ORCID

Abstract

In breaking the habit of ‘making sense’ typified by normative, neurotypical modes of engagement with the world, neurodiverse sociality performs a treachery in relation to prescriptive, dominating forms of normative reality. Within this conference paper, a modest site of resistance, a reconsideration of neurotypical normative reality takes place, extending beyond the boundaries underpinning neurotypical hegemonic discourse about ‘human’ reality, identity and existence: rescinding the neurotypical “normative standard for human experience” requiring the mapping of bodies in advance, to foreground bodies in excess, neurodiverse bodies subject to patterns and rhythms that defy stable or coherent identification. As bodies “always extending beyond the limits of explanation and finitude” neurodiverse life is irreducible to normative “partition[s] of ideality,” stalwarts of neurotypical ideals and practices of stable and unified – typified – human identity and its Cartesian representational domain of sense. In a world where such neurotypical regimes of truth operate as standard, the narrative of neurodiverse life is constructed through neurotypical paradigms binarising neurodivergence as positionally opposite to the standardised model of the neurotypical human. In an inability to meet the neurotypical normative, desired outcomes of human assemblage, the neurodiverse, the more-than human, within their innumerable contexts and complexities live in excess of culled relational fields: the neurotypical subtractive models of value that quantify the human through categories of normative experience, language, production and subjectivity. Neurodiverse life is always in-formation. Always incomplete. “In(self)sufficient.”For living in the excess, prior to signification and coding, where “nothing is simply human,” neurodiverse life undermines normative discourses of stable and unified human identity, thereby questioning the very concept of humanity. In challenging ideas about who counts as human, neurodiverse life removes preconceptions of the more-than human other, preconceptions and definitions that exist solely for the neurotypical to cope with reality and maintain one’s own subjectivity (and superiority).Within what Manning rightly states, “to know cannot be limited to neurotypical definitions of knowledge,” alongside the studies of Gale, Massumi, Moten and Harney this modest site reconceptualises how knowledge is created and how reality is actually shaped beyond the dominant discourses where neurotypicality operates as the standard. This conference paper, a disruptive gesture towards those “not of the human but of the more-than human,” is a reconsideration of bodies in excess that rather than becoming within the world, become with the world.

Publication Date

2025-01-08

Event

European Congress of Qualitative Inquiry: Hope, Humility and Playfulness in a Precarious World

Acceptance Date

2025-01-08

Deposit Date

2026-08-14

Keywords

neurodiversity, oddkin, affective vitalities, Manning

First Page

125

Last Page

125

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