indoctrinated bodily into heteronormativity and having to build a facade and heteronormativity to protect myself and sort of hide my queerness and then like, okay, there's also the facade of what I started calling neuronormativity that I had to do to hide my autistic embodiment. So first it was like, okay these two are parallel and as I thought into it and felt into it more, I was like they're not just parallel there entwined to embody hetero normative embodiment, you know, if you're embodying the societal standard of heteronormativity. That's also neuronormative, when they say, you know, act like act like a man act like a woman, you know, act like a boy, act like a girl in this heteronormative sense. That they mean like a neurotypical boy or girl, man or woman. Nobody's, you know that the enforcers of normativity don't want you acting like an autistic man or an autistic woman or an autistic gender-fluid person. It's very specifically neuronormativity is implied in there.  

And likewise, when, you know, when abusive behavioral therapies are inflicted on, autistic children, to try to force them to act neuronormative - they're also heteronormative. They're trying to get them to act like non-autistic, boys, or non-autistic girls depending on what gender they were assigned at birth. And, if you deviate far enough from heteronormativity, in terms of what you do with your body and such you start building new neuro pathways and deviating from neuro normativity as well. And likewise, if your mind gets weird enough and your embodied psyche gets weird enough and further away from the neurotypicality. Well, you're also deviating from heteronormative performance. And so somehow, it's like okay, you know, we know like queer theory is like gender can be queered, right? You can, there's this neuronormative performance that's, or sorry, there’s this heteronormative performance, it's imposed on everyone but we can queer that. Meaning we can defy it or deviate from it, or challenge it, or subvert it or creatively fuck with it and alter, am I allowed to say fuck in this conversation? I'm not sure, but we're allowed to, you know, we can do these things where we escape, we liberate ourselves from heteronormativity and this is called queering, right. We're queering, we're queering our gender, were queering our sexuality and I love this idea of queer as a verb, you know, it's an action to queer to break away from the heteronormative performance. And at the same time, you know, we can queer our body minds, we can queer neuronormative performance, we can queer our mind and our psyches and get away neuronormative limitations and thought and embodiment and explore, what are the potentials of autistic movement and autistic cognition on the autistic body mind and how far can we take this away from neuronormativity and what lies outside those boundaries?  

And so neuroqueer theory boils down, what neuroqueer theory is essentially extends queer theory into the realm of neurodiversity. It says, one neuronormativity can be queered just like heteronormativity, can be and should be, and too, the queering of neuronormativity and the queering of heteronormativity are entwined. So, if you queer one of those enough you’re also starting to queer the other. 

Dan: So much there. All right, let's think about how we want to proceed because I think what you just said is so rich and I almost want to let people like have a second to digest it but let’s, so I think there's a few aspects that I have in mind to kind of proceed with. The embodied aspect that you've been talking about is so present in your work. It's a vitally essential part of what you are trying to convey through your writing and through your work.  

And you also talk a bit in your defining neurodiversity piece about how people commonly, you know, hear neurodiversity or neurodivergence and think neuro means brain. But that it doesn't mean brain it means nerve and that from your perspective we're actually talking about the entire nervous system. [Nick: Mhm.] And you have this great. I love your writing by the way, it's just so, [Nick: Oh, thank you!] it's so both simple and comprehensible and beautiful and intricate at once.  

But yeah, this line so by extension, the full complexity of human cognition and the central role the nervous system plays in the embodied dance of consciousness. And I think a lot of people just think brain, because it's, you see this commonly in the discourse…autistic brain…neurodivergent brain and it seems like it's been perhaps one important step in helping to spread the concept of neurodiversity and neurodivergence. But also, as you say is reductive. 

So, I guess I'm interested in, If you could say a little more about the embodied, embodiment aspect of your work, maybe if you have examples of how you have worked with this process of neuroqueering in an embodied way. And also, how that connects to your relationship with your nervous system and how others might begin to think about their nervous system and their own embodiment. 

Nick: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we have this wonderful concept in modern neuroscience called neuroplasticity, which is I mean, which is about brains and the idea that the brain is plastic. It can, it can rewrite itself. It is continually rewriting itself, based on experience and action and continually evolving, that the brain is not a computer but more like an ecosystem. And you know pathways that are explored develop further, you start using your body mind in particular ways and new neural pathways form and what doesn't get used atrophies and fades. And so, there's this continuous evolution of consciousness that's possible and that's biologically possible because of neuroplasticity, but the brain is not isolated, like I said as you quoted, you know, the neuro means nerve. There's a whole central and peripheral nervous system and it's all connected. Our brain we’re not brains driving around in bodies the way people drive around in cars, we're body minds, we’re complete systems. Consciousness and the brain is part of the body and shares blood and all sorts of interesting chemicals with the rest of the body. And is wired into the body with all these amazing nerves that run throughout the body.  

And so, what we do, there's a feedback loop continually, it's two way. It's not just, you know, mind controls body, but embodied action and embodied experience shape the mind by shaping and rewriting the brain. The brain is more like the interface between consciousness and embodiment. And so, we do this- you start changing how you move and how you sense, how you relate to the world embody yourself in the world. And you are, altering your consciousness and developing new capacities.  

And so, what I found when my embodiment was constrained and limited and traumatized into this very rigid pulled in state, my ability to connect creatively and joyfully with the world was also constrained and as I started liberating and seeing there’s some vestige, there's some, my hand wants to do this. What if I just let it? And there was this process of learning to feel into what did my body actually want to do? What were all these things I suppressed? There were still vestiges of that there in some bodily memory of what brought me joy in early childhood, and I just followed those things and that took a lot of work. That was a lot of, a lot of work in Aikido and a lot of work in somatic psychology and various forms of somatic work, authentic movement and Reichian work and such, and extensive physical theater work. Extensive, was a member for two decades of this experimental, physical theater group, called ParaTheatrical Research, where, you know, really exploring deep capacities of the body, to give expression to unconscious forces.  

And so, there was a really extensive transformative process, it is still going on for me. I'm still always going on and always work I'm doing but it's really, follow the embodiment, follow the impulses. Let them do what they want. Be this, be in the dance of engagement with the world and with the bodily impulses, and stirrings all of the time. And that keeps transforming the mind and my experiences are continually, there's a negative feedback loop that comes, you know, sort of a spiral of a spiral of trauma and repression where our physical tensions and restrictions and embodied traumas keep us locked into fearful mindsets. And that in turn encourages a more fearful cut off from the world embodiment, which reinforces the mindset and peoples spiral in that direction. But one can reverse the spiral and spiral outward and say, well, if I start liberating the body, you know something, what's the, what's the old saying, free your ass and your mind will follow. It's like start liberating the body liberating the body, getting the body moving. Find the physical joy, and there's this creative impulse and joyful engagement that starts getting released. And one can follow that further and further into this accelerating spiral of vitality and creativity and well-being and weirdness. Because this is what we're talking about neuroqueering here. We're talking about, we're talking about queering normativity. Like this is definitely like this means, stop moving like a damn normal person, you know, really, really lean into the weirdness and dance into the weirdness and that's where the liberation happens, and the creative capacity, start getting developed outside of the little box of normative thinking. 

Dan: I love that aspect of when you, when you're talking about this and writing about this, this, the weirdness and the very intentional subverting of these neurotypical norms heteronormative norms and just the potential that that has to unlock so much. And it seems like this notion of- I love this reversing the spiral. Because it's feels like there's something very intuitive and very, very non conceptual. It's not about thinking how do I want to move? How do I think I need to be? Or it's actually, how do I intuitively feel my body wants to express and then how can I trust that? And I think that feels like also the rub of like, you know, really learning to trust oneself in this process. And I imagine there's also this aspect of really sometimes struggle for people because you're really, you are going against the grain of what's been a lot of conditioning and potential, you know, like you said, true processes of embodying cultural norms that you may not have even known you’re embodying. And to this end you also talk about neuroqueering as a practice with which anyone can engage. [Nick: Yes.] And I would love to hear more about that. I think this is one of the most interesting. I don't know- maybe provocative. I don't know if people would say that, but I think there's something I think people have this idea, some people might have this idea that, you know, either you're neurodivergent or you're not or like you’re queer or not. And these are like, this is not for me or this, you know some kind of gatekeeping or something like that. So, I'd be curious to hear more about how this is a practice with which anyone can engage. 

Nick: Yes. It's a practice with which anyone can engage! [Dan laughs gently] You too can neuroqueer. And this is- there is a lot of, so much societal discourse these days is governed by an essentialist identity politics. You are, you are born this- you are born this way. And this is who you are, you're like this because you're born this way and as part of your essence and this is not for you because you weren't born this way. And that, you know, everything from like, you know, the old, you know, decades old idea and the gay rights movement of like we're gay because we're born that way, which is kind of a defensive strategy in a way of saying, you know, we can't help it we’re born that way, accept us because we can’t help it, we were born that way to like, you know, white supremacism is also, you know, identity politics at its, most extreme, you know?  

It’s funny because the term identity politics gets associated with social justice movements a lot. But the right-wing politics is also based identity politics. And there's this tendency towards essentialism of you’re this type of person and you're this type of person and you have this set of intersecting identities. And it becomes very rigid, very easily, especially in a culture of extremely polarized, us and them discourse, which seems to be also across the political spectrum. And so, I'm not an essentialist. I'm all about fluidity and continual creation and recreation. And yeah, we get boxes that society sticks us in, you know, there's going to be, people are going to get, you know, a certain amount of privilege or abuse based on just what color skin they were born with and that's a current reality. But how fluid can we make these identities? How much can we play with it?  

And you know, so I love this queer theory idea, you know, central to a lot of queer theory is this anti-essentialism. If gender is something you do rather than something you're born with, it's something you do and therefore, it's something that you can play with and it's something you can alter. It is fluid and there's, you know, what has his potential for fluidity and therein lies those opportunity for gender creativity and sexual creativity. Yeah. People may be born with certain sexual leanings. There’s definitely people who are like, okay, you know, I was just like, I don't know why I'm just wired to be heterosexual or I'm wired to be homosexual. You know, I'm just attracted to this particular type of person and not this particular type and that's the way I am and maybe it's innate, people are born that way but there's also so much room for exploration and fluidity in terms of heteronormativity and how people can deviate from it and how people can specialize, you know, nobody.  

You know, you can be born, you know, a lesbian maybe, you know, you're born with a natural proclivity, you know, a woman born with a natural proclivity to be drawn sexually to other women, but you know, nobody's born like a BDSM leather dyke, you know, that is that is a series of like cultural influences and cultural choices and ways of exploring particular excitations and exploring particular possibilities and evolving towards a particular gender and sexual identity and set of pleasures, that's a product of fluidity. So, there's this exciting fluidity that happens and I want to encourage more of that and less fixed essentialist categories. And that's thanks to queer theory, you know, it's widespread in queer theory and so there's a growing sense of gender fluidity in certain in queer cultures and there's a very strong resistance to it. 

Both from the right wing and from you know, second wave feminist, gender essentialists as well. There's a great deal of resistance to a lot of the fluidity happening around gender. But there's also a lot of like, a growing number of people I think, especially in the younger generations, who recognize the potential fluidity of gender and sexuality and that it's something that can be played with. Well, I'm part of this idea of neuroqueering, is this same thing is the case around neurodiversity in the queering of neuro normativity, I’m not an essentialist there.  

And yeah, I'm autistic. You know, I'm autistic. I was born with a particular, you know, particular mode of cognitive functioning that does, that is definitely distinctly minority, you know that is different from that of many people and so I can talk to other autistic people and say there are significant commonalities, you know, there's a reason, there is a reason to have this idea of autistic because there's a, you know, like two percent of the human population has these certain commonalities among us even though we're wildly diverse among us. We have these certain commonalities, we can say, okay. Yeah, we could fit in, we can say there's a category of autistic and that is useful, you know, it can be very useful to form identities. As long as one doesn't get stuck in thinking, you know, in a mode of thinking, that's all essentialist identity politics and you know, what box does a person fit in and they're in that forever.  

Because neurotypicality, you know neurotypical, this term neurotypical emerged in the autistic community way back in the early 90s and was the idea that neurotypicals are people with the normal brains. And so, it's a sort of way of talking about what is the dominant majority, the people who conform to neuronormativity but there's no such thing as a normal brain. There's no neurotypical brain. There's just people who can comfortably or somewhat comfortably perform neuronormativity throughout their lives more effectively and with less strain than, say autistic people can. But there's no, there's no such thing as a neurotypical brain. I don't really buy into the idea of types of brains, the idea of and so much of a discourse on neurodiversity has become this essentialist thinking on types of brains.  

And so, it's, you know, like you're just, you're born with an autistic brain, or you're born with a neurotypical brain, you're born with an ADHD, brain or whatever. That seems very limiting to me. I mean, I've learned lots of things from people who are neurotypical or who are neurodivergent in ways that differ from mine, and I've integrated them and altered my own consciousness with that and altered my own capacities. And you know, people do that all the time. Part of what I say here is, you know, that's already a thing. We don't think about it as being part of like the neurodiversity movement because the neurodiversity movement, again, as specifically tends to be a social justice movement around, you know, civil rights for autistic people, and ADHD people, and people with Down syndrome. But there's lots of ways to diverge from neuro normativity and that includes meditating every day because that alters your consciousness, that alters your brain. That physically alters your brain, and you get a, you do a meditation practice, Yeah, every day for years. You are not neurotypical anymore. You are not thinking like the dominant majority. You do a lot of psychedelics, you know, you start seeing trails full time from doing enough psychedelics and you know, your creativity permanently opened up and made weird by lots of psychedelics, you have neuroqueered yourself.  

So, there is, you know, intentional neurodivergence has always been with us long before that the terminology existed for it. And you know, I'm very influenced by autistic culture, and queer theory, and stuff but also by stuff like the works of Tim Leary and Robert Anton Wilson about how do you, how do you creatively play with your own consciousness, and expand your intelligence in exotic new ways? So, all of that is neuroqueering and yeah, it's like you don't have to be born gay or trans to queer your gender by being like, yeah, I'm assigned male at birth, and I'm going to explore my femininity and stop performing at this bit of masculinity that's a complete, you know, complete drag, no pun intended. Or by the same token, you know, you don't have to be born neurodivergent, have been born Autistic, or dyslexic, or ADHD, or whatever in order to neuroqueer because anybody can alter their consciousness with the right practices and deviate from normativity with the right practices.  

So I called the book Neuroqueer Heresies. And you know, I really meant that idea. You know being heretical because it's heretical, you know, the early stuff. I mean, by the standards of the dominant culture, you know that pathologizes autistic people and, you know, treats autism as some sort of psychological disorder or medical condition, you know, my basic stuff on autistic empowerment and the neurodiversity paradigm is heretical, but I'm also heretical by the standards of the neurodiversity movement, you know, because I'm not an essentialist because you know, neuroqueer theory is heretical because I'm, you know, I'm not interested in this essentialist idea of types of brains and you're just born with this type of brain. I like, yeah, you're born with whatever brain you're born with and maybe that's autistic or something, but whatever, brain you’re born with you can queer it and develop it. It's yours to develop creatively and anybody can explore the weird. Anybody can neuroqueer. And yeah, so I'm very much against gatekeeping. I'm very much against, you know, people who gatekeep the term queer in the first place, like that was always an experience of mine as a, you know, as a young, as a young queer activist, you know, in my teens in the 1980s, you know. There were like young queers who were like, yeah, we're just gonna we're just gonna queer gender boundaries and go out and to, you know, go out and cross-dress and participate in, you know, street actions and our queer cross-dressed sort of way. And then there was, you know, older gay people who were like, you know, you can't use the term queer unless you were born gay and we're like, no way, screw that you know. Let's like and in fact, a lot of those, you know, older generation of gay people were very opposed to the word queer because they were used to it being a slur and the idea of reclaiming it was just too blasphemous.  

And yet now, you know, there's more and more just gleefully queer young people. I love the younger generations now, gleefully, joyfully queer they are and not constrained by gender boundaries and that's where I want to see this concept of neurodiversity go. And so right away as soon as we put, soon as I put the term neuroqueer out there me and some other people who were, you know, other fellow scholars who were playing with the term, as soon as it got out their people started trying to gatekeep it, and be like, you can't call yourself neuroqueer, unless you were born autistic and gay. Nope. That's not what we're talking about. We're talking about nobody's born neurotypical and anybody can creatively diverge from neuro normativity and heteronormativity. 

Dan: Hmm. All right, so one thing I just want to kind of like reflect on as you said that is there is so, I feel like the field of neurodiversity studies has just really opened up and become like almost like suddenly to me, it seemed like suddenly so much more mainstream and kind of in the consciousness just in the past few years even. [Nick: Absolutely.] As so, I wonder if, you know, just in the same way that, you know, the mainstream understanding of gender has shifted so much, in recent years as well like that, maybe this concept of neuroqueering can also contribute to this in a way like allowing people's understanding to just broaden, shift and deepen as it continues to become better understood and more widely embraced.  

So, I also wanted to just ask you and mention like your whole world is so much more than just your scholarship and your teaching, and writing. You’re also, an Aikido master. You, run your own Aikido dojo, I believe in Berkeley. And you also have an ongoing webcomic that you've been publishing. You've been publishing a fictional series. That and have also created a publishing house along with some other colleagues and friends of yours. So how does all of your work fit together? Like, how does or doesn’t it? Just could you tell us a bit more about these kind of interesting, weird, diverse aspects of what you do and who you are? 

Nick: Yeah. I mean this is kind of a symptom of the neuroqueering that I'm talking about. You know, by through this embodied somatic process. I've been going through of liberating my creative impulses. I find that I’m just doing more and more, weird, different stuff.  Aikido is where it started for me in terms of somatic transformation, you know, and I've been, I've been practicing Aikido for more than 40 years at this point and teaching really my whole adult life. Actually, since my late teens and managed to keep doing that throughout all sorts of mess. I mean, there were times when I was like, you know, homeless and still teaching Aikido, so that's been an ongoing theme and that's definitely informed my work. It's really shaped my work from drawing me towards somatic work and embodiment transformation through embodiment work in the first place, you know, there's that.  

And also, just in terms of the positivity of it that again part of my goal with neuroqueering is yeah the neurodiversity movement and really the field of neurodiversity studies so far has been very, very much about pushing back against the pathologizing and oppression of neuro minority groups, like autistic people. And that work is necessary. And that work is important. You know that this is essentially, you know, pushing back against ableism and such and that's essential work for the well-being of autistic people and other neuro minorities, you know, got to happen and it's increasingly not the work that I'm drawn to, you know, there's more and more people who are coming in to do that work and that's wonderful, but I don't want to see neurodiversity as a concept where the field of neurodiversity studies is still emerging. I don't want to see it get limited to that. I want to see- I've always been fascinated by the creative potentials and in a sense, one has to have that in order to get anywhere. If you just fight against oppression, you have to fight against oppression, you have to push back against oppression, you know, we can't let ourselves get crushed and oppressed you know, or let other people get crushed and oppressed, but there has to be a positive vision we're working towards too. Otherwise, it's a losing battle. We have to be working towards something better and have a vision of how things can be beautiful, without the oppression, and that's missing so much.  

I actually was, I almost had an essay that I wrote for the book, but I decided not to at the last minute because I was like, okay. I'm going to keep writing forever. I just got to publish this thing as is. But I almost wrote something about how disappointed I was with the field of neurodiversity studies so far because it was still so essentialist. And really just an extension of the field of disability studies. And I was like, why, even why not just be disability studies then? You know, we need the field of disability studies. We need the disability rights movement, but there's something else in this concept of neurodiversity. There’s something else about the creative potentials of human neurodiversity. And that something else is what I'm interested in and that comes from my Aikido training.  

That comes from the idea in Aikido that we can do something else besides fight, flight, freeze when confronted with a bad situation. We can turn it into something graceful, if we're willing to think outside of the limitations of fight, flight, freeze and outside of the limitations of this other person is my enemy. And so, the idea of looking for positive solutions and getting out of a negative polarized mindset is something that I wouldn't have if it weren't engrained in my body from four decades of Aikido practice and neuroqueer theory comes as much from that as from anything else.  

And then, of course, the other stuff, you know, yeah, I write speculative fiction. I write weird speculative fiction. All of which is interconnected. I have a longtime collaborator Andrew M Reichert. Wonderful. He's got a wonderful, some wonderful stuff that is an amazing, weird psychedelic sci-fi novel called Wallflower Assassin. that I highly recommend it’s super neuroqueer. And all our work is set in the same universe and interconnects like his work and my stories interconnect. We've been writing together, we've been friends since we were 15, and been writing together all that time, even though our publishing is a much more recent thing. So, we co-write this web comic called Weird Luck illustrated by Mike Bennewitz, who is just a genius, I'm just so blown away that somebody that talented is willing to illustrate the stories I write. But yeah, so this webcomic is still in its early stages. It's going to be a very long epic and we've only polished about 50 pages of it so far, but weekly webcomic page a week and so and interconnected with all of the fiction that Andrew and I write. And so yeah, that's my favorite project right now is this web comic and definitely it's informed by you know, I think of it being neuroqueer as a product of my neuroqueerings or the product of all the embodiment work and psychedelic work and stuff Andrew and I have done over the years.  

But yeah, it's just, I don't set out to teach a lesson about neuroqueering or anything. I just write the stories that come to me and that's been very much that creative liberationist has been very much, you know a result of my, you know, I wanted to be a storyteller and creator of comics and fiction, when I was real small and I got cut off from my creativity by being stuck in a shell of fake neuronormativity and heteronormativity. And when I liberated myself from that, it was just like suddenly, these ideas come to me, and the characters just emerged from my unconscious, and I need to write about them. And so, it's just, it's a creative liberation and I'm just totally in love. I am totally in love with it. I want to keep doing you know, comics for the rest of my life. So yeah, everybody read the Weird Luck webcomic. It's way more interesting than my nonfiction. 

Dan: Amazing. Well Nick, thank you so much for writing this book, for sharing so much of it tonight with us. I think that this has been hopefully something that sparks a lot for people and inspires people to go further with your work, with their own personal processes, wherever they find themselves. So, I, just on behalf of everyone, just really grateful for what you're doing in the world and thanks for being here tonight with us.  

Nick: Thank you. Thank you so much. And thank you so much for being my interviewer and partner in this, in this conversation, it was wonderful to work with you. [Dan: An honor.] Thanks to everybody who- I can't- I can't see the audience, but I believe that you're out there and thank you all for joining us.  

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Thank you for listening to the CIIS Public Programs Podcast. Our talks and conversations are presented live in San Francisco, California. We recognize that our university’s building in San Francisco occupies traditional, unceded Ramaytush Ohlone lands. If you are interested in learning more about native lands, languages, and territories, the website native-land.ca is a helpful resource for you to learn about and acknowledge the Indigenous land where you live. 
 
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