"Quiet Hands" and Other Normative Violences: Mapping the Queerness of the Neurodivergent Body/Mind

• In Event: 66.087 - MTCC Roundtable Session 30
  In Roundtable Session: 66.087-11 - Recentering (Dis)Ability in Queer Studies

Abstract

This paper explores the relationship between queer children and neurodivergent children and the ways that institutional power comes to bear on both. Responding to the Queer SIG's call, this paper extends queerness beyond the queer body, engaging in scholarly coalition building between Queer Studies and Critical Disability Studies. Focusing on the figure of Ivar Lovaas, creator of modern Applied Behavioral Analysis, and his interest in the “conversion” of both autistic and queer children, the paper locates a critical nexus between these histories. This paper demonstrates how “queerness” ascribes state-sanctioned mechanisms of control, through cultural anxieties about pleasure, agency and rejection of normative behavior, and looks to “neuroqueerness” as a political practice with revolutionary potential.

Author

• Robin Roscigno, Rutgers University