Title: Earthlove – Theorising Neurodivergent Reader Love of A Room Called Earth

ABSTRACT

This paper is a neuroqueer reading of the novel A Room Called Earth (2020) by Madeleine Ryan. In the paper, we explore and theorise a neuroqueer reading practice. Ryan’s novel depicts a neurodivergent experience of life and the world, through a neurodivergent literary form and style. Reading as neurodivergents, the content and the form melt together – it is more than ‘literary style’, it is a way of existing. This reading, and our writing about our reading, is not neutral. It is an engaged and personal reading, where we let our reading subjects fuse with the text. Important in our neuroqueer reading practice is the context of reading and writing. In the article, we explore how sharing our readings in a neurodivergent collective opens up an understanding of the world, the text, and ourselves, which works both as a healing process and sharing of experiences of sensory desires. We argue that the neurodivergent experience is different when experiences as a collective rather than individual experience – the feelings of reading, becomes when shared, something more and other. Earthlove is, through our reading, an experience of sensory/textual desire, and neurodivergent collective acts of love and self-love. Reading it feels like love.

KEYWORDS:

• Neurodivergence
• neuroqueer reading practices
• Madeleine Ryan

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Remi Yergeau, Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness (Duke University Press, 2018), 18.

2 Nick Walker, Neuroqueer Heresies: Notes on the Neurodiversity Paradigm, Autistic Empowerment, and Postnormal Possibilities (Autonomous Press, 2021).

3 See H. Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, M. Botha, K. Hens, S. O’Donoghue, A. Pearson, & A. Stenning. 2022. “Being, Knowing and Doing: Importing Theoretical Toolboxes for Autism Studies,” Autism in Adulthood.

4 For a similar exploration but in an educational context, where neurodivergent students are assigned a task of responding to texts featuring characters who potentially share dis/ability experiences like their own, but where the analytical gaze is an outsider of the students, the (possible neurotypical) teacher, and therefore does not share the experience of the reading, see Kleekamp, M. C. ““No! Turn the Pages!” Repositioning Neuroqueer Literacies,” Journal of Literacy Research 52, no. 2 (2020): 113–35.

5 C. Mullis, “Reflection: Autistic-coded Characters and Fans in Fandom,” Canadian Journal of Disability Studies 8 (2019): 147–56.

6 See ex Ian Hacking, “Autistic Autobiography,” Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society B 364 (2009a): 1467–73. Ian Hacking, “How We have been Learning to Talk About Autism: A Role for Stories,” Metaphilosophy 40, no. 3-4 (2009b): 499–516.

7 For a critical discussion see, Anna Stenning, “Understanding Empathy through a Study of Autistic Life Writing. On the Importance of Neurodivergent Morality.” Neurodiversity Studies. A New Critical Paradigm, Ed. Hanna Bertilsdotter Rosqvist, Nick Chown Anna Stenning (London: Routledge, 2020).

8 Becky Francis and Valerie Hey, “Talking Back to Power: Snowballs in Hell and the Imperative of Insisting on Structural Explanations,” Gender and Education 2, no. 2 (2009): 225–32.

9 Jim Sinclair, “Cultural Commentary: Being Autistic Together,” Disability Studies Quarterly 30 (2010).

10 Fergus Murray summarize monotropism as following: “In a nutshell, monotropism is the tendency for our interests to pull us in more strongly than most people. It rests on a model of the mind as an ‘interest system’: we are all interested in many things, and our interests help direct our attention. Different interests are salient at different times. In a monotropic mind, fewer interests tend to be aroused at any time, and they attract more of our processing resources, making it harder to deal with things outside of our current attention tunnel”. The monotrophic mind is contrasted to polytropic minds, summarized by Murray as “have multiple interests aroused at any time, pulling in multiple strands of information, both external and internal. They are primed to be on the look-out for things like social implications, and effortlessly decode metaphors and indirect language”. Fergus Murray, “Me and Monotropism: A Unified Theory of Autism,” The Psychologist 32 (2019): 44–9.

11 Dina Murray, Michael L. Lesser and Wendy Lawson, “Attention, Monotropism and the Diagnostic Criteria for Autism,” Autism 9, no. 2 (2005): 139–56.

12 Simon Baron-Cohenand Jaime Craig, “Creativity and Imagination in Autism and Asperger Syndrome,” Journal of Autism and Developmental Disorders 29, no. 4 (1999): 319–26.

13 Helen Hoang, The Kiss Quotient (London: Corvus, an imprint of Atlantic Books Ltd, 2018). Helen Hoang, The HeartPrinciple (New York: Berkley, 2021).

14 Monika Fagerholm, Diva : en uppväxts egna alfabet med docklaboratorium (en bonusberättelse ur framtiden) (Stockholm: Bonnier, 1998). A. Nygren, “‘Alfabetiskt ordnad eller på annat sätt ordnad enligt mina associationskedjor’. Om en autistisk poetik som del av estetiken i Monika Fagerholms DIVA” Finsk Tidskrift (FT) (2022): 61–72.

15 Hanna Emerson, You Are Helping This Great World Explode (2021), 10–12.

16 Monika Fagerholm, Vem dödade bambi? [eng: Who killed bambi?] (Stockholm: Albert Bonniers Förlag, 2019).

17 Rita Felski, “Critique and the Hermeneutics of Suspicion,” M/C Journal 15, no. 1 (2011).

18 J. E. Egner, ““The Disability Rights Community was Never Mine”: Neuroqueer Disidentification,” Gender & Society 33, no. 1 (2019): 123–47.

19 See ex Leni van Goidsenhoven, “‘Autie-Biographies’: Life Writing Genres and Strategies from an Autistic Perspective,” Journal of Language, Literature and Culture 64, no. 2 (2017): 79–95.

20 Catherine McDermott, “Theorising the Neurotypical Gaze: Autistic Love and Relationships in the Bridge (Bron/Broen 2011-2018),” Medical humanities 48 (2022), 51–62.

21 Astrida Neimanis, Bodies of Water: Posthuman Feminist Phenomenology (London: BloomsburyAcademic, 2017).

22 Erin Manning, Always More than One: Individuation’s Dance (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009).

23 Jim Sinclair, “Cultural Commentary: Being Autistic Together,” Disability Studies Quarterly 30 (2010).

24 Stephen Shore, Beyond the Wall: Personal Experiences with Autism and Asperger Syndrome (2nd ed. Shawnee Mission, KS: Autism Asperger Publishing Company, 2003).

25 Ralph Savarese, See It Feelingly. Classic Novels, AutisticReaders, and the Schooling of a No-Good English Professor (Duke University Press, 2018).

26 We use term “bodymind” as understood by Margaret Price as: “because mental and physical processes not only affect each other but also give rise to each other—that is, because they tend to act as one, even though they are conventionally understood as two—it makes more sense to refer to them together, in a single term”. M. Price, “The Bodymind Problem and the Possibilities of Pain, Hypatia,” 30, no. 1 (2015): 268–84.

27 Amelia Hill, “‘Clients Say It Feels Like We’ve Always Known Each Other’: The Mental Health Experts Who Believe Their Autism Has Turbo Charged Their Work,” The Guardian, Thu 3 Feb. 2022. 4 Sept. 2022 <https://www.theguardian.com/society/2022/feb/03/clients-say-it-feels-like-weve-always-known-each-other-the-mental-health-experts-who-believe-their-autism-has-turbocharged-their-work?utm_source=facebook&utm_medium=news_tab>.

28 Remi Yergeau, Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and NeurologicalQueerness (Duke University Press, 2018).

29 Christa Mullis, “Reflection: Autistic-Coded Characters and Fans in Fandom,” Canadian Journal of Disability Studies 8 (2019): 147–56.

30 See Remi Yergeau, Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness (Duke University Press, 2018).

31 Yergeau, Authoring Autism.

32 Mel Baggs, In My Language (YouTube, 2007). 8 Apr. 2021 <https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JnylM1hI2jc>.

33 Anna Stenning, “Understanding Empathy Through a Study of Autistic Lifewriting. On the Importance of Neurodivergent Morality.” A New Critical Paradigm. Neurodiversity Studies, Ed. Hanna Bertilsdotter Rosqvist and Nick Chown Anna Stenning. (London: Routledge, 2020).