When we bring what we know about neurotypicality and neurodiversity together in conjunction with affect theory we can see an even more complex understanding of autisticness than before, one that needs to be brought into the world.
“New materialism engages bodies at a more meaningful level than the social model of disability because it refuses to toss the matter of bodily materiality (even experiences of impairment) out of the question of meaning-making itself.”1
“Crip and queer lives explicated through nonormative positivisms are those that believe another world is possible. The pursuit of crip ecologies such as this collection offers demonstrate that such worlds will not come into existence unless we vigilantly attend to more visceral engagements with the nuances of disabled lives as viable alternatives–an enrichment of the way alternative cognitions and corporealities allow us to inhabit the world as vulnerable, constrained, yet innovative embodied beings rather than merely as devalued social constructs.”2
“There is a great need for an ethical methodology from which disabled people can articulate how their lives bring something new into the world that would otherwise go unrecognized. As such, complex embodiment and parallel methodologies such as nonnormative positivism offer pathways to alternative spaces from which to discuss this critical third rail of disability experience.”3
Joy is an “nonbifurcated experience” which is “‘the self-enjoyment of being one among many, and of being one arising out of the composition of the many’ (Whitehead, 1985, 145). Thus is not a self-satisfying moment in time that essentially begins in a human head, brain, mind, body, or AI algorithm. Human experience can be ‘an act of self-origination,’ but it is constrained to a ‘perspective of a focal region, located within the body…but not necessarily persisting in any fixed coordination with a definite part of the brain’…In short, experience cannot be decoupled from its entanglement with the ‘whole of nature.’ Experience is continuous to material assemblages (technological or otherwise) and their encounter with the entire temporal thickness of events.”4
“For once we begin to feel deeply all the aspects of our lives, we begin to demand from ourselves and from our life-pursuits that they feel in accordance with that joy which we know ourselves to be capable of. Our erotic knowledge empowers us, becomes a lens through which we scrutinize all aspects of our existence.”5
“As we begin to recognize our deepest feelings, we begin to give up, of necessity, being satisfied with suffering and self-negation, and with numbness which so often seems like their only alternative in our society. Our acts against oppression become integral with self, motivated and empowered from within. In touch with the erotic, I become less willing to accept powerlessness, or those other supplied states of being which are not native to me, such as resignation, despair, self-effacement, depression, self-denial.”6
“This, to my mind, is a more useful concept than debility, as affective activism can be employed to think about how intellectually disabled bodies ‘turn on’ or activate switchpoints or affects in other bodies, through (ibid., p. 150). Embodied relations, sensory experiences and, as I argue elsewhere (Hickey-Moody, 2006, 2009; Hickey-Moody and Crowley, 2011), art made by and with people with intellectual disability can fracture and redesign despotic, medical and capitalist codings of intellectual disability.”7
“Contemporary arts practices call on us to think anew through remaking the world as we know it. Building on this ethos of practice as thought in the act, I want to suggest that arts practices with people with intellectual disability need to be recognised as crucial to building ecologies of sensation that highlight and respect the experiences of people with intellectual disabilities.”8
“To be autistic, says Yergeau…’is to be neuroqueer’, which involves ‘lurching towards a future that imagines “incommensurabilities of desires and identities and socialities’”, thereby moving away from comparison to an imagined ‘mythical form’ (Lorde, 2012, 116), be it neurological or sexual, and opening up other ways of knowing.”9
- Mitchell, David T., and Sharon L. Snyder. 2023. “Precarity and Cross-Species Identification: Autism, the Critique of Normaitve Cognition, and Nonspeciesism.” In The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Carolyn Pedwell and Gregory J. Seigworth, 2:553–72. Duke University Press. ↩︎
- Mitchell and Snyder, “Precarity and Cross-Species Identification” ↩︎
- Mitchell and Snyder, “Precarity and Cross-Species Identification” ↩︎
- Sampson, Tony D. 2023. “Nonconcious Affect: Cognitive, Embodied, or Nonbifurcated Experience?” In The Affect Theory Reader, edited by Carolyn Pedwell and Gregory J. Seigworth, 2:295–313. Duke University Press. ↩︎
- Lorde, Audre. 2019. “Uses of the Erotic.” In Pleasure Activism : The Politics of Feeling Good, 27–35. Chico, CA: AK Press. ↩︎
- Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic” ↩︎
- Hickey-Moody, A. (2015). slow life and ecologies of sensation. Feminist Review, 111, 140–148. http://www.jstor.org/stable/24572221 ↩︎
- Hickey-Moody, “Slow life…” ↩︎
- Jackson-Perry, David. 2020. “The Autistic Art of Failure? Unknowing Imperfect Systems of Sexuality and Gender.” Scandinavian Journal of Disability Research 22 (1): 221–29. https://doi.org/10.16993/sjdr.634. ↩︎
The Art of Autistic Joy 