Protected: 3. Neurodivergent Approaches to Artistic Writing and Performance

Panellists: Matt Hargrave, Nimalan Yoganathan, Katharine Morgan
Chair: Warda Farah

Matt Hargrave | A Critical Neurodiversity approach to Stand-up Comedy 

Abstract: What contribution can popular performance make to the critical neurodiversity project? In the first quarter of the 21st century stand-up comedy appears to be staging neurodiversity, almost single-handed: Fern Brady's Strong Female Character (2023); Hannah Gadsby’s Ten Step’s to Nannette (2022) and Robin Ince’s Normally Weird and Weirdly Normal (2025) are lengthy memoirs, adding nuance and depth the hour-long stand-up shows they grew out of. Many other comedians (Ashley Storrie; Jerry Seinfeld; Bethany Black) cite autism and/or ADHD as foundational in their work; and Stewart Lee came close to ‘confessional’ mode in Basic Lee (2023) when he too revealed a late diagnosis, ‘obvious in retrospect’. This paper argues that stand-up comedy is often viewed as an ‘anti-stigmatising’ force: a compensatory act which educates publics and therefore reduces the worst negatives of social judgement. Myriad campaigns put comedy to work in ‘dismantling’ stigma, which can be instrumentalising and prescriptive; and tends to circumscribe stand-up as a de facto Diagnosis Narrative, which often unwittingly tend toward medical/pathology paradigms (often presuming to teach neuro-typical audiences ‘about’ autism). The paper argues that rather than dwelling on the need for certain attainable outcomes (stigma reduction; personal healing) more emphasis should be placed on the intrinsic formal properties of stand-up comedy as an art form: in this case, the manipulation of public persona, the deployment of confessional material; the use of distanced (often alienated and obsessional) perspective and a tendency to engage in word-play. I want to re-imagine neurodiversity as aesthetic/political potential in popular performance, rather than a pervasive social deficit. A transactional relationship risks placing an undue social burden on individual comedians and could be replaced with a relational one, that encourages more complex understanding of how neurodiversity might be perceived, illuminated and represented. 

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Nimalan Yoganathan | Listening beyond neuronormativity: Autistic multi-sensory art as a site of resistance and world-making 

Abstract: My paper presentation will reflect on how autistic sound and multi-sensory artists enact creative sound-making and listening practices that sometimes function as refusals against assimilating into ableist, capitalist and settler-colonial norms. In particular, what happens when autistic bodies produce counter-normative sonic gestures (e.g. vocal stimming, echolalia, silence) or engage in listening modes that resist neoliberal values including time efficiency and productivity? In what ways do autistic sound and multi-sensory artists use their creative work to enact small yet radical world-making projects that imagine more ethical relationships with both human and more-than-human worlds? I will study the sonic registers of resistance that the artists I have selected engage in so as to challenge therapeutic approaches like ABA that reduce autistic forms of sonic expression to meaningless “noise”.  

Through an examination of their creative output available online and via interviews conducted remotely, I will study the following three artists: 1) Dawn-joy Leong, an autistic multi-media artist, poet and musician based in Singapore. I will study her ongoing and evolving project Clement Space which she proposes as both a quotidian practice and artwork – that is, an autistic-informed “quiet room” as a form of recuperation from urban sensory overload; 2) Sara Kian-Judge, a Walbunja-Yuin autistic multi-media artist based in Sydney, Australia. I will focus on Kian-Judge’s Upside-down people: A listening story (2022), an experimental audio documentary that takes listeners on a “journey into the surprisingly entangled worlds of autistic experiences and Bat conservation issues”. 3) Audra Mitchell combines her drawings and written poetry with her practice of echolalia which she conceives of as a “political act that can disrupt interwoven neurotypical (NT), colonial, racial and capitalist rhythms of sociality, communication and space” (Mitchell, 2022, p.1). 

These three artists may face multiple forms of marginalization due to their intersectional positionalities in relation to race, indigeneity, gender identity, disabilities and neurodivergence. Thus, my research for this paper will be committed to an ethical and intersectional methodology. This will include drawing on disability studies scholarship emerging from the Global South. My methodology employed for interview questions will also respond to Tuck and Yang’s (2014) calling on researchers to “learn from experiences of dispossessed peoples – often painful, but also wise, full of desire and dissent” (p.812). I propose challenging reductionist theories emerging from medical autism research that tend to solely highlight autistic “suffering” and pathology. Doing so can help move my study more towards desire-based research (Tuck, 2009) that addresses the systemic oppression and trauma faced by autistic communities, but also highlights the overlooked and under-theorized creative practices of resistance, care and world-making among autistics. Furthermore, I will contextualize the artists’ projects within their everyday lived experiences. For instance, how does the multifaceted nature of each artist’s experiences, involving both marginalization and moments of joy or respite, get articulated in their creative projects? Finally, as a racialized autistic sound artist myself, I will reflect on common aesthetic and conceptual themes among my work and that of the three artists discussed. 

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Katharine Morgan | The Lady of the Lake and “The Mermaid who had forsaken the Sea”: Celtic Fairy Brides and Cross-Cultural Neurodiversity 

Abstract: Celtic fairy literature is littered with ableist tropes. Previous scholarship has largely viewed these through a medicalized lens, framing them as ‘folk explanations’ for those ‘who were born, or who became, different as the results of identifiable congenital disorders which are today known to medical science’ (Schoon Eberly 1988, p.58). Over the last fifty years disability theory has moved away from the ‘medical model’ of disability and its inherent ableism, and turned towards the ‘social’ and ‘neurodiversity’ models, which is where I situate my work. With this in mind, I use a critical neurodiversity studies framework to analyse two examples of fairy literature from the Celtic revivals—John Pughe’s English translation of Welsh lake legend The Physicians of Myddfai (1861) and Irish Lord Dunsany’s The King of Elfland’s Daughter (1924)—establishing their value as an area of critical cross-cultural enquiry. When read neurodivergently, the fairy brides at the heart of these narratives can be viewed allegorically as a neurodivergent sub-nationality living in the context of a larger, more powerful, neurotypical culture. As they cross from otherworlds into human societies, they experience environments with alien social norms, unreceptive to their ways of experiencing, processing and communicating. These fish out of water or (to use Dunsany’s phrasing) ‘mermaid[s] who ha[ve] forsaken the sea’ inspire real-world transformation: they express radically different perspectives on human behaviours and practices, revealing flaws, pushing boundaries, and applying social pressure. Furthermore, at The King of Elfland’s Daughter’s close, Elfland’s borders are expanded in accordance with the fairy bride’s needs. I read this as a metaphorical modelling of how, instead of pathologising bodies and neurotypes, it is possible to reshape environments, cultures and societies, and move away from power structures which serve to perpetuate inequality. 

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Speaker Bios:

Matt Hargrave: Matt Hargrave is Assistant Professor in Theatre and Performance at Northumbria University. He is the author of Theatres of Learning Disability which won TaPRA’s 2016 ECR Prize. He is working on a project investigating new theories of stigma and performance. 

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Nimalan Yoganathan: Nimalan Yoganathan is a PhD student in Communication Studies at Concordia University. His research engages with sound studies, critical race studies and critical autism studies. His primary interests include the politics of listening, as well as sound as a site of resistance and refusal. Nimalan is also a practicing sound artist and musician involved in projects that explore a diverse range of genres including experimental electronic, free jazz, dub and hip-hop. 

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Katharine Morgan: Katharine Morgan is a PhD student at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. She recently completed her MA in Celtic Studies at UWTSD, where she wrote her dissertation on Celticity, disability, and the figure of the fairy in Celtic revivalist literature. Her current research focuses on using a critical neurodiversity studies framework to explore literary depictions of the Celtic Otherworld, towards establishing their value as an area of critical cross-cultural enquiry. 

Meeting ID: 912 3412 1874
Passcode: 944289