Neuroqueer

The grammar is the argument rather than a detail of it. Walker's own gloss is that as a verb the word refers to a broad range of interrelated practices, and that as an adjective it describes things associated with those practices or resulting from them. A person can therefore be neuroqueer, but on this account something has to be being done.

What neuroqueer does as a verb

Walker, Michaels-Dillon and Yergeau set out eight components, and the split between them is the useful part. Two are adjectival and describe a state: being both neurodivergent and queer with some conscious awareness of how the two interact, and embodying neurodivergence in ways that also queer a person's performance of gender, sexuality or ethnicity.

The other six are things done. Undoing ingrained habits of neuronormative and heteronormative performance. Intentionally altering one's own neurocognitive processes so as to diverge further from prevailing standards. Approaching neurodivergence as a form of queerness. Producing literature, art and scholarship that puts neuroqueer perspectives first. Producing critical responses to cultural work, on how it characterises neuroqueerness. And working to change social environments so that any of the above is supported rather than punished.

Print usage follows the verb closely. Anna Reading wrote in 2018 that a particular video neuroqueers the popular image of autistic people as always having great powers of visual memory. Monica Kleekamp described a child in 2020 who neuroqueered his reading of a text by turning it upside down and backward. Kristen Cole published on neuroqueering interpersonal communication theory in 2021. In each case the object of the verb is a norm, a text or a theory, not a person.

Where the word neuroqueer came from

Wiktionary derives it plainly from neuro- plus queer, and the two halves carry two histories. Disability studies took shape as a field in the 1970s after the disability rights movement, producing the social model of disability, on which a deaf person is disabled by structures that privilege hearing rather than by an inability to hear. Queer theory emerged in the 1990s to analyse and challenge heteronormativity, and brought with it the habit of using queer as a verb.

The vocabulary immediately around neuroqueer is unusually well dated, because Walker set it out himself in an interview with Dora Raymaker for Autism in Adulthood in 2021. Judy Singer coined neurodiversity in the late 1990s. Walker coined neurominority a few years after that, and notes that others very likely arrived at it independently. Kassiane Asasumasu coined neurodivergent around the year 2000. Walker began calling the two approaches to the subject the pathology paradigm and the neurodiversity paradigm around 2010. He is also insistent on a point of etymology that changes the reading: neuro does not mean brain, it means nerve, and in this compound it stands for the functionality of the whole bodymind.

What Walker says he was doing with neuroqueer is examining how socially imposed neuronormativity and socially imposed heteronormativity were entwined with one another, and how queering either of them blended into queering the other. The print record starts seven years later than the coinage. The word first appeared on the back cover of Michaels-Dillon's novel Defiant in 2015 and in Yergeau's Authoring Autism in 2018, and Wiktionary's earliest citation is Walker's essay Neuroqueer: An Introduction, dated 4 May 2015 and quoted in Jason Tougaw's The Elusive Brain. Nothing on file explains the gap.

Who can call themselves neuroqueer

People who identify as neuroqueer are usually both neurodivergent and queer, and Wikipedia records that this is not a requirement. Walker has said that neurotypical, cisgender and heterosexual people may identify as neuroqueer if they are actively challenging neuronormativity and heteronormativity, particularly the existing categorisations of gender, disability label or sexual orientation. An identity label whose coiner has opened it to people outside the group it names is rare, and it follows directly from defining the word as a practice.

On the overlap itself the article is more careful than its sources are. It states that neurodivergent people are more likely than neurotypical peers to identify as LGBTQIA+, and that gender-diverse people are more likely to be neurodivergent than cisgender peers, without naming the studies behind either claim. It then says that the reason for the connection is not known, that several hypotheses exist, and that each needs further investigation.

Where the concept touches this catalogue most directly is in what people do with it afterwards. Sarah Cavar and Alexandre Baril, writing in 2021, note that neuroqueer bloggers make up a significant share of the communities they studied and often create genders and pronouns specific to their own neurodivergences. That is the practice Neurogender and Autigender name from the other end.

Why neuroqueer refuses a fixed definition

Walker and others hold that the neuroqueer community actively resists any authoritative definition, and that no conceptualisation should be treated as comprehensive or definitive, the term being fluid, shifting and always adapting. The eight components are the nearest thing to a definition of record, and the people who wrote them decline to call them one.

The spread of the word bears the looseness out. Wiktionary files neuroqueer as an adjective, as two separate nouns, one for the quality and one for a person, and as a verb, with neuroqueerness, neuroqueers and neuroqueering all attested in print. Ryan Lee Cartwright, in 2021, reports Yergeau theorising neuroqueer as a kind of asocially perverse motioning, which is a fourth thing again.

The tightest short definition in the material is Monica Kleekamp's, written for the Encyclopedia of Queer Studies in Education in 2022: people claiming a neuroqueer identity recognise that discourses of person-first language or celebrated differences do not shift ableist constructions of neurological functioning in the way they purport to.

Where neuroqueer appears in academic writing

The term moved into journals quickly and across an unusually wide set of fields for a word with one coiner and no institution behind it. Rhetoric, education, disability studies, communication theory, literary criticism and social justice scholarship all carry it, and Wiktionary's citation file is the closest thing to a map of that spread.

It reached non-academic print in the same years. Donnie TC Denome listed autistic, neuroweird, neuroqueer, disabled and brain damaged in a piece for The Student Life on 21 February 2020. The musician Alex Masse was quoted in The Peak in September 2021 on themes of gender euphoria and neuroqueer love. QNotes wrote in December 2021 about a lawyer working on the rights of the neuroqueer community.

Why nobody has counted neuroqueer people

Wikipedia keeps a section headed prevalence and puts no figure in it. What it says instead is that statistical data on both queer and neurodivergent people is limited by differing social and cultural definitions of identity, by the safety of coming out, by the ability to obtain a diagnosis, and by other factors.

The definition compounds the problem in a way peculiar to this term. A word that can name a practice, a description, a field of study and a person cannot be put on a form as a single checkbox, and a count of anything would first have to decide which of the four was being counted.

The state of the record is visible in the article itself. It carries a banner asking for more citations, added in March 2024, and a proposal from November 2025 to split it into separate articles on neuroqueer theory and on neurodivergence and LGBTQ identities. Both are ordinary editorial notices, and both say something about how recently this vocabulary arrived.