4. The Social Beyond Normativity
Hybrid
Panellists: Nic Cottone, Alfred Freeborn & Lisa Schmidt-Herzog
Chair: Eleonora Marocchini
Meeting ID: 926 8747 5003
Passcode: 500283
Nic Cottone (Online) | Social Reproduction of Neurodivergent Childhood: Alienation, Masking, and Autistic Burnout
Abstract: Social Reproduction Theory (SRT) theorizes the processes that sustain life in capitalist societies, like care giving, child-rearing, and reproducing labour power. In the global north, ideology portrays childhood as a time for play (not work), despite the material realities of ongoing child labor and normalization of children as future laborers through compulsory schooling. Within SRT, Susan Ferguson explains how childhood is a unique site characterized by the negotiation between instrumentalized alienation and children’s ‘praxic’ or playful nature, oscillating between a play-work continuum despite capital’s attempt to sever them. For Ferguson, this affords children distance from capital’s direct control, experiencing less alienation (Ferguson 2017, 114). However, given the distinct forms of disciplining and normalization neurodivergent children face through what Robert Chapman (2023) calls the empire of normality, I use SRT to articulate an account of neurodivergent childhood alienation which proves useful for understanding masking and autistic burnout.
While alienation is traditionally conceptualized within the circuit of capitalist production (through the normalization of populations qua workers), I suggest that autistic children experience alienation within circuits of reproduction. This includes not only alienation from caregivers and peers, but alienation from our praxic tendencies, wherein our relation to play is hyper-mediated by normality. I argue that masking serves as a mechanism that autistic children use to abate our unique social condition of alienation, even though it is difficult to sustain, comes at grave cost, and can lead to autistic burnout. A contradiction emerges wherein the means available to alleviate alienation further contribute to it. On this view, burnout is not an inherent feature, but rather a material response to alienation from our very own play and care in the spaces where we are supposed to be less formally subject to capital.
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Alfred Freeborn, Lisa Schmidt-Herzog | Racecraft and Neuroessentialism: An Open Epistemology about Neurodiversity and Race
Abstract: Facing liberal and rights-based approaches to emancipation, contemporary critical neurodiversity and disability theorists encounter a set of problems that we argue is directly comparable with those of abolitionist anti-racism frameworks. Both face a division between those pursuing the integration of formerly marginalized groups into unchanged categories of the normal person, society, and state; and those who are working towards a fundamental onto-epistemological paradigm shift, leading to an “end of the world as we know it” (Ferreira da Silva, 2007). While the 1970s saw anti-realist activist positioning on mental illness, neurodiversity advocates of the 1990s like Jim Sinclair have defended a neuro-realist position for a wide spectrum of diagnostic concepts. Whereas the first stance risks shifting types of human suffering to the realm of non-being (Szasz, 1961), the second one risks installing an ontological segregation that sorts humans into either “neurotypical” or “neurodiverse”, both supposedly incommensurable with each other and both being determined by their alleged brain structures (Vidal & Ortega, 2017). Similarly, anti-racism debates have seen both the argument of race not being a “real” category or as a neo-biologist-culturalist identity that reifies the division between humans upon specious naturalist grounds (Fields & Fields, 2012). Through a historical and theoretical comparison of these movements, we seek with this paper to help describe the historical pathways and present possibilities for a truly emancipatory neurodiversity movement. This, we argue, will require us to shift focus away from the onto-epistemological closure of “neurodiversity” and “race”, and instead engage with the historical and biosocial milieus from which both these objects emerge. Going forward, we propose an open epistemology to avoid both the traps of non-being and of essentialism (Borck, 2018).
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Speaker Bios:
Nic Cottone: Nic Cottone recently defended her dissertation in the Department of Philosophy at Michigan State University. She writes on socio-political theory, feminist philosophy, philosophy of disability, and disability studies. She is especially interested in theories of social reproduction, sexual violence, disability, and grief.
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Lisa Schmidt-Herzog: Lisa is a writer/PhD student exploring the ambivalent impact of global transcultural psychiatry, which both diversifies and standardizes psychiatric knowledge, often aligning it with a dominant, biomedical framework for understanding mental suffering. Alongside academic publications, she has released poems and essays in various magazines. Just recently, she became involved with The Polyphony Meets India. She is deeply committed to bridging theory and practice, which is why she has co-organized events on the "psychopolitics of normality" and helped establish a reading and activist group that meets at Institute for Cultural Inquiry Berlin to connect the struggles and theories explored in our proposal.
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Alfred Freeborn: Alfred is a Research Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science where he is currently investigating changes in how psychiatric research has been evaluated as part of postwar globalization. He has published on the historiography of the neurosciences, the philosophy of biomarker research in contemporary biomedicine, and methodological reforms in psychiatric diagnosis. In 2024 he convened the Globalizing Schizophrenia conference in Berlin which brought together psychiatrists, anthropologists and historians to discuss the history and legacy of epidemiological studies of psychosis. He is co-editor of the forthcoming collected volume Biomedical Visions: Medicine, Epistemology and Art Practice and author of the forthcoming monograph Biomedical Madness: Biological Psychiatry and the Schizophrenic Brain.
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