Protected: 2. Neurodivergent Literatures: Forms, Feelings, and Futures of Resistance

Panellists: Natasha Downs, Prerna Tolani, Lloyd Meadhbh Houston
Chair: Nat Paterson

Natasha Downs | Exploring the shared aims of Maddened and Critical-neurodiverse literary approaches: a case study of Luo Guanzhong’s Romance of the Three Kingdoms 

Abstract: This talk explores the shared goals and distinctiveness of critical-neurodiverse and Maddened literary approaches, using Chinese novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms 三國志通俗演義 (Sanguozhi tongsu yanyi), often attributed to Luo Guanzhong 羅貫中 (1280-1360), as a case study. Since its formal founding in 2008 (Ingram 2008), Mad Studies has carved out an academic space led by people with experience of psychiatrisation and/or emotional distress. With interdisciplinarity as one of the discipline’s guiding principles (Menzies et al. 2013, 13), Mad Studies has unsurprisingly developed frameworks for literary analysis (Stefan 2018, Donaldson 2018). The current critical phase of Neurodiversity Studies similarly recognises the importance of literary analysis (Bergenmar et al. 2025, Irish 2025). While the fields share similarities (McWade et al. 2015), recent dialogue in Mad spaces questions the usefulness of the neurodiversity paradigm (Cromby and Johnstone 2024). This talk captures some of this ongoing debate and intercommunity dialogue, examining different literary approaches which evolved from Mad Studies and Critical Neurodiversity Studies contexts respectively. I illustrate how approaches from each discipline can coexist to enrich our understanding of texts. To this end, the implied link between unemotionality and villainy in Romance of the Three Kingdoms serves as our case study. Maddened and Critical-neurodiverse lenses can enrich understanding of how literary emotion effects are harnessed as a tool to reinforce behavioural norms, in addition to raising awareness of the non-fictional Mad/neurodivergent individuals depicted within Romance of the Three Kingdoms. This talk aims to broaden the scope for Mad and critical-neurodiverse lenses to East Asian studies, amplifying this important dialogue to a field where these approaches are seldom taken. 

Positionality statement: I am a Mad-identified, autistic British woman. Where possible, this talk highlights knowledge produced by Chinese Mad/neurodivergent thinkers and critically reflects on the absence of voices. 

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Prerna Tolani | Panels to Hashtags: ADHD Comic Campaigns as Neurodivergent Research and Digital Praxis 

Abstract: Digital comic campaigns such as #ADHDInvasion and #ADHDComicTakeover have emerged as powerful sites of neurodivergent storytelling and activism. Situated at the intersection of graphic medicine, digital culture, and critical neurodiversity studies, these campaigns challenge the pathology paradigm of ADHD by centering lived experiences and resisting medicalized, capitalist, and neuronormative frameworks. This study examines how these campaigns function as both a collective storytelling space and a grassroots activist tool, demonstrating the role of comics in neurodivergent liberation. Through a formal, thematic, and reader-response analysis of comics posted as part of these campaigns, this study explores how neurodivergent artists use comics to visualize the often (in)visible embodied differences and the struggle to navigate a neuronormative society. These comics serve as a participatory archive, preserving neurodivergent narratives that might otherwise be erased or co-opted. At the same time, their circulation through hashtag activism transforms them into a site of resistance, where neurodivergent individuals build crip kinship, disrupt neuronormative discourse, and advocate for neurocosmopolitanism. By examining the emerging intersection of graphic medicine and critical neurodiversity studies, this study argues that these comic campaigns embody a radical neurodivergent praxis, rejecting reformist inclusion in favor of community-driven knowledge production and collective action. Their digital nature enables transnational neurodivergent solidarity, reinforcing neurodivergence as a site of political struggle against capitalist labor expectations, psychiatric gatekeeping, and institutional neuroableism. In positioning digital comics as both archive and activism, this study highlights their role in shaping neurodivergent resistance, self-advocacy, and liberation. 

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Lloyd Meadhbh Houston | Autist-fictions and Autogeddon: Neuroqueering Creepiness in Crash and Mad Max 

Abstract:  

K Angel is an autistic, kinky, trans/non-binary writer, performer, and researcher from the American Midwest. A two-time participant in the HBMG Foundation's National Winter Playwrights Retreat and shortlisted for the Virago Furies Competition, their projects across genres play with myth, consent, chosen community, and metamorphosis interruptus. 

This paper, which emerges from a wider collaborative project with the trans, autistic multidisciplinary artist K Angle, uses J.G. Ballard’s Crash (1973) and George Miller’s Mad Max franchise (1979-present), and their respective dramatizations of ‘the coming autogeddon’, to explore autism as a neuroqueer ecology of creepiness – both in the sense that autistic traits and autistic people are consistently framed as ‘creepy’ by neurotypical culture, and in the sense that autism has the capacity to disable, or at least reconfigure, creepiness as a regulatory category and normative affect through which to approach the world. Drawing on techniques from creative non-fiction, autist-ethnography, neuroqueer studies, and queer ecology, we examine the collapse of the Anthropocene as a sovereign category in the work of Ballard and Miller, and chart its implications for who gets to determine what is deemed creepy, and who has creepiness thrust upon them, particularly in the contexts of queerness and disability. Promiscuously collaging our critical reflections on and creative responses to Ballard and Miller’s work with pieces of car culture ephemera and medical and popular texts on autism, we ask what happens if, as two queer autistic people, we honour and pursue our intuition that there is something that constellates these texts, their obsessions, and the obsessional engagement they invite in us? What happens if, embracing the potential ‘creepiness’ of our engagement with these texts, we let that obsessional quality dictate the form of the piece itself? And what, if anything, can our resulting ‘creepy’ reflections tell us about how ecological disaster will (neuro)queer us? 

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Speaker Bios:

Natasha Downs: I am a Mad-identified autistic woman with experience of emotional distress. I currently guest lecture in the field of Mad Studies at Northumbria University, where I also study for a CertHE in Public Involvement & Co-production. Previously I completed a MSc by Research in Japanese (Edinburgh) and a BA in Chinese & Japanese Studies (Leeds). I am passionate about combining my experiential knowledge from being a psychiatrised autistic person with my special interest in the novel Romance of the Three Kingdoms. I have presented my work on Maddened approaches to the text at institutions such as Oxford and LMU Munich. 

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Prerna Tolani: Prerna Tolani is a PhD graduate student in the Department of Humanities and Social Sciences at the National Institute of Technology, Tiruchirappalli, India. Her PhD thesis examines neurodivergent expressions in graphic medicine. Her primary research interests include, neurodiversity studies, graphic medicine, health humanities and critical disability studies. She has her academic articles published in Journal of Graphic Novels and Comics and BMJ Medical Humanities. She has also contributed a blog piece to The Polyphony, a web platform based in Durham, UK.

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Lloyd Meadhbh Houston: Dr Lloyd Meadhbh Houston is a (gender)queer, autistic scholar based at the University of Cambridge, where they are Leverhulme Early Career Fellow in English. They are the author of Irish Modernism and the Politics of Sexual Health (OUP, 2023), and a range of articles and chapters on the medicalization of sex, queer cultural history, and the history of erotica and obscenity. They co-host the podcast Censored with Dr Aoife Bhreatnach, and, in collaboration with K Angel and Erica “ERN” Rivera, they co-facilitate the grass roots queer family history project Relatively Queer. 

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Zoom Meeting ID: 975 2198 8306

Passcode: 081361