Affirming Neuro-Queer Rhetorics in Early Childhood Education

• In Event: Moscone Center North Roundtable Session 4
  In Roundtable Session: Queer-Inhumanisms: Unsettling the Legacies of "Man" Across the Curriculum

Abstract

Objectives or purposes

This paper draws from a fourteen-month research-creation project conducted in Year 2 (age 7-8) of a mainstream Northern England primary school to examine how a speculative, compositional attention to sound and voice can make British schooling more inclusive. I argue that—even in Britain, where physical integration of Autistic children into mainstream settings has been a feature of special educational policy for forty-two years—schools continue to inscribe ‘Man’ through homonormative expectations of capacity, whereby Neuroqueer students are encouraged to pass as neurotypical by ‘approximating values of normalcy’ (Mitchell, 2014). I draw on affect theory, and the intersections between queer and dis/ability studies, to neuroqueer what passes as a rhetorical practice, with implications for who is rendered (in)volitional, (a)rhetorical, and, consequently, (in)human.

Perspectives or theoretical framework

For Yergeau (2018), the behavioural nature of Autism narratives “render [Autists] inhuman” (5) and “automatic” through the inconceivability of Autistic volition: ‘Symptoms’ of Autism, such as self-stimulatory behaviours, or stimming, are noise: involuntary, non-rhetorical movement. Chen (2012) considers the notion of an ‘animacy hierarchy’, which “conceptually arranges human life, disabled life, animal life, plant life, and forms of nonliving material in orders of value and priority” (p. 13) through inscribing degrees of lesser capacities to affect than be affected. Entry to the human requires minimum affective capacities of humanist rhetoric, of which absence is scripted onto the Autistic body, and necessitates rehabilitation to enable the Autist to “pass” (McRuer, 2006; Weheliye, 2014). This affective and rhetorical dis-capacity is evident in the literature, where a research interest in Music as a treatment to reduce the frequency of Autistic behaviours (e.g. Whipple, 2004) situates Autism as diametrically opposite to Music.

A neuroqueer-ing of sonic Autistic practices such as stimming might enable them to be read as queer rhetorics. After Alexander and Rhodes (2012), a queer rhetoric may “broaden, even to breaking point, what counts or passes as “normal”” (n.p).

Methods, techniques, or modes of inquiry

The research was conducted as a series of music composition workshops in a Year 2 classroom in Leeds, Northern England. Research-creation is the imbrication of art, research and theory in event. The episodes were recorded into digital music production software. I continue to think-with these events here, drawing from critical dis/ability studies and crip/neuroqueer theory, critical race theory, and sound studies.


Results and significance

‘Listening in detail’ (Vazquez, 2013) to a noisy six-note improvised melody by one neuroqueer child, and a noisy rhythmic scatting by one neurotypical Black child, I consider the ways in which affective dis/capacity is differently inscribed on each body: Specifically, the inconceivability of a dis/abled future (Kafer, 2013) and the assumed pliability of the ‘animated’ Black body (Ngai, 2007). However, considering these events side-by-side not only (neuro)queerly disrupts the ‘values of normalcy’ that form neurotypicality, it refuses the minimum capacities of volition that separate ‘music’ and ‘noise’, and so refuses the Music encounter.

Author

• David Ben Shannon, Manchester Metropolitan University