A Call to Beautiful Weirdness

Small ways (for everyone) to unmask and be more free

A girl who flaps her hands a lot when she’s excited might be told she’s “unladylike”. A boy who does the same might be told his gestures are “gay”. How “normal” our expressions of being are ,is usually deeply tied up with what the norms for our gender are perceived to be. The hands thing is given as an example by Nick Walker, the theorist who came up with the idea of the “Neuroqueer” to describe practices of subverting so-called “normal” ways of thinking and being.

Though I have sometimes been told I talk with my hands, I haven’t usually been criticised for that particularly, My eye contact has been noticed in the past- the way my eyes flick up to the corner of a room sometimes and people follow them as I’ve spotted a bat in the ceiling. “Ah, I’m doing that thing” I think. Much less often nowadays. My Mum, who Policed most aspects of my self-expression when I was growing up particularly fixed on my walk “Can’t you walk normally?” she would tut. My shoes always wore down on the inside of their heels. That seems to have stopped now too.  Any “feminising” of my movements happened before I was conscious of it and now feels ingrained. I have not felt conscious of any need to rebel against it (until I started leading comedy performance workshops for women and we experimented with walking around and greeting each other like men. Ways of moving that I thought were “natural” were suddenly revealed as not so).

Walker says that some babies can be born neurodivergent but no babies are born neurotypical. (I feel like I should suggest a pause to let that sink in if it’s a new idea). You can’t look through a microscope and point at a universally biologically normal brain. Neurotypical is something you can learn to be. It is socialised. For most babies, this works- they’re wired up in such a way that they can deeply internalise neurotypical norms- so much so that they come to feel “natural”- the only way they can be. Even if it’s not necessarily in ways that are best for their wellbeing.For some babies- there’s absolutely no chance. Many neuro-norms are just not going to work. No, nopety, no. For some of us, we can learn the norms in our particular place, time and culture. Almost well enough to pass. But there’s a mismatch between them and our inclinations that will always more or less, depending on the environments we are in, be jarring.

Walker doesn’t come out in favour of a wholly essentialist OR non-essentialist model. They suggest that there’s about an 80% socially constructed, 20% biologically driven set of potentials helping shape us.

I have long experienced the drama workshops I started going to as a teenager as helping me unlock my rigid body and my uncertainty of how to relate to other people. I didn’t used to know where to put my arms when performing improv sketches. Struggled with trust games where you would take turns in falling into a partner’s arms or catching them. But I knew something was being released. Walker quotes Wilhelm Reich’s description of “Character armour”  to say that if we learn to move our body differently we can also free our mind:

“Character armour is the bodily component of repression; it serves to block not only the spontaneous performance of various bodily movements and self-expressions, but also to block access to the feelings, yearnings, organismic impulses and psychological capacities associated with those movements and self-expressions”.

Without knowing it, I was using my practice as a performer to try and do some of the unmasking of my neurodivergent self. But- I picked stand-up comedy. A form which still has some fairly rigid ideas of what male and female bodies and voices should be doing and saying (and generally as a society we are more critical of women who feel it necessary to speak in public at all. Or who dare to be visible without conforming to normative beauty standards). Even more so in the nineties and noughties. I remember watching in almost-envy as a comedian I mentored, who talked about the differences between men and women that I found so hard to pin down, was effortlessly understood by audiences. At the same time, I realised that, in performing, I was undertaking some sort of process that I knew might take me quite a while to complete. Quite bizarre to undertake it on public stages - though after a couple of years I started getting paid. Then I began adding poems in. There’s a lot more leeway for poets to be - well- weird. I got better audience responses and felt more free, more expressive, more myself. It’s still a work in progress. I still find myself adapting how I speak and move so that an audience will be able to hear and see me. But my canvas feels like it’s got broader. While researching comedy performance I was struck by a line by the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu who says it takes a “comprehensive counter training” involving repeated exercises to overcome the ingrained social “habitus” that gets dinned into you by parents. carers,, education, cultural representations, peers, everything… I remember thinking that creative workshops of all sorts- from writing to performance to art- can be a type of counter training. So can bodily practices like the martial arts or yoga or burlesque. So can meditation and some forms of sport and dance. Bourdieu was pessimistic that people could actually shift their “habitus”. But, I think we have more means of doing it available to us than when Bourdieu was studying rigid French society in the sixties and seventies. Nick Walker is optimistic about how people consciously choosing to “neuroqueer” even little bodily and verbal habits can be transformative:

“To liberate the body from the ingrained habits, tensions, and inhibitions that keep one locked into the performance of normatively, and to reawaken and cultivate the capacity for spontaneous stimming and non-formative self-embodiments, can also serve to help free the mind from the limits of normative perception and cognition”.

So here “neuroqueering” is an adjective (though they are happy that some people might find it useful to claim as an identity) and it is a practice. It’s a way of questioning some of the things that keep you stuck in ways of being that you’ve been corralled into because of your gender or because that’s what normal people are “supposed” to do. It is about unmasking -for people who identify as  neurodivergent OR neurotypical. It is about realising you don’t have to do that. And it can start small, so small.

“Unlaughter” is a concept I looked at in my comedy research. You can choose NOT to laugh at that sexist or racist or ableist joke you don’t actually find funny. You can give in to that urge to randomly tap your foot. You can knit in that lecture because it helps you concentrate. You can go to Shamanic dancing in Whitley Bay and move your arms in a way you’ve never moved them before just to see what it feels like (quite specific to the people who came to Shamanic dancing in Whitley Bay but- other “Free your body” things like that are available..), you can let that big “Arrgh” that you were keeping in, out. Dye that fringe purple or wear grey clothes for a fortnight. And I know even these small things might not be easy. People might look at you. They might say “Don’t do that” or “What’s got into you?”. If that would be upsetting to you- do things that are noticeable only to you. Or see if there actually are some safe spaces in your life. Don’t run yourself out of your comfort zone and back into a place of terror by going too fast. Perhaps, enlist support. If you have someone you can do these things with or who you can at least share how it feels along the way, then do. But know that you may be preparing the ground to live a life that feels closer to one that works for you. Something powerful awaits. Walker suggests:

“With sufficient engagement in neuroqueer practice, anyone can liberate themselves from the strictures of normativity. The already neurodivergent can reconnect with, and cultivate previously suppressed or undeveloped capacities, in order to more fully manifest their potentials for beautiful weirdness, and those whom we call neurotypicals are just potential neuroqueer mutant comrades who haven’t yet woken up and figured out how to unzip their normal-person suits”.

Nick Walker’s website with links to the quoted “Neuroqueer Heresies”:

https://neuroqueer.com/neuroqueer-heresies/

On Bourdieu and pedagogy: http://burawoy.berkeley.edu/Bourdieu/6.Freire.pdf