What Is Neuroqueer? Neuroqueer Theory Explained

Neuroqueer is a word people search for far more than they find explained. This is the plain version: where it comes from, what it means as an adjective, a verb and an identity, how it relates to neurodiversity, and what neuroqueering looks like in an ordinary life. The longer, stranger version is in my essay Neuroqueering from the In-Between.

Neuroqueer describes the act, and the result, of stepping outside the performance of a “normal” mind. Nick Walker, who coined the term with Athena Lynn Michaels-Dillon and Remi Yergeau, defines neuroqueering as intentionally freeing yourself from the culturally ingrained and enforced performance of neuronormativity. It is a verb first (to neuroqueer), an adjective second (a neuroqueer practice, a neuroqueer learning space) and an identity for those who want one.

Where the word comes from

Neuroqueer grew out of the neurodiversity movement and queer theory in the late 2000s, and reached a wide readership through Nick Walker’s 2021 book Neuroqueer Heresies. The parallel with queer is deliberate. Queer theory showed that gender and sexuality are performances that society enforces and that people can refuse; neuroqueer theory says the same about neurotypicality. Nobody is born performing “normal” attention, movement, emotion and speech; we are trained into it, and some of us can never quite manage it however hard we try.

Neuronormativity: the thing being queered

Neuronormativity is the set of norms, standards and expectations that treat one way of thinking, feeling, moving and communicating as the right way, and everything else as deficit, disorder or bad behaviour. It lives in classrooms that reward sitting still and eye contact, in workplaces that prize multitasking, in clinics that measure us against a neurotypical baseline, and in our own heads, where it becomes masking and internalised ableism. Neuroqueering is the practice of noticing those demands and declining them, deliberately and on purpose.

What neuroqueering looks like

• Unmasking. Letting your face, voice, body and interests do what they naturally do, instead of monitoring them for other people’s comfort.
• Stimming freely. Rocking, flapping, humming, fidgeting and pacing as the embodied sensory language they are, not as behaviour to be extinguished.
• Following monotropic attention. Going deep into what pulls you, living in monotropic time, and treating flow as rest rather than as a distraction from “real” work.
• Refusing the deficit story. Describing yourself in your own words, with community concepts like glimmers, pebbling and spoons, rather than in the language of symptoms.
• Making neuroqueer spaces. Classrooms, communities and gatherings designed around difference, such as the Neuroqueer Learning Spaces project with Stimpunks and the cave, campfire and watering hole of Cavendish Space.
• Becoming. Treating your neurodivergence not as a fixed category but as something that keeps unfolding, which is where the rhizomes, liminal spaces and Deleuze that run through this site come in.

Who can be neuroqueer?

Anyone who neuroqueers. Walker is explicit that the word is not reserved for people who are both neurodivergent and queer, although many of us are both, and the overlap is not a coincidence: Autistic people are several times more likely to be LGBTQIA+, and both experiences involve refusing to perform a self that does not fit. A neurotypical person who deliberately loosens their own performance of normality is neuroqueering too. What the word does not describe is a diagnosis, a symptom, or anything a professional can confer or withhold.

Neuroqueer, neurodivergent, neurodiverse: the differences

• Neurodiversity is the fact of human minds differing, and the paradigm that treats that as natural rather than pathological.
• Neurodivergent describes a person whose mind diverges from the dominant norm, whether they do anything about it or not. (What does neurodivergent mean?)
• Neuroqueer is active: it is what you do with the divergence, and the refusal of the norm itself.

Why it matters

Because the alternative is a lifetime of masking, and masking is one of the main roads into Autistic burnout. Neuroqueer theory gives language to what many late-identified Autistic and ADHD people arrive at on their own: that the problem was never the mind, but the performance demanded of it. It also changes what support means. If distress emerges between people, environments and systems, then that is where the work is: in the classroom, the family, the community, not in correcting the individual. That is the idea at the heart of Re-Storying Autism, and of this site.

Questions people ask

Is neuroqueer the same as being neurodivergent and queer?

No, though many neuroqueer people are both. Neuroqueer is about the practice of refusing neuronormativity; you can be neurodivergent and queer without ever neuroqueering, and you can neuroqueer without being either.

Is neuroqueer an identity or a verb?

Both. Nick Walker’s own ordering is verb first: neuroqueering is something you do. People who do it a great deal, or who have come to understand themselves through it, often take it as an identity as well.

Who coined the term?

Nick Walker, together with Athena Lynn Michaels-Dillon and M. Remi Yergeau, around 2008; Walker’s essays and the 2021 book Neuroqueer Heresies set out the theory in full.

How is neuroqueer theory used in education?

As a frame for designing learning spaces around difference instead of compliance: freedom of embodiment, communication in every form, interest-led deep attention, and spaces to move between. See Neuroqueer Learning Spaces.

Go deeper

• Neuroqueering from the In-Between, my essay on living in the gaps and turning them into Ma
• Neuroqueering Deleuze: Rhizomes of Becoming
• Wyrd, Weird and the Invention of Normal and Weird Pride in a Hostile World
• Monotropic Time and Neuroqueer Temporalities
• Key Words, the More Realms glossary of neuroqueer theory and philosophy
• Nick Walker, Neuroqueer Heresies: Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Possibilities (Autonomous Press, 2021), and neuroqueer.com