Featuring a vibrant rainbow design, and our super-sized Q logo, you won't find a more stylish way to make a statement. Ultimately a great book, but I feel I would have gotten as much out of it from reading the second half alone.

It will change how you view yourself and others in your life, guiding you to fully embrace your weird and amazing self. Her nonfiction explores the edges and intersections of queerness, neurodivergence, embodiment, and creative transformation.

For someone like me who was diagnosed as autistic last year at age 57 this has provided an invaluable and affirming perspective on how I perceive and experience the world. ACT Contact / FAQ About Events / Videos Merch / Subs Sign in/up Neuroqueer Heresies : Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Possibilities Walker, Nick More by this author. It provides foundational definitions of key concepts like "neurodivergent," "neurotypical," "pathology paradigm," "neurodiversity paradigm," etc. Nick Walker is a queer, transgender, flamingly autistic author of both speculative fiction and nonfiction, and co-creator of the urban fantasy webcomic Weird Luck. If you are new to these topics—particularly if you are a non-Autistic person—some may be challenging to read.

The 103 third parties who use cookies on this service do so for their purposes of displaying and measuring personalized ads, generating audience insights, and developing and improving products. Although I didn't always agree with the concepts Dr Walker expressed (I generally did), I DID appreciate the historical view of the "origins" of the phrase neuroqueer, which I've been familiar with for about the last decade, via Tumblr.Neuroqueer Heresies also provide valuable foundational knowledge for Autistic and other neurodivergent people. What Walker has done in Neuroqueer Heresies is define and celebrate the neurodiversity paradigm, yanking autism out of the disease and medical model into its proper place as an example of a necessary diversity of neurotype. Lays out extremely digestible definitions of and frameworks for utilizing different terms related to neurodivergence, neurodiversity, and neuroqueer, and the problems with pathologization, as well as provides extremely important input for interacting with and honoring the individuality of autistic individuals (through clinical work, educational settings, and personal relationships). Walker discusses the pathology paradigm, which is deeply rooted in society—how it harms and controls Autistic people. Early in the text, for example, Walker states the “pathology paradigm consistently results in autistic people being stigmatized, dehumanized, abused, harmed, and traumatized by professionals and often their own families.

Nick Walker has been part of the neurodiversity movement for the last couple of decades, and knows people who were there at the beginning when autistic people started meeting and building culture online. They are no more neurotypical than they are a chemical engineer, because they have the potential to become one in 20 years. Among the early sections of the book, the one that concerned me most was the grammatical prescriptivism chapter.It is something of a compilation of older pieces, plus retrospective commentary, plus a few newer pieces that elaborate nuances.