Inevitably, but disappointingly, neurodivergent cultural landscapes are beset and policed by the same social and cultural standards, gatekeepers and institutional ableisms and marginalisations as neurotypical cultures.
Of course they are. All we seem to be doing is both impotently tinkering with repressive institutions to make them a little more accepting and accommodating, and capitulating to neuro-normative performance standards.
Popular ‘ND’ influencers, newly-discovered autist and ADHD celebs and anyone chasing Instagram Fame merely replicate the conditions that oppressed them, using the in-built obsolescent tools to recreate a slightly wonkified version of the boringly stupefying cultural products they seem to want to criticise (but, crucially, not critique).
Sanctioned, palatable, mediocre and mainstreamed apologias for ‘quirk’ and ‘difference’ are not radical.
Seeing the same-old faces and pontificators patting their backs, as well of those of their familiarly famous fellows and their boringly middle-class liberal content creator chums, for their ND ‘struggle’ is not radical. We now have a raft of celebrities and otherwise already-enabled people coming out with their ‘diagnosis’ stories. As before, some of these people court and receive all the attention, promote their mates, get the publishing deals, go on podcasts and the BBC and don’t bother to bolster, advocate or foreground the work of those who could really do with a little attention, money or just support.
I have posted on many of these people’s work, re-posted their videos, read their writing, referenced their books, promoted their work to colleagues, students and the public. I have reached out to these white, middle class people with broad platforms dozens of times and have never received replies, let alone been offered a conversation.
Some of these people are cynical opportunists, trading on their newly acquired ‘quirk’ to hog ever more of the limelight and to gatekeep (or just keep) their privileged and powerful positions of cultural attention. These institutional, tokenistic and blandly familiar ‘voices’ simply replicate the conditions of NT Capital, with a quirky twist, wonky dancing to bland pop, pick-me twerking for the exploitative attention of always-already compromised institutions.
The palatable neurodivergent culture they peddle is boring and it is reformist.
Revolutionary Neurodivergent Culture doesn’t quote Audre Lorde on the master’s tools (they know who they are), then use the same tools to assemble a similar looking House with a rainbow coloured infinity symbol.
We must promote Neurodivergent culture that does not have the look, feel and aesthetics of a debased mainstream and neurotypical product, BBC-a-fiable, docu-saccharine and fueling and enabling the ease of transactional consumerism, palatable for a passable chew.
We must create and promote Neurodivergent cultures OUTSIDE the structures that have led to our marginalisation. Tinkering with the ossified and corrupted House is not good enough.
Neurodivergent Culture should be Revolutionary, not reformist.
Making neurodivergence palatable to mainstream culture is ableism by stealth.
To quote Audre Lorde’s famously hijacked words in fuller context:
“Those of us who stand outside the circle of this society’s definition of acceptable women; those of us who have been forged in the crucibles of difference; those of us who are poor, who are lesbians, who are black, who are older, know that survival is not an academic skill. It is learning how to stand alone, unpopular and sometimes reviled, and how to make common cause with those other identified as outside the structures, in order to define and seek a world in which we can all flourish. It is learning how to take our differences and make them strengths. For the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. They may allow us temporarily to beat him at his own game, but they will never enable us to bring about genuine change. And this fact is only threatening to those Women who still define the master’s house as their only source of support.”
See, Audre Lorde, ‘The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House’. Comments at “The Personal and the Political” Panel (Second Sex Conference, October 29, 1979)