Protected: Making Things Perfectly Neuroqueer

Abstract: Taking up Fatal Attraction (1987) as my case study, this presentation will bring forward a new method of textual analysis designed to read for glimpses of liberatory neuroqueer stories, sometimes tucked in places that would seem to harm us the most. In the creative theoretical tradition of resisting readers, oppositional gazes, queer eyes, and crip spins, my call to make things perfectly neuroqueer asks the text—and the political realities that animate it—to function differently from its original intentions to silence, destroy, and abandon its neurodivergent inhabitants. 

Bio: Dr. Lisa Johnson (she/her) is a crip theorist, adoptive mom, and small dog fanatic. As Professor and Director of Women’s and Gender Studies at University of South Carolina Upstate, she teaches courses on feminist disability studies, mad feminism, girlhood studies, and LGBTQ studies. Her current research focuses on neuroqueer feminism and borderline personality disorder, a controversial and historically feminized diagnosis that can be usefully reframed through the destigmatizing contexts of neuroqueer theory and feminist public health. With her co-author/co-editor, Robert McRuer, she has also created and explored the concept of cripistemologies in the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies in a double issue in 2014 and a 10th anniversary issue in 2024. Her work has appeared in a variety of academic journals, including Signs, Discourse, Feminist Studies, Feminist Formations, Social Text, and Tulsa Studies in Women’s Literature. Her books include Girl in Need of a Tourniquet, On the Literary Nonfiction of Nancy Mairs, Third Wave Feminism and Television, and Jane Sexes It Up. 

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