Divergent (A)socialities and Textualities in Post-Truth Landscapes
Hybrid
Meeting ID: 933 2730 7911
Passcode: 233747
Abstract:
What does it mean to story neurominoritarian desires and futures, when the act of telling stories has become so fraught?
Possibilities of neurodivergent flourishing are increasingly threatened by dominant societal counter-narratives that enforce increasingly narrow ideals of ‘normal’ across systemic, institutional, and social contexts. Though certainly ableist, these are also colonial projects which uphold white supremacist, cissexist, heteronormative and capitalist ideals. These ‘narratives of neuronormativity’ rely on the incoherence of anti-intellectualism and are scaffolded by the cultural imaginaries that invite authority from former children’s authors and far-right politicians. Yet, such narratives have tangibly manifested in political, legal, and medical endeavours which disproportionately harm nonconforming lives: disability funding cuts, EDI/DEI rollbacks, anti-trans legislation.
Such actions stifle neurominoritarian voices and desires along multiple trajectories. Even as the ‘neurodiversity’ concept is everywhere, and remains a valuable paradigm of thought, it is now overrepresented as a signifier. Neurodivergent subjectivities are dominantly presented in increasingly individualistic ways and by a few select knowers, or are subject to the reductive collapsing of experience in the popular imagination.
This talk examines the affectual and material landscapes that emerge from neurodivergent literary outputs, to disrupt dominant deficit-based narratives of asociality or harm and instead gesture towards ideas of commonality and interdependence. These approaches to storying offer valuable starting points for a more coalitional future in the face of the violently neuronormative crisis of the present.
Bio:
Dr Abs S. Ashley (they/them) is Lecturer in English at the University of Bristol. Their work explores the intersections of neurodivergence, gender dissidence and sociality in contemporary literature. Abs’s monograph Entangled Textualities, is forthcoming, and their research has been published in Transgender Studies Quarterly, Autism, and Neurodivergent Connection among other places.
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Meeting ID: 933 2730 7911
Passcode: 233747