Rooted in disability activism and broader social justice discourse, the neurodiversity movement recognizes that neurodivergent lives are under threat and insists that neurodivergent people deserve a future: life, identity, care, and justice. Neurodiversity (as practice, as movement, as life) might be understood as an orientation to the world that welcomes and waves toward cognitive difference, even as it acknowledges its pains and complexities, rather than merely, barely, or begrudgingly tolerating the atypical. What then is the future of neurodiversity? How might articulation of that future elucidate stories about its past, its thorny intersections, its affronts to normativity? In this panel, we focus on specific sites of neurofuturity: the undercharted territories of autistic blackness, violence and psychiatric disability, and the #PostFreedom of a #FreeBritney.

As a Black mother of an autistic daughter, Diana R. Paulin (Trinity College), in “Futures of Autistic Blackness: Exploring the Neurocolorline,” acknowledges: I am not fully inside autism; yet I am entangled in a discursive web of racialized autism/autistic discourse. I cl/aim to speak only for myself but I am also compelled to speak with and for my Black autistic daughter. This complex dynamic informs the way in which I understand Black autistic intersectionality. More often than not, the discourse of disability fails to capture the contours of Black autism and limits imaginative possibilities. How might the concepts of neurodiversity/ neurodivergence serve as possible sites for reevaluating the intersections between Blackness and autism? For instance, despite the historic distance and distinct experiences of (enslaved) Black and autistic bodyminds, the overlapping discourse of disability was (and, often, still is) deployed to dehumanize and contain Black and autistic people. Pushing against critical models that rely on self-contained formulations of autism and Blackness, I posit the “neurocolorline” as a relational model for understanding and evaluating the dynamic interplay between Blackness and autism in the past, present, and future.

In “Relocating Violence & Neurodivergence,” Julia Miele Rodas (Bronx Community College/CUNY) addresses a subject on which disability scholarship has largely remained silent. Literary and popular culture abound with toxic representations associating violence and psychiatric disability; from Jane Eyre’s Bertha Mason to Psycho and Fatal Attraction, brutally violent madmen and madwomen are portrayed as a perpetual threat to the innocent. In response, disability scholarship has resisted these deeply embedded tropes as a false threat, emphasizing that people with psychiatric disabilities are far more likely to be the victims than the perpetrators of violence. While the threat of harm to people with psychiatric disabilities–-from police, in institutional settings, on the street, and from family–-must remain the focus of greatest concern, decades of disability scholarship have created another problem by effectively eliminating from scholarly discourse the very real and persistent issue of violence originating from psychiatric disability. This illustrated talk points to the problem of disability scholarship’s unwillingness to speak on this subject; it argues against ceding this conversation to clinical and bureaucratic arenas; and it proposes that disability scholars are better positioned than others to develop language, theoretical tools, and inclusive practices to address the reality of violence that arises out of psychiatric disability.

In “#PostFreedom: Mental Healthcare and #FreeBritney,” Elizabeth J. Donaldson (New York Institute of Technology) juxtaposes the rhetoric of the #FreeBritney movement with the historical conditions of mental healthcare in the U.S., focusing on the criminalization of mental illness and the failed promise of community care. This talk briefly analyzes the documentary Framing Britney Spears, which records fans’ genuine concern for Spears herself, but also their own latent fears about the need for mental health treatment and the stigma of psychiatric hospitalization. While the #FreeBritney movement highlighted significant potential failures and abuses of the conservatorship system as well as the difficulties wards have navigating that system, #FreeBritney discourse nevertheless embraced an implicit ableist desire to be free of disability itself, especially chronic psychiatric disability and the complex social obligations that this entails. After Britney is free, we are left in a metaphorical state of post-freedom, a neuro-futuristic limbo where disability continues to exist but mental healthcare remains under-researched, inadequately funded, and difficult to access.