Creative and Critical Studies, Faculty of (Okanagan)
Creative Studies, Department of (Okanagan)
DSpace
UBCO
Barkved, Kaytlyn H.
Master of Arts - MA
University of British Columbia
“Neuroqueer Imaging” is an interdisciplinary contribution to an ongoing cultural shift regarding the life narratives of queer autistic women. Through a combination of qualitative research methods like arts based research (ABR) and feminist autoethnography, I utilize digital drawing as a language and as a means to explore the experiences, senses, and emotions of living as a queer woman on the spectrum. These image explorations are guided and interrogated through applications of critical theory that range from multiple fields —disability studies, feminist and queer theory, as well as posthumanism— and seek to show how the autistic researcher is deeply embedded and therefore best suited to contribute to autism research. “Neuroqueer Imaging” is a project that both shows autists as capable, subjective beings with a uniquely deep capacity for emotional and social intelligence, but further, it is an affective artistic experience that has life beyond the research paper: the images have capacity for multiple readings and meanings for any audience.
NEUROQUEER IMAGING: DRAWING AN AUTISTIC AUTOETHNOGRAPHY by Kaytlyn H. Barkved B.A., University of British Columbia, 2019A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF MASTER OF ART in THE COLLEGE OF GRADUATE STUDIES (Interdisciplinary Studies: Digital Arts and Humanities) THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA (Okanagan) December 2021 © Kaytlyn H. Barkved, 2021 ii The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the College of Graduate Studies for acceptance, a thesis/dissertation entitled: “Neuroqueer Imaging: Drawing an Autistic Autoethnography” submitted by Kaytlyn H. Barkved in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Arts . Aleksandra Dulic, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies Supervisor Ilya Parkins, Irving K. Barber Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences Supervisory Committee Member Karis Shearer, Faculty of Creative and Critical Studies Supervisory Committee Member Astrida Neimanis, Univeristy of British Columbia University Examiner iii Abstract “Neuroqueer Imaging” is an interdisciplinary contribution to an ongoing cultural shift regarding the life narratives of queer autistic women. Through a combination of qualitative research methods like arts based research (ABR) and feminist autoethnography, I utilize digital drawing as a language and as a means to explore the experiences, senses, and emotions of living as a queer woman on the spectrum. These image explorations are guided and interrogated through applications of critical theory that range from multiple fields —disability studies, feminist and queer theory, as well as posthumanism— and seek to show how the autistic researcher is deeply embedded and therefore best suited to contribute to autism research. “Neuroqueer Imaging” is a project that both shows autists as capable, subjective beings with a uniquely deep capacity for emotional and social intelligence, but further, it is an affective artistic experience that has life beyond the research paper: the images have capacity for multiple readings and meanings for any audience. iv Lay Summary “Neuroqueer Imaging” is an interdisciplinary thesis that combines narrative writing, critical theory, and drawings to explore autism from the perspective of the researcher: a queer autistic woman. Table of Contents Abstract ......................................................................................................................................... iii Lay Summary ............................................................................................................................... iv Table of Contents .......................................................................................................................... vList of Figures ...............................................................................................................................viiAcknowledgements .....................................................................................................................viiiDedication ...................................................................................................................................... xChapter 1: Introduction ................................................................................................................1 Chapter 2: Positioning ...................................................................................................................4 2.1 Disclosures .................................................................................................................... 7 2.2 Making the Mask ....................................................................................................... 10 2.3 The Cost of Masking .................................................................................................. 12 2.4 Diagnosis .................................................................................................................... 10 Chapter 3: Theoretical Literature Review ................................................................................17 3.1 Critical Disability Studies and the Social Model of Disability .................................. 17 3.2 Neuroqueer and Cripping Critical Disability Studies ................................................ 20 3.3 Standpoint Epistemology, Epistemic Authority, and Strong Objectivity .................. 22 3.4 Posthuman, Crip Kinships, and the Cyborg ............................................................... 23 Chapter 4: Methodological Literature Review .........................................................................26 4.1 Arts Based Research ................................................................................................... 26 4.2 Autoethnography ........................................................................................................ 27 Chapter 5: Results........................................................................................................................31 5.1 The Emotion Portrait .................................................................................................. 32 5.2 Queer Imagery............................................................................................................ 41 v vi 5.3 Doublings & Hauntings ............................................................................................. 49 5.4 Digital Figures............................................................................................................ 58 Conclusion ....................................................................................................................................66 Bibliography .................................................................................................................................67 vii List of Figures Figure 1: Emotion(al) Portraits I .................................................................................................. 34 Figure 2: Emotion(al) Portraits 2 ................................................................................................. 34 Figure 3: rage, sorrow, anguish .................................................................................................... 36 Figure 4: Honey Coloured ............................................................................................................ 38 Figure 5: Outlaw Emotions ........................................................................................................... 40 Figure 6: (Fe)(Male) ..................................................................................................................... 42 Figure 7: Pink & Dark .................................................................................................................. 43 Figure 8: Queer Bodyminds .......................................................................................................... 44 Figure 9: As Above ........................................................................................................................ 45 Figure 10: Puported to be Mindblind............................................................................................ 47 Figure 11: (over)Stimulations ....................................................................................................... 49 Figure 12: light/reft ....................................................................................................................... 51 Figure 13: pink fractals ................................................................................................................. 54 Figure 14: borders......................................................................................................................... 56 Figure 15: Stream designs ............................................................................................................. 60 Figure 16: Digital Bodies .............................................................................................................. 63 viiiAcknowledgements I want to thank Aleks, who I first met as I was sitting quietly apart from everyone in a studio class full of bright and talented students. Aleks, I am so grateful to you for seeking me out and inviting me to join the creative circle you form in each of your classrooms in the capacity that I could manage. Since our first class together, you have introduced me to so many new methods, processes, and styles —and all you have ever asked of me since we met is to try; try to come as I am, try to speak when I can, try to listen and not be afraid, try to feel the things that seemed inexpressible. Thank you Aleks, for seeing the potential in me, for all the opportunities you have given me, and always giving me the opportunity to try. Ilya, thank you for seven years of mentorship —and your unending patience with me! Thank you for instilling in me a voracious desire to learn and for supporting and encouraging me in my journey as a scholar. Every one of the undergraduate courses I had the pleasure of taking with you has played a role in developing the theoretical and methodological foundations of this thesis. Without your dedication to the continuous development of the Gender and Women’s Studies program at UBC, this work would not have been possible. I will forever be grateful to you for showing me that there is a space in the academy for voices like mine, and for always holding that space for people like me in your classrooms. Karis, thank you for your guidance these past three years. When I first entered the program I felt so unmoored and uncertain but you have consistently listened to me and pointed me in the right direction. Thank you for joining my committee, for tirelessly proof-reading my work, and for your reassuring comments and advice when it felt like my writing was faltering. Thank you for introducing me to the field of digital arts and humanities, and for further expanding my repertoire of theorists and scholars to draw from. ixI also want to thank the following professors and mentors whose skills and knowledge have been imperative to my growth as a student and artist over these many years: Alifa Bandali, Norah Bowman, Sue Frohlick, Joanne Gervais, Melissa Jacques, Kevin McPherson, Heather Latimer, Emily Murphy, Tannis Neilsen, Katherine Pickering, and Miles Thorogood. Thank you to my wonderful and supportive friends, who listened to each iteration of this work, and to the fabulously talented cohort of DAHU and MFA students who spent hours workshopping it with me. Thank you to my creative mother for teaching me to draw and nurturing my art practice, and to my dedicated father for letting me take my time to grow —and for driving me to the university when I wasn’t sure if I could finish my undergraduate degree! Mom and Dad: thank you for spending 32 years getting to know me, and for unconditionally loving every version of me that I have discovered along the way. Thank you to my older siblings: Jenny for naming me Kaytlyn (and then Bugsy), to Creighton who has always been willing to do anything for his five sisters, and to Nessy for always opening your home to me. And to my sisters Kirsten and Kelsi: I could not have done this without your unending words of encouragement and your love and compassion. And finally, thank you to Murphee, for starting this journey with me, to Dougall for continuing in his place and of course, to my beautiful, wise, and kind partner. Ashley: thank you for your enduring and patient love, for listening to every idea that bloomed and grew this thesis, and for always encouraging me whenever I doubted it or myself. Your strength and your empathy inspires me everyday and I am so proud and so honored to be your partner. x Dedication For Murphee. My beloved boy, my strength, my sweet stinky son. March 2011 - May 2020 1 Chapter 1: Introduction The relatively new field of Critical Disability Studies has prolifically theorized the individual and social models of disability from and for the disabled perspective (Oliver 1990, 2015; Garland-Thomas 1996, 1997, 2009; Davis 1995, 2016). However, this work predominantly features physical disabilities, while the perspectives of individuals with cognitive, mental, and developmental disabilities remain largely missing from Critical Disability Studies (Kafer 2013). Further, current societal and cultural narratives regarding these kinds of disabilities —produced by caretakers, parents, and supposed experts— fill this disparity, while our own works (Grandin 1995, 2013; Williams 1992, 1994) have been systemically ignored, essentialized, or denigrated. My thesis, “Neuroqueer Imaging,” is an attempt to fill this discursive gap by bridging visual arts and digital humanities to Critical Disability Studies, and consequently cripping them, by applying an autistic, or neuroqueer, perspective through digital art. Through this narrative drawing research process, I seek to contest both the cultural narratives of allistic (non-autistic) authorities as well as the historically sexist, racist, ableist, and eugenist gatekeepers of Autism Spectrum Disorder (ASD) that to this day continue to harm and misrepresent autistic people. The visual lexicon I created for this thesis stems from my autistic imagination and the development of multiple perspectives to share, celebrate, and provide a deep, affective insight into ASD. As an autoethnographic project, “Neuroqueer Imaging” draws largely on standpoint feminist epistemology, a critical approach to research that centers women’s concrete experiences in explorations of overlooked or missing knowledge claims (Hill-Collins 1990; Hesse-Biber 2014). As a queer autistic woman I am uniquely situated within a rich epistemic standpoint to produce research that speaks to a neuroqueer positioning in disability studies and cultural narratives about autism. Feminist standpoint theory is crucial for a successful autoethnography as both call for “reflection on the social organization (public issues) and structuring one's own life 2 (personal troubles)” (Crawley 2012, 150). By relying on my experiences and knowledge as a disabled and queer woman, and placing my ‘personal troubles’ at the center of my research practice, I am able to critically reflect and theorize about the ‘public issues’ facing the burgeoning autistic community, and further, add to discourses in disability studies. The first chapter of my thesis, “Positioning,” goes more deeply into my position as not only an artist and scholar, but the depth of my experiences as a disabled woman, and how this particular social location informs my research. Building on this, chapter two, “Theoretical Literature Review”, is a concise look at the critical theory I have utilized to build this thesis. It offers a summary of the field of disability studies before exploring theoretical offshoots in the form of crip and neuroqueer theory, considers the usefulness of standpoint epistemology and limitations of epistemic authority, and finally examines some posthuman perspectives on crip kinship. This literature review is followed by chapter three, “Methodological Literature Review'', an analysis of the methods employed for this work. In this section, I approach how to critically apply qualitative research methods like arts-based research methods as well as autoethnographic research methods, with particular attention paid to the autopathography, or disability life writing, that frequently is the vehicle for speaking about disabled life experiences and further the autistic form of life writing, the autistethnography. Finally, chapter four, “Neuroqueer Images” consists of sections that integrate the results and methods of my thesis work. These distinct sections — “The Emotion Portrait, “Queer imagery”, “Doublings & Hauntings”, and “Digital Figures”— are the synthesis of hundreds of drawings into four major themes. At its core, the methods for contributing drawings to this thesis consisted of creating hundreds of drawings to relate my unique explorations of empowerment and oppression as a neuroqueer woman through a drawn vocabulary. Many of these figurative drawings, consisting 3 of contour lines, gestural shapes, and colour planes, are responses to thought provoking ideas discovered through the writing, readings, and research I delved into throughout my thesis, while many others are attempts at distilling a sensory experience, grapple with emotional expression, or feature attempts to visualize neuroqueer subjectivity. Many more examples of my long standing work, including this entire thesis work, can be found at www.kaytlynbarkvedart.com and on instagram @kaytlynbarkvedart. 4 Chapter 2: Positioning 2.1 Disclosures Perhaps disclosure isn’t quite the right word. But this positioning needs a disclosure; it needs the act of making something known. Coming out connotes something to be celebrated, something positive, but disclosure somehow has teeth, it has the ability to “inflect and infect” (Yergeau 2018, 20). It feels formal, perhaps even factual, as what I am attempting to describe about myself needs a prescriptive authority, something that the very condition I have spent my entire life spiralling towards precludes me from. After all, we are led to believe that there is nothing to be celebrated when I disclose that I have autism; that I am austistic, that I am on the spectrum. This is not the kind of disability that one should seek out. For not only am I making it known that I have a disability; I have a condition that disables me: “a disclosure around autism invokes questions, invokes guesswork, incites demands for particularity” (Yergeau 2018, 138). There is a ‘dis’ to my ability, and therefore, a dis-closure hints bitterly yet readily towards the dis-value, or the “category of ‘other’ designated as a dumping ground for anything that cannot be valued” that encircles a disabled identity (Corker 2001, 47). My positioning is filled with these disclosures, about queerness and about disability. Disclosing details all the time to be believed, to be seen, to be granted access to space/place by institutions, by family, by strangers. I must pathologically disclose details of my life to others — not just because I do not appear to belong to the part that I am describing, but because it feels that I may burst if I return once more, for even a moment longer, to tamping all of myself down into a repressed and detached body. This thesis would not exist without the incessant need I find and now cultivate within myself to disclose. My research is concerned with my own neuroqueerness, with the strange nebulous space that many women like myself find themselves occupying: of being simultaneously not autistic 5 enough because of the social norms and pressures of our gender, and also being simultaneously too autistic to have proper control over of our gender and sexual expressions (Yergeau 2018). Many of us become adept enough to mask social deficiencies behind plastic smiles and fleeting eye contact, burdened by the cruel comments of those who see how we force it, see how we wear it uncomfortably, how it does not fit us well. How we stretch our smiles tightly over our faces, wrap our bodies in our assigned genders and assume our heterosexuality. Hanging in the space between us and them though we are constantly flagged by masks just slipping, masks not quite fitting. We come to queerness early on as strange creatures, quick enough to pick up on some of the social rules, but quietly and endlessly troubled by their arbitrary nature. We are neuroqueer in our bodyminds in ways that mark us as outliers to our peers, our families, or authority figures in our lives. It is the odd ways we hold our bodies in relation to others, and the fascination we have with particular subjects and objects, as well as how our bodily senses delight and terrify us. Yet we are also neuroqueer in our bodyminds in ways that seem invisible, even to us, as we are told if we are who we say we are, then we are far too disabled to pursue or express agency over our gender expressions or sexual partners. Disability may fill our allotted difference slot, or queerness may, but never both (Hillary 2014). When I disclose that I am on the spectrum, eyebrows raise, lips quickly purse, and everything I have ever said and done passes through the mind of who I have just shared this with. Often it is only a moment, but I see it; I have become fairly skilled at catching it. The quick calculations, the furtive side glances, the instant disbelief. If I am with my partner, holding her hand, it becomes even more perplexing. Not only am I immediately an outlier to autism from my gender, but my sexuality marks me out further in even more complex ways. Autistic people cannot possibly be in happy, healthy relationships. Therefore, if I purport to be in one, A) I am 6 not autistic in a way that matters, or B) it is suitable that my supposed relationship appears to be a seemingly non-reproductive one; at least I cannot pass on what I am, if I am what I say I am, to any offspring, as my “mental deficiency” is most certainly and appallingly "transmissible from one generation to the next” (Carlson 2001, 127). I am snatched up from my own disclosure and held to account in the minds of others, turned and prodded and compared. There is always another here to be compared to – a sibling, a child, a friend – who can be marked out as being definitively on the spectrum in relation to me; a better example of what autism truly is. Perhaps then if I provide a few more details, if I could just divulge a little more, I might be a believable autist. Without fail, I come, as I always must, to a crossroads in a disclosure; in order to be truly and utterly believed as an autist, I have to overshare every excruciating and traumatizing detail of my childhood, of my diagnosis, of my life. There are rules and formalities to a disability like mine, little significant boxes that must be checked off to get to the truth of this kind of disclosure coming from a queer woman like me. The word disclosure does feel fleeting in light of all of this, it does not remark on the gendered, sexed, or racialized contours and details of the circumstances that accompany disability. It does not make immediate space for the history of the body. But ‘coming out’ disabled does not feel accurate here either as “coming out is primarily portrayed as the process of revealing or explaining one’s disability to others, rather than as an act of self-acceptance facilitated by a disability community” (Samuels 2003, 239). There is pathology, trauma, and sadness to this disclosure; a bitter reproach to anyone who might attempt to insert a narrative of toxic positivity, or imagine me as supercrip (Clare 2015). In order to live this life, and do this research, I must position myself within it. In order to be positioned within it I must disclose my history. In seeking to change the way that ASD is 7 researched, written, and spoken about culturally, I must elucidate all the details of my history. I must disclose, disclose, disclose, until I am a fully fleshed out person, disability and queerness and all, and I can step aside, even for a moment, from the masking I have done my entire life. 2.2 Making the Mask The diagnostic criteria of autism from the 1987 DSM-III-R lists a child as needing “qualitative impairment in reciprocal social interaction and in communication,as well as restricted interests” in order to be diagnosed (Volkmer et al. 2014, 199). The DSM-IV, published in 1994, was the first of the diagnostic manuals utilized by diagnosing professionals to conceive of autism as a spectrum, and though the criteria has broadened, the “gold standard diagnostic tools for autism are moulded around the male phenotype” (Kanfiszer et al. 2017, 662). The autistic child, we are all often told, either culturally through movie and television depictions, but especially from professionals —and parents of autistic children— is easy to spot. Autistic children tend to be boys —most research points to a disproportionate amount of girls to boys diagnosed with autism with some numbers as low as one female to four to five males (Lounds and Dewalt 2020). Autistic children miss crucial social and developmental landmarks: they seem to mysteriously stall or suddenly slide backwards in their development. They don’t play with others, or don’t socialize with others, or they play with their toys in peculiar ways. They don’t like eye contact and they don’t like to be touched or held. They will flap their hands, repeat words or sounds, spin in circles, or hit themselves or bang their heads against walls when they are upset. They are rigid, repetitive, and strange. To anyone looking at me now, I appear to be none of these things; but after all, that is just the surface of this mask. When it starts to peel from my face, the true heft of it asserts the time I have spent crafting it, and highlights how “science has been privileged in defining autism” rather 8 then identifying and studying the neurotypical “cultural and society within which norms exist” (Kanfiszer et al. 2017, 661). Like many other autistic women, I came to my diagnosis later in my life, as an adult (Green et al. 2019). I learned to speak and walk on time and I interacted well with the world around me, particularly with my multiple siblings, and family dogs and cats. But there were also oddities to my childhood: I could not hold a pencil the correct way well into the second grade; I could not (and still cannot) read an analog clock, nor could I tell right from left unless it was indicated by a letter on my hands. I would scream or cry when my parents put the wrong clothing on me; I preferred to be naked most of the time. I developed particularly picky eating habits that related to colour, temperature, and texture of food that narrowed the parameters of food that was acceptable. Regardless, at home, despite all of these strange markers, I hit most of the correct developmental markers, or was just shy of missing them. To all appearances, I was a normal, albeit sometimes strange, happy, healthy(ish) little girl. Upon entering kindergarten my idiosyncrasies began to manifest as behavioural issues. Things that I struggled with at home, or things that had never been issues before, suddenly became or developed into problems: picky eating was turned into malnourishment, food intolerances, and vitamin deficiencies; texture issues with clothing was inappropriate attire or nudity, and the easy friendships I had fostered with my sisters did not translate into social skills for a new cohort of peers who, unlike my siblings, had a choice in whether or not they wanted to interact with me. Small disruptions in my daily schedule could bring me to tears at home, but at school disruptions and difficult tasks not only made me cry, they made me pull at my hair and slap, scratch, and pinch myself. I frequently made myself nauseous from frustration and anxiety and had to be sent to the nurse’s room. I started bringing on bouts of nausea and vomiting to stay home from school. 9 I was a disruptive force in the classroom, just not in the ways that were typical of autistic boys. I was not violent, nor outrageously loud, but I did have a peculiarly distracting presence and —an alarming at times— way of thinking. I was extremely sensitive and could be called back to task or away from undesirable or disturbing activities with sharp words or tone of voice. In these formative years in primary school, I began to grow and form in earnest a mask around my sensitive body that would both protect and debilitate me for years. Instead of learning what was and what was not appropriate in school, I relied on a developing knack for knowing when my disruptions were about to go too far. Rather than connect and understand facial expressions and their relative emotions, I began to parse how a face could shift when my presence brought displeasure to others —especially in figures of authority. At times when my misbehaving or distractions could not be stopped or silenced even with stern looks or words, I fostered an uncanny ability to go silent and still. I could become an entirely different child if I shifted myself slightly; singularly focused and intent on a task in one moment when I had been hiding under desks and barking like a dog rather than speaking earlier that day. This state, brought on sometimes by using my ability to hyperfocus, other times by sensory shutdowns, was something that adults enjoyed much more than my fidgeting, chatting, and constant inane disruptions. I tried to nurture and seek out these episodes. I taught myself to get lost in anything that could catch and keep my attention. Pushing the bright jewel coloured swirling specks in the air around the room, learning recently after reading Williams’ Nobody Nowhere, that I was seeing air particles (Williams 1992), or tracing patterns on the seat covers at the kitchen table, the wallpaper in my bedroom, or drawing into the carpet in my classrooms with my eyes and fingers. I could listen to the electricity humming in the walls around me, or the sounds of my tendons and muscles creaking within my own body, or if I was still for long enough, I could hear 10 the music and tones inside of my own head. These silences, especially the prolonged ones, did come at a cost however; they made it difficult to shift from one task to another, and they numbed my body. I came to discover the pleasure of how recklessness with my body could bring me crashing back into it when I felt the exhaustion of keeping myself tamped down creeping in. Running down hills and into walls, spinning as fast as I could until I fell down, or climbing as high as I could in trees or on jungle gyms —sometimes buildings, one time a decommissioned school bus— till I felt dizzy with height. I could quiet my body only for so long before I would begin to feel the urgency to reawaken it. As I got older, getting back to my body required more and more recklessness, more adrenaline, and pain: one day, at thirteen years old, I jumped out of my second story bedroom window. My mother, frightened when I told her later that I had felt compelled to do it, took me to the family doctor who, after hearing my simple explanation of needing to feel my body, swiftly prescribed me antidepressants. 2.3 The Cost of Masking What I learned in those years as a young girl was how no one seemed to listen to me, or was able to understand me. Things I said and did brought about puzzling looks, whispers, and mockery. I learned to be secretive about the things that brought me pleasure, just as I learned to hide or downplay the things that upset me. I was a little girl with no social graces, who loved pink and Sailor Moon, and did not understand relationships with other little girls. I grew up into a woman who still loves pink and Sailor Moon and now is a woman who loves other women. As a little girl I sat too close to other girls or followed them around, and reached out instinctively to hold their hands. I would whisper to them my darkest secrets, tell them they were my best friends, and tell them how much I loved them. I preferred the company of girls over boys; girls were soft, funny, and pretty while boys were too loud and too quick; they were shaped too 11 sharply and brightly. But girls are also cruel, and the quick, steadfast and strange dedication to any girl who would smile at me, marked me out as naïve and gullible. Just as I had learned how to avoid the ire of adults by reading their changing expressions on their faces, I haltingly tried to apply this to my peers; how to seem, behave and look like a normal little girl to try to avoid the worst of the cruelty. Girls on the spectrum, for the most part, learn social behaviours from other girls: they camouflage —or mask— their differences by “using coping strategies in social situations...to seem socially proficient” (Green et al. 2019, 22) As I entered high school, playground cruelties turned into vicious and traumatizing bullying that forced my family to move. Girls were no longer soft and pretty and merely masking was no longer enough. I learned that in order to survive, I needed to reel in the parts of myself that I could not change, silence some, and cut off the parts that could be spared. But still, girls could scent the blood on me, the differences I had desperately cleaved off and clumsily sutured shut. No matter how much I tried and no matter how hard I hid myself, I was always different in ineffable yet wrong ways. The body cannot hold up to that kind of prolonged silencing, and come out the other side unmarked. Much of what I tried and thought I had covered up, shut down or severed, grew out of me in disastrous ways. Like a hydra, my idiosyncrasies multiplied pathologically as I tried to cut them away from my body. My already sensitive bodymind developed hypersensitivity to sight and touch and the mild synesthesia I had grown to love as a child, grew into severe misophonia and hyperacusis. As a teenager I medicated myself with alcohol and drugs to cope with a nervous system constantly firing over capacity while simultaneously clamped tightly down and ignored. My emotions became wild and difficult to understand or relegate, my body growing away from me as my mask grew in place to protect me from the world. Like many other girls and women on the spectrum, depression and anxiety began to seriously grip my life and stunt my 12 development (Bagiela et al. 2016). Masking is “cognitively effortful, exhausting, and challenging to one’s identity” and the results of a lifetime of these efforts rarely results in “the development of successful and naturalistic use of social skills” but rather in a set of “anxiety-driven, rules based” social skills (Green et al. 2019, 22) that are hardly reliable and rarely universally applicable. Graduating from high school and beginning my life as an adult broke me. Now outside of the rigidity and repetitive cycles of primary and secondary school, my poorly cultivated social skills no longer worked in a much more complex social world. I no longer knew how to soothe myself in a large world that overstimulated and deeply perplexed me, nor could I bear the cumulative weight of my masking efforts, or continue to ignore the effects of years of trauma. My mask, wildly out of control, while growing with me to save me, had now grown around me, encasing and choking the life out of me. 2.4 Diagnosis My mother was the first to suggest that perhaps within all of my idiosyncrasies, not just the manifestation of my depression and anxiety, was the answer to my frightening downward spiral. Speaking to a friend, she had mentioned my difficulties with my senses, particularly with sounds, my inability to adapt to new situations and environments, and my seemingly stunted adult development. This friend, upon hearing the parallels between her own autistic daughter and me, asked my mother if she had ever considered if I was on the spectrum. At 25 years old, I did not see how this could possibly be true; all I knew of autism was from the representations of autistic men played by allistic actors in movies and on television. My mother persisted however, because perhaps this could finally provide answers and closure to over a lifetime of constant and unending difficulties. I started my journey to diagnosis of ASD by reading the accounts of other 13 adults seeking an autism diagnosis. Soon I discovered an entire community of autistic women online —in their 20s, 30s, 40s and even 50s— who disclosed their own eerily similar life stories, and who, too, had been misdiagnosed or missed altogether. The pieces all started to fall into place. Late diagnosed or misdiagnosed autistic women, like myself, continued to be misfits amongst their peers, felt overcome by their hypersensitive senses, and found comfort in uninterrupted routines. They too, like me, had found themselves in a constant cycle of exhaustive depression and anxiety; burning out from work, from school, from friends or relationships. Looking at the world, seeing the whole of it, and feeling alien on its surface. Research shows that undiagnosed and misdiagnosed autistic women typically are treated for at least one or more mental health issue —most commonly anxiety, depression, eating disorders— and that treating and diagnosing healthcare professionals either never consider a possible ASD diagnosis, or dismiss outright if the patient suggests an autism assessment (Bariegla et al. 2016; Green et al. 2019). This too was my own experience: after numerous sessions with two psychiatrists I found myself buried under countless diagnoses and their accompanying treatments. My twenties became a lonely blur of depressive and psychotic episodes, suicidal ideations and blundering, half hearted attempts at taking my own life. Clearly I suffered from clinical depression with a panic disorder, which evolved into a social anxiety diagnosis, which became generalized anxiety with obsessive compulsive tendencies, complicated by an anorexia nervosa diagnosis —that I would ‘pathologically’ deny— and a clearly missed childhood diagnosis of ADHD. There was a perpetual rotation of antidepressants, anti-psychotics, benzodiazepines, and stimulants. Appointments with talk therapists, art therapists, psychologists, psychiatrists, naturopaths, and nutritionists consumed my days. But as the years passed, I continued to atrophy even under the care of a team of psychiatrists, therapists, 14 specialists, and general practitioners. So at 25, despite my initial doubts, I began to let myself wonder —was I autistic? Casting my mind back on my painful childhood, and talking with my parents, I discovered not only that my childhood assessment for learning and developmental disabilities was quashed by my parents when I was eight, but that autism was prevalent on my mother’s side of the family, and further, that my own father had an autistic brother —an uncle I would never meet— that had been institutionalized since the 1950s. During a fateful session between myself, my psychiatrist, and my parents, a corroborated account of my childhood emerged, one that elaborated on both the hidden history of autism in my family and one that finally acknowledged my social deficits, strange behaviors, and sensitive nervous system for what they were. I was diagnosed with ASD at 26 years old. There were no treatments or cure, my psychiatrist warned as we started this two year long endeavor, and there would be no resources available waiting for me as a newly diagnosed adult. Regardless, the journey of self discovery and diagnosis began to shift my entire life. ‘Normal’ no longer looked appealing. Instead of seeing myself as a failure for my inability to meet and keep up with the world around me, I began to consider that perhaps the world around me was one that I could not fully participate in —and that was okay, because it was not a world built for people like me. Rather than masking, exhausting and numbing myself to keep up, I chose to try to take off my mask and reconnect to my odd, sensitive, neuroqueer bodymind. Altering my approach to the world, adjusting my view and approach towards it specifically for my neuroqueer bodymind to not only survive in, but thrive in, saved my life. Rather than feel anguish for my hypersensitive sensory perceptions, and intense emotions, I have learned to treasure and nurture my delicate bodymind. I try to let my bodymind do what it 15 needs to do instead of fussing over appearances of normalcy; I protect my sensitive hearing from overstimulation and allow for my fingers to fidget or my hands to flap. I ask for accommodations to be able to enter a space and leave or do not attend if there is no space made for me. I carefully open myself up to people now and allow them to see me —all of me. Now, five years after diagnosis, as a graduate student, I can better see my trajectory and trace my story leading up to this point. I look at each of the pathologies that my bodymind has been accused of, and of the traumas and pains inflicted on it, of my attempts to escape it, and my ongoing reconciliations with it. This story —all of these experiences— add up to an account of autism, one account of which there are many, that must be shared. Therefore I come to faces and figures in an attempt to reconcile and story this journey, its excesses and traumas that have spilled into my life and structured it. The journey from dysfunction and discordance with my body and bodies around me, and the pathologized fascination and love of women that has turned from shame and flourished. These excesses spill still into my practice and specially enable me to be positioned to do this research. Only through the intense obsession and focus that my brain makeup allows me am I able to pursue what I do. These drawings, soft and wispy, are like dreams coming to life on the screen before me. Every face hides within it a dozen emotions I cannot begin to describe in real life, but from me, through the stylus, they come: beautiful, serene, calm. Some of them look forlorn and I imagine touching their faces and running my fingers through their hair like I did when I was small; beautiful faces of the girls who now cannot hit me, spit on me, or call me names. In this space I can explore these faces, their inane expressions that when hanging on a face of flesh and blood drive me mad with misreadings/misgivings. Here I can be amongst them; we all gaze at each other, into each other, and past each other. There is no dread, no need to count the seconds between my eyes blinking, 16 no worry I will stand too close, or say something that I shouldn’t. There is no posturing, there is no plastic mask. This is not because they are not real in this digital landscape, rather, they are all extensions of me. They become mirrors of my own face, my own attempts to master expressions, and acceptable facial contortions and social graces, mirrors of my love for my own neuroqueerness. The glass on the screen warms beneath my palm, and the tablet heats as I press its processors to keep up with me, layer after layer. 17 Chapter 3: Theoretical Literature Review 3.1 Critical Disability Studies and the Social Model of Disability As a queer autistic woman seeking to research, write, and draw my thesis, I enter into a realm of discoursing with and in between Critical Disability Studies (CDS) and feminist disability theory. Gender, sexuality, even whiteness, have complexly changed and rewritten my trajectory as a disabled subject. This is a particularly demanding task when the very language, theory, and methodology best used to outline these experiences is contested. CDS offers a discursive look at the way ableist society views bodies; to be precise, it offers insights into how we, as people view the able body, and its counter, the disabled body. CDS examines not only this category of disability and its disabled subjects, but also considers the genealogy of disability, including the various methodologies and theories of the field of disability studies (Vehmas & Watson 2014). Akin to queer theory and its studies, CDS considers and unpacks historical and cultural depictions and standards of the able body that normalize the body in one particular way, but mark out the disabled body as deviant, different, other, and substandard (Davis 2016). In the 1980s, the field of disability studies championed a shift in ideology regarding the body in its movement away from the relegation of the disabled body solely to the medical realm of specialists, hidden away in institutions or asylums, and supported solely through pity and charity, towards a social model that marks out instead how the normative world impinges on and impairs the body (Oliver 2012; Davis 2016). The medical model defined disability as an “individual defect lodged in the person, a defect that must be cured or eliminated if the person is to achieve full capacity as a human being’’ (Siebers 2008, 3). The social model, on the other hand, questioned society and its exclusionary practices that disable the body as the problem rather than the individual impairments of each person (Shakespeare 2014). The social model of 18 disability, still highly favoured by many disability rights advocates and activists, is not without issue; though it attempts to reposition dialogue and perception about the disabled body, many scholars, deemed critical disability scholars, view the binary model of disability as fundamentally couched within modernist paradigms (Shuttleworth and Meekosha 2013; Shakespeare 2014; Corker 1999, 2001). The social model inherently relies on binarist thinking, tending to position the body in a disablement/impairment dichotomy, an oversimplified materialist approach (Vehmas & Watson 2014). The logic employed by this model thus delineates disability as social and impairment as biological, which is troublingly essentialist in nature, and follows a similar concerning trajectory within second wave feminism’s gender/sex distincitons (Shakespeare 2006). Theorists critical of the social model argue that it tends to flatten disabled people's lives and experiences, that “qualitative research has found it very difficult to operationalise the social model because it is hard to separate impairment from disability in the everyday lives of disabled people” (Shakespeare 2006, 36). The proliferation of the social model has even led to the liberalization, co-option, and defanging of the disability rights movement by the very corporations and institutions we initially sought to break free from (Shakespeare and Watson 2001; Shakespeare 2006; Corker and Shakespeare 2002; Corker 2001). Michael Oliver, on the other hand, the originator of the social model, has repeatedly argued that the model, from its very inception, was never meant to be more than a “tool to improve peoples’ lives” (Oliver 2013, 1025). Thus, it is important to recall that the social model is just that: a model. It is not meant to be utilized as a long standing theory in disability studies but is rather “one strand in an emerging social theory of disability” (Corker 1999, 629). Thus, many theorists and activists working with disability still find the social model of disability to be the best vehicle to theorize about the 19 paradigm of ability/disability to better highlight the disturbing inequalities that face disabled people. Turning to feminist disability scholars I found not only critical insights for the application of the social model of disability, but applications of it that were both intersectional and innovative towards interrogations of gender, sexuality, and race alongside disability (Garland-Thomson 1996, 1997, 2009; Wendell 1989, 1996; Clare 2015, 2017; Kafer 2013; Young 1990). Feminist disability scholars perhaps offers some answers to the numerous contentions that CDS has with the social model of disability. Merely lifting or breaking socially constructed barriers will not bring an end to disabilities, as ability is not the only way that the body is caught up in exclusionary constructions and practices of society (Garland-Thomson 2002). Perhaps, then, a better approach to the contentions taken up with the contemporary models of disability —like the social model— and the way they structure discourses around the disabled bodymind is to apply a phenomenological hermeneutic analysis: “an investigation of disability [that] examines not only the experiences of disabled people, but also the framework that governs those experiences and their interpretation.” (Kavanagh 2018, 73). Here, theory comes secondary to investigating disabled experiences, particularly ones that have historically been or are continuously excluded by the vertical and homogenizing models of disability (Kavanagh 2018). A phenomenological hermeneutic analysis of disability “gives voices to the people who actually live with disabilities,” and one of the best resources to gather these experiences is through disability life writing, as “narratives of disability shape and are shaped by models of disability” (Kavanagh 2018, 77). This approach is not meant to replace the models of disability, but to augment them and fill in the gaps through which bodyminds —like my own— tend to fall through. 20 CDS has come to a place of reckoning, much like the waves and eventual splintering of feminism: not one theory, not one pairing of models, nor any one word in our languages can entirely fit the complex experiences and lives of disabled people. Feminist disability scholars, premise their work on the ways that disability oppression intersects with the bodymind through other categories of race, gender, and sex, and offer critial approaches and analyses that are embodied, subjective, and reflexive. These sensitively tuned approaches are plural in praxis and focus on how relationality is necessary to the field of studying disability in all the ways it renders and marks each individual body. 3.2 Neuroqueer and Cripping Critical Disability Studies From the works of feminist disability scholars, I arrived at crip theory, of the foundational work of Robert McRuer, and, most importantly, of Alison Kafer. Kafer offers that the term ‘crip’ or ‘cripping’ is capable of inducing someone to wince: its appeal to disability theorists and activists is in its harshness (Kafer 2013). Crip —itself shorthand for the term pejorative ‘crippled’— urges a wince, a shakeup, or a jolt out of “everyday understandings of bodies and minds, of normalcy and deviance,” that it is a means of theorizing about and contesting compulsory ablebodiedness and ablemindedness (Kafer 2013, 15). Kafer extends that crip theory is “more contestatory than disability studies, more willing to explore the potential risks and exclusions of identity politics” and its “most productive and provocative elements” lie in the fluidity of the boundaries of its definitions (Kafer 2013, 15). Starting this work from crip theory, I felt like I had discovered a space from which to situate myself amongst the “edgy and powerful valences” apparent in crip theory’s resistances and methodologies (McRuer 2006, 13). Yet what struck me when I read and reread Feminst, Queer, Crip, was Kafer’s elucidations that disability studies, particularly in the humanities, has “focused little attention on cognitive 21 disabilities” (Kafer 2013, 12). Unfortunately, this too was echoed within the fundamental writings on crip theory, but within the citations of Kafer’s more recent work, I found the work of Remi Yergeau. I came to neurological queerness, or the term “neuroqueer,” through Remi Yergeau as I navigated through my literature review, trying to find niche pockets of research and theorists who had developed a strong body of work that I could turn to and rely on. Yergeau, themselves an autistic rhetorician, offers a crucial and critical insight into the scope of the autist as neuroqueer by compiling an online autistic scholarly community’s definitions into their text Authoring Autism: On Rhetoric and Neurological Queerness (Yergeau 2018). Neuroqueer, a term first contemplated by Yergeau, Ibby Grace, Athena Lynn Michaels-Dillon, and Nick Walkers, and defined in a blog post published by Walkers in 2015, encompasses “the queering of neurocognitive norms as well as gender norms'' and can both be verb and adjective; one can be neuroqueer, or one can neuroqueer something (Walkers 2015). Yergeau expands further on this, that “autism’s queerity is often storied by means of disorientation” and that the neuroqueer, be it in “empathy or eros or gender” capably queers any relation to normativity (Yergeau 2018, 27). They further point to the powerful tool of narrative storytelling and disclosures that researching autistics bring to the field that allistic researchers cannot and comment on how autistic research and autistic narratives appear paradoxical. It is a ticcing “narrative condition” when the neuroqueer subject tells their story of autism, yet simultaneously autism is a “condition that resists the narratable'' when “autism parents, autism researchers, autism therapists and specialists and mentors and advocates'' do it (Yergeau 2013). Yergeau says it best when they bitterly write “I will say something about autism, and someone will assert that nothing I've said matters or applies to anything...Because it is just my autism talking” (Yergeau 2013). While 22 Yergeau consorts largely with rhetoric, and the aforementioned citation deals with theory of mind, their work criticizes harmful notions that autists are mindblind or afflicted with an ‘extreme male brain’ and offers a complexly insightful entry into the potentials of the neuroqueer position regarding CDS and crip theory as most of their work consists of, or blends in narrative and autoethnographic elements. 3.3 Standpoint Epistemology, Epistemic Authority, and Strong Objectivity As this work dwells deeply in the personal, I seek to ground it in a strong framework, not only because I have chosen the oft-questioned emotive autoethnographic style, but also as Yergeau proposes “whether in published autobiographies or in the blogosphere, autistic narratives are regarded as questionable (un)truths” (Yergeau 2013). As I face this double bind from both autism research and the humanities at large, and with the desire to make my (un)truths as truthful, or at least, as recognizable as possible, I turn here to theorizing about standpoint epistemology. Prominent standpoint theorists like Sandra Harding and Patricia Hill Collins argue that marginalized social groups or cultural locations give particularly significant epistemic authority on individuals. When research endeavours to focus on disadvantaged or marginalized groups or identities, it can be beneficial to rely on standpoint theory to explore the diverse epistemologies of “knowers whose vantage points have [historically] been ignored or discredited for producing knowledge” (Hesse-Biber 2014, 25). Standpoint theory provides a robust theoretical framework where any particular standpoint is “a consequence of self-reflective analysis from a specific social actor, social group, or social location” rather than the assertion that one has authority through merely being a “member of an oppressed group” (Hesse-Biber 2014, 28). Not only does my thesis consist entirely of research that is largely missing from the discourse around studies of 23 autism, but also, I am positioned within a specific social community that can best offer it. As a basis for my thesis, it grants me access to historically denigrated research materials, methods, and data —like the use of narrative that Yergeau calls for— as well as utilizing and cultivating space for, rather than detaching from, the rich resources that emotion brings to research (Lutz 2014). To further shore up my use of standpoint theory, I want to flag here that I am relying on strong objectivity as a positioning framework, a vital alternative to scientific objectivism, which attempts to be value-free, or neutral (Harding 1999). Strong objectivity rejects the universalizing and flattening tendencies of social sciences’ epistemic authority to make room for responsible empathetic knowing and the use of emotion (Code 1995). Strong objectivity, like standpoint theory, recognizes that harnessing deeply subjective and emotive research is critical in fields of research that feature marginalized voices. I am utilizing these frames for my research to show the importance and value of the personal disabled queer perspective. 3.4 Posthuman, Crip Kinships, and the Cyborg There are tensions regarding the accessibility of the realm of digital that must be addressed. Within the turn to digital arts and humanities there are similar criticisms of posthumanism. As humanism has historically denied or limited its delineations of what comprises a human, and the legacies of this can still largely be seen and felt in our institutions, perhaps it is not entirely possible to claim to be ‘post’ human. It is a privilege to be considered human enough —be it through normative markers of gender, race, sexuality, or ability— to pursue how to move past or beyond it (Braidotti 2013; 2019). Posthumanist Rosi Braidotti suggests that it is difficult to “re-define the subject of knowledge and power without reference to that unitary, humanistic, Eurocentric and masculinist subject” (Braidotti 2019, 37). 24 With this in mind, I seek to align myself here as a posthuman subject “work-in-progress” attempting to “interrogate the self-representations and conventional understandings'' of the humanist subjective ‘we’ to “explore the multifaceted and differential nature of the collective ‘we’” (Braidotti 2019, 36). I want to consider the posthuman rhizomatic potentiality between the neuroqueer bodymind that has crip kinship with the non-human other —particularly in the figure of the machine of the drawing tablet. It is crucial to pause for a moment here to distinguish kinship from the figure of Donna Haraway’s Cyborg—as the figure of Haraway’s Cyborg is never far off in discussions of the disabled bodymind. Kafer contests that Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto,” while using examples of disabled people, does not account for “any analysis of the material realities of disabled people’s interactions with technologies” (Kafer 2013, 105). She argues that the cyborg body is often flattened into mere “human-machine interactions” that disappears both “disability as a complicated lived experience, and disabled people as a diverse group encompassing a range of opinions” (Kafer 2013, 110). She further argues that the cyborg “becomes reified, reduced to a particular kind of body,” a body that desires to be normal—thus a body with the economic means and power to become cyborg to be read as normal (110). Kafer suggests that rather than diminishing the disabled bodymind to “the details of their impairment, let us focus instead on their complex and contradictory negotiations with technology” (Kafer 2013, 124). Crip kinships describe tangled and embodied relationships that are plentiful between technology and disabled bodyminds: we are crip kin to one another in our deeply intertwined relationality (Kafer 2019). Kinship here offers the notion of interdependence, of a rejection of “normative kinship imaginaries” that outline where the edges of the normative bodymind —and its relationships— should begin and end (Kafer 2019, 6). In this sense, the neuroqueer artist in particular through creations and productions alongside her crip kinships with technology, can 25 potentially refuse “technology as capitalist commodity” and even “offer sideways approaches to technology and desire” (6), something that Haraway’s Cyborg cannot offer. 26 Chapter 4: Methodological Literature Review 4.1 Arts Based Research The exploration of Arts-Based Research (ABR), a creative process that “adapts the tenets of creative arts in social science research projects,” allows articulation of observations and primary sources in the form of multimodal images, and has greatly informed the foundation of making a methodological approach out of the act of drawing (Chilton and Leavy 2014, 601). Utilizing ABR, image becomes an invaluable research tool, not merely as a source for data, but as a method of articulating results that “relies on experience and connection and subjectivity —all the things that academic traditions abjure” (Clutcher 2013, 34). An ABR process is a “complex process of meaning making and idea percolation [that] shapes research,” (Leavy 2020, 18) meaning that the drawn thesis, through an ABR process, involves a reflexive research trajectory, not merely one that is an impromptu amalgamation of words to images. Rather, the “meaning-making process occurs as an iterative process (not a linear one)” and the data that arises from an ABR process is still analyzed, distilled, and thematically grouped in order to apply a robust theoretical analysis to its results, just as the most vigorous of quantitative research methods (18). My methodological approach through ABR is informed by my disability as much as it is about my disability. There are inexpressible things that cannot be reached through words as they crawl across a page. When words and letters begin to slither on paper, and my attention starts to falter, I can trust the shape of the line from a pencil —or pen or whatever is nearby— to anchor them in their proper senses once more. I can allow myself to take in the idea better when I can draw on the text or next to the text, or over the notes of the text as I read them so that “thinking and practicing become deeply enmeshed with one another” (Bayley 2018, 70). What surprised me as I started this work, but has become a reassuring and recurring feature of drawing this 27 thesis, is how often drawing about a theory or drawing about an experience or an emotion have had similar drawn trajectories or visual vocabularies, highlighting how “practice-as-research” often “impact and produce one another.” (70). My process for drawing this thesis is twofold: some images are simple explorations of figures and forms, and emotions, while others are drawn responses to concepts, theories, and even criticisms from readings or texts that evoked an emotional response or compelled or instilled in me something unsayable, something that I, through language alone “can never fully know or linguistically express” (Visse et al. 2019, 6). Further, embracing or endeavouring to lean into the unsayable feelings in this process and attempting to draw them out is often where “an epiphany prevails” (7). I want to stress here though, that not all of these drawings make sense, nor were all of these leanings towards the unsayable aesthetic masterpieces. In fact, out of hundreds —perhaps closer to a thousand— of sketches, scribbles, annotations, and fully resolved images, only a select few have been included in the thesis. Ideally, ABR approaches the artistic work asking less “is it a good piece of art?” and more “what is this piece of art good for” (Chilton and Leavy 2014, 621). Images as research sources may not produce great art every time, but hold important information for research, which is critical in how it differs from a fine art practice. ABR then establishes space for an interdisciplinary thesis that is less about making a beautiful image, and more about what an image, regardless of its beauty, can communicate. 4.2 Autoethnography Autoethnography is, in essence, studying the self; using personal lived experience as the research data (Hesse-Biber 2014), which can be further sub-categorized into analytic or emotive 28 autoethnography (Bunde-Birouste et al. 2019). Emotive, or evocative, autoethnography is typified by research, like life writing, and seeks to “share in an expressive or emotional way the subjective experience of the cultural or social” (Bunde-Birouste et al. 2019, 514). While this approach has been explicitly criticized for its proximity to life writing, and therefore its tendency to veer towards solipsism, its value in my thesis is in enabling exploration of personal experiences as a way of addressing broader social challenges in the area of queer/disability. It is important to remark here that emotive autoethnography is about considering the emotional and evocative experiences as research data: distilling data and theory from emotional and evocative experience as a primary research source. I am utilizing autoethnography through a process of drawing to distill threads of experiences, sensory explorations, and emotional data to speak about changing pervasive cultural dialogues about autism. Autoethnography has many parallels to life writing —like the memoir or autobiography—that I want to pause for a moment to discuss here. Disability life writing, referred to as autopathography, in particular consists of a narrative of challenging or disabling life experiences and clearly fits within the parameters of my thesis. The autopathography, in fact, has been fundamental to postmodern understandings of disease and illness: it has long been the primary mode of reclaiming disabled narratives from medical discourse (Couser 1997, 2009). Disability life writing in the form of autopathography is a tool that can bridge the social and medical models of disability. For instance, it can use the medical model of disability for readers to get their bearings, and then focus on the social model to uproot and elaborate on the impairments of society that have disabled the bodymind (Rose 2008). It can open up a space for a reader to sigh in relief as they read other similar tales of diagnosis and prognosis (Rose 2008). 29 While this approach is valuable for getting out the unique perspectives of disabled voices, and as I discussed above, it can enable a phenomenological hermeneutic analysis of disability, there are still multiple and complex contentions to take up with the autopathography. One I want to draw out here is the functional limit to its uses. As popular media typically infuses the style and genre of life writing, it frequently offers finite resolutions within a quantifiable page range: the condition starts, a cure is found, the disabling condition ends, or the problem is solved with diagnosis, or death (Couser 2009). This is the premise of the written narrative— it has to function within some sort of familiar formula in order for it to be readable and eventually marketable, yet this is a limited view of the life of the disabled bodymind (Couser 2009). Thus while the autopathography can provide a valuable addition to purely medical and research driven writing about the pathologized bodymind, in contrast, narratives on the pathologized bodymind can only be so robust, or hold the interest of the reader for so long until medicine, science, and diagnosis must intervene (Couser 2009). I will admit here that I do feel haunted by the autopathography given the trajectory of the first chapter “Positioning,” wherein I detailed pieces of my life in a narrative format that concludes in diagnosis. However, what I seek to reflect in my research through the use of autoethnography, means I am relying less on autopathography's storying of the intimate or “gory details” of my life and instead exploring just how “commonplace” my particular autistic lived experiences are with those who share my similar social location (Crawley 2012, 154). Therefore, I want to align myself towards the autoethnographic method of autistethnography: life writing employed to reintegrate the autistic subject as fully figured and capable of rhetoric and having a cultural world – something autists are frequently denied (Yergeau 2018). Autistethnographies “regardless of genre, mode, or delivery” (Yergeau 2018, 30 24) story autistic lives and experiences and, when composed by autists, show how autistic subjects can be complex, “thick” people (Hacking 2009, 1469). Autistic storying holds “potentiality” (Yergeau 2018, 25) that can be both informative: offering “insight into the subjective world of autistic individuals” and/or transformative: transforming the frameworks of “how the autistic spectrum is constituted” (McGreer 2009, 520). Therefore, I am engaging with the autistethnography to deconstruct “cognitive studies scholarship that reifies the inhumanity and neurological passivity of autistics” and make space in the humanities, autism research, and disability culture for others like myself (Yergeau 2018, 26). The methods involved in autoethnography and more precisely, autistethnography, offer extraordinarily useful insights for my research. As Yergeau writes in Authoring Autism, disability studies is already a “highly narrativistic field, one that seeks to foreground individual narratives within larger sociopolitical and often rights-based discourses” (26). Thus the autistethnography further attempts to “unsettle, digress, and, ultimately, center those who have traditionally been decentered” (26). What I have come to love about autistethnography is the unabashed way that Yergeau claims it plays with the “paradoxical autos of autism in all of its glory,” meaning we as neuroqueers can drop pretenses and be as we are: our so often pathologized ways of narrating (or not narrating) ourselves and our inner worlds let us “protest oppression” (14). 31 Chapter 5: Results Drawing this thesis enabled the mixing of theory to practice to consider and interpret personal experiences alongside academic texts. Through this creative approach, I came up with new knowledge to be shared through visual elements and the results of this arts-based autistethnographic thesis have coalesced into four distinct image themes: “Emotion Portraits,” “Queer imagery,” “Doublings & Hauntings,” and “Digital Figures.” Throughout these sections, I will reflect on several finished drawings that have been developed into triptychs; drawings paired with others to show the multiplicity of narratives, plurality, and the shifting of subjectivity of images. These multiple drawings best highlight the potential of autistic storying: individual themes blend, build, and elaborate into an evolving visual lexicon and vocabulary of mark making and colour to fully flesh out the neuroqueer as subject. The first theme, “The Emotion Portrait,” explores drawing emotions in three different styles and touches on my experiences of coming to understand my relationship with my neuroqueer bodymind’s emotional intelligence. “Queer Imagery” is an image theme that explores gender, sexuality, and disability: it considers the confines of heteronormativity and ablebodiedness/ablemindedness in relation to queer subjectivity, examines queer and neuroqueer relationality to the non-human other and time, and contemplates neuroqueer positioning and celebrates neuroqueer sensory experiences. The theme “Doublings & Hauntings” is a visual analysis of the dichotomous/binary thinking that impacts and structures heteronormative and ablebodied/ableminded culture, society, and language surrounding neuroqueer identities by playing with doubled and mirrored images. Finally, “Digital Figures” is a visual theme of exploration and experimentation: it interrogates technology and design, queries the relationship of the neuroqueer to the non-human other/cripkin of the digital and the machine and considers posthumanism in drawn imaginings of the bodymind becoming digital. 32 5.1 The Emotion Portrait There are three kinds of emotion portraits featured in this section: the first six are thoughtful and reflexive sketches, attempts to recognize and dialogue with the alexithymia (difficulty identifying and expressing one's emotions) and propogonasia (difficulty recognizing or distinguishing peoples faces) that I struggle with an as autist. The second genre of the emotion portraits are explorations of how to depict neuroqueer emotional masking: these colourful and expressive faces hint towards a hidden plasticity that show the potential of neuroqueer emotional intelligence. The third style of emotion portraits evokes a blending of the first two emotion portrait styles. These images emphasize subtle facial features that require deeply subjective readings. Here, serene expressions and emotions juxtapose with bright saturated colour, offering that complex and affective emotional connections are needed to discern a neuroqueer emotion portrait. The first approach to thinking, writing, and then drawing through this thesis blossomed from an idea of trying to discern through image and text the way that I, an autistic artist, approach drawing a figure and its form and, more importantly, a face and its emotion. As autistic writer Donna Williams has written in her memoirs about her life as an autist, emotions are difficult to deal with. They tend to come crashing in and overwhelm the neurodiverse bodymind; they are difficult to imitate and replicate in the correct circumstances, and they are inordinately difficult to read off other bodies, and particularly off of faces (Williams 1992). I have always struggled in parsing positive, or neutral-positive emotions, versus negative ones from faces. In attempts to render this difficulty, I found that I was drawing similar expressions, over and over, in repetition, one after another after another; returning to similar compositions and amalgamations of facial features. My frustrating relationship with alexithymia reared as these repetitive images emerged. I struggle with recognizing and parsing emotions on the faces of my 33 peers, but I am simultaneously deeply in touch with all of my own emotions. I cannot always name them, and they easily overwhelm me, but I have them. As I grew I learned through cruelty how to recognize negative emotions on the face, and began, painfully, to recognize the fake positive ones associated with sarcasm and mockery. There were times as a pre-teen and teenager where I mistook every smile for a sneer. However, the extra effort of learning to read others' faces cost me the development of my own emotional lexicon and kept me from maturing emotionally for years. What I learned from the formative years in my life as a child, a teenager, and as a young adult was to be a still and empty vase: ready to be filled by others’ emotions. Acting of my own volition on my own emotions had led consistently to brutality and cruelty. If my body and face were glass and plastic, I could reflect the features, or wear the very faces of the abusers, perhaps they would see what they wanted to see, and I could be safe. Coming to my ASD diagnosis —and the work on this thesis— has shown me how out of touch with my own emotional range and needs I was. Thus, the first of these emotion portraits are like sketches or art journaled thoughts about emotions —they flow from the mind's eye down the arm and through the stylus without hesitation. They do not rely on translating a reference image to composition, nor are they reliant on inspiration from the pose of a model. Rather, they are all attempts at rendering my own face, my own emotions before I look upon it in a mirror, before it even exists in space. They are a look at my own simultaneously emotional and emotionless existence before the words come to the forefront of my mind to tell me how I feel. I do not always know how to describe how I feel, yet image transcends the language of emotions, and that is what these emotion portraits attempt. These images document feeling engulfed by strong or passionate emotions but simultaneously feeling the strong need to remain still and unresponsive. They are depictions of 34 my own uncertainty of strong neuroqueer emotions: questions in image form about what I feel and how to feel it. Figure 1: Emotion(al) Portraits I Figure 2: Emotion(al) Portraits 2 These two emotion portrait triptychs, Emotion(al) Portraits 1 and Emotion(al) Portraits 2, follow a similar compositional structure. Each figure is head and shoulders, centered in the canvas, facing the viewer head on, in a simple three to four tone colour palette of pinks and black. However, each image differs in its renderings of negative and positive space and features different handlings of mark making. Some faces are blocked in with heavy black lines and planes yet others denote delicate facial features with simple contour lines. In some instances, 35 enormous planes of black swallow the figure entirely, swathing or anchoring the composition with a shroud, yet others feature torsos of diaphanous smokey grey and soft pink. Five of the figures feature intense planes of cramped, scribbled lines. These rigorous mark makings structure the foundations for necks, shoulders, and even hair. All five look out at the viewer boldly; their faces composed serenely, watching. There is an imperceptible shift in the emotion on these faces— they appear calm but melancholy, proud but aloof. Poised to speak, but tightly wound, as though at the wrong moment the intense energy of the lines and planes surrounding them and building up within them might cause them to burst. Perhaps then, as I drew these, as I remarked above, I was not drawing others' faces, but my own. I look back on the trajectory of my face and body, of the composed and still glass vessel I had strived to become and now I mourn for her. There is a stiffness in these images, an uncomfortable posturing that I recognize. These then are that girl who felt she might burst from sadness but waited until she was alone to stim and cry to soothe herself. The girl who felt that her rigid composure would demarcate her as normal, even as her thoughts, compulsions, and feelings pinged around her mind, tracing painful fireworks under her skin as she ignored each one. I see how she stands, blank faced in a sea of others expressions and hopes her features are arranged smoothly, correctly, and perfectly in place. These emotion portraits are powerful, but I can’t look at them for too long; all in a row they make me sad and uncomfortable, like I have peeled back a part of myself for strangers to look in at. These initial emotion portraits rely on gesture and plane to express and frame emotion with limited colour theory; the aura of the image relies on the skill of gesture and mark making. The second style of emotion portrait is the inverse of this. 36 Figure 3: rage, sorrow, anguish The emotion portraits on the other hand in the triptych rage, sorrow, anguish, have the feeling of plastic to them, a shininess that I feel is a replication of the vase-like qualities I referred to above. Rather than feeling anger, sorrow, or anguish, when I look at the emotions imitated in the images, I feel emptied out pale reflections of what is pictured. These images are an attempt to harness the power of colour, by associating emotion with colour theory. Soft and saturated tones of red, blue, and purple, fill and flush the three faces. As a synesthete however, I find that the colours typically associated with these particular emotions —red with anger for example— do not match the colours I associate with these emotions in my own head. The compositions lack negative space inside of the faces, have no textural line variance, and feature rather stagnant and unremarkable compositions. Their brows are furrowed deeply as they are overcome by their powerful emotions, yet these emotion portraits feel clinical. As if they have been lifted from a guidebook on how to read and place emotion on a face; they do not diverge from neurotypicality to offer how a different neurotype might read, place, or colour an emotion. The mark making and colour flattens the neuroqueer emotional intelligence that is legible in the first ones. 37 The translation of these attempts to link recognizable colour to readable emotional expression thus results in forced, flat plastic images. Aesthetically, they might be pleasing, and do consist of many elements that I use in most neuroqueer imagings, but the nature of the emotion feels missed, or is unfaithful in its replication. In these I can see the expression as it stretches across the canvas and while I can locate the emotion, I do not feel strongly towards it; it is ungenuine in its arrangement of features and choice of colour, and stirs my feelings of alexithymia. In my focus to render facial features in a distinct expressed emotion, I found myself couched within allistic depictions of expressing emotions —and it shows. What became apparent as I worked through these drawings, trying to create evocative emotive pieces that related to popular colour theory was how I was simultaneously flattening and homogenizing my neuroqueer experience: the opposite of what I had intended to do. The harmony between line, mark making, and colour do not portray emotion fully and intricately, and these images, while indeed expressive, appear as pantomime next to the others. This is not to say that exaggerated expressive emotions cannot be authentically replicated; rather, that by forcing the composition of the facial features in a stylized fashion and relying on colours that do not relate to my neuroqueer synaesthetic palette, the expressions become visible, but the actual feeling is lost. The last of the emotion portraits fortunately reimagines an emotive colour palette from the neuroqueer synesthete and synthesizes the power of mark making, lines, and planes of the first emotion portraits. These pieces appear initially as calm, contemplative, serene, or even lacking in expressive emotion, but are perhaps better representations of how the neuroqueer feels or expresses emotion. Not only because of their subjective quality —what is seen in the face 38 differs from one person to the next— but their apophatic qualities; the things that are not there, or the things that feel unsayable (Visse et al. 2019). Figure 4: Honey Coloured The triptych Honey coloured offers bright saturated colour planes and textural and contour lines that display a truer neuroqueer emotion portrait. The first image, for instance, is an attempt at rendering happiness. The golden yellows and burnt oranges beneath the surface evoke the warmth and glow of the emotion, and the partially submerged face within the yellow plane speaks to the heavy brilliance of this particular kind of happiness. Satiated and still, the figure is recumbent in her happiness, pleased to be still for a moment and let it flow around her, expand and fill the pictorial plane, and wash over her. The second image suggests contempt. Her red planes and lines are bright and over-saturated to the point of appearing hot pink in some areas. Textural lines of hair erupt in waves from her skull and flow upwards as if on a current, and soft pink spiraling circles wash across and around her torso. Her body rises from the pooling red of her derision, as she peers out composed and active in her emotions, engaging with that which has drawn her ire. The third figure in the triptych is solemn and guarded; her emotions almost acerbically contained to her face and mind. The cooler blue and pink planes demarcate this emotion portrait 39 as different from the warmer two she is paired with. Here, emotion flows across the brow and blooms over the head, as it also encircles and appears like a shield for the mind. The body is portrayed isolated and alone from the rest of the figure, the lips tightly pursed, and brow smooth. The antipathy portrayed in this image is less one of contempt like in the previous, but rather one of unease, or perhaps, fear. The face does not move in any inclination of this angst, but the way that colour lacks flow and movement through the body delineates how the neuroqueer, in order to maintain an illusion of normalcy, must tamp down the nervous system that fires warnings to the mind and emotions when perhaps nothing is amiss. Guardedly, she allows her feelings to flit and fluctuate around her mind, open to their cautious conjectures. While part of her must tamp down the bodily responses that seek to ignite the fight/flight/freeze response, she recognizes that the genuine feelings that come with it must be felt and if she has to leave in order to feel them and reconnect with her body, she can and she will. Honey coloured details the revised attempts at depicting complex emotion plane from the previous triptych rage, sorrow, anguish by skillfully applying planes of corresponding synesthete colour schemes. Many of the later emotion portraits similarly play with balancing composition of line, plane, and colour. In Outlaw Emotions for instance, the emotion portraits combine and synthesize elements of earlier emotion portrait successes yet also remedy the plasticity of a more ‘expressive’ face discovered in rage, sorrow, anguish. This final triptych returns to mingling line and plane: balancing their relationality to one another through colour saturation and the play of positive and negative space. 40 Figure 5: Outlaw Emotions The use of line in all three figures is varied: in figures one and two, it depicts intense negative emotion, and in figure three, a more ambiguous neutral positive one. This triptych shows the ways that line, when applied methodically yet creatively, in correspondence with plane and colour, can depict complex and specific emotion. In figure one, the red horizontal lines seem to seep and flow out of the disembodied bust of the unfinished figure like pooling blood. These lines contract and expand around her, warping to and from her, ebbing and flowing. She looks back intently at the viewer: haughty, glaring, her mouth tight lipped. The intense red saturation is powerful, the subtle negative emotional language on her face suggests anger, but warping lines around her show motion and fluidity. Though her face seems taught, it betrays no explosive angry emotion. She feels passionately and intensely, and though these negative emotions are overwhelming, she is rising from a pool of them, rather than being subdued by them. Figure two in the triptych shows the opposite of this, perhaps even depicting the moments preceding a rise from the waves and coils of negative emotions. Contracting lines form a huddling cave around the figure: deep purples surround her like bruised flesh. Old emotional wounds seek to crash in on her in waves of pain and anguish. Line is an active element in this composition: the figure’s hand juts out, grasping at one of the lines and pushing it back from her 41 face; she is an active participant in her attempts to free herself. Though heavy lines encircle her and grief shades her eyes, she gazes out at the pain the world has inflicted on her, reaching out from it, ready to rise. Figure three of Outlaw Emotions shows the potential success of line in a composition of a neutral or positive emotion portrait depiction. Dark horizontal lines depict evenness and steadiness in their relation to the wavy light pink plane that wanders pleasurably over the surface of the composition. The figure’s eyes are closed as she seems to drink in the pleasure around her, a slight smile on her lips. The lines and planes in the composition maintain a balanced ecosystem for her to thrive in. She is not overcome by line, nor unanchored by plane. Composing these kinds of emotion portraits, like the ones in Outlaw Emotions, became a meditative practice for me as someone who cannot always recognize the subtle negative expressions that show discontentment or disparagement, or even the simple joys on a face that are relegated to the shift of an eyebrow or quirk of a lip. Rendering these faces through complex relations between colour choice, line, and plane demonstrates the different, yet deep emotional intelligence of the neuroqueer. 5.2 Queer Imagery These drawings are a showing of the openings and potentials of queerness. These are rejections of essentialist and dichotomous thinking about sexuality and gender, and are a reimagining of the fluidity and the hybridity of malleable sexualities, genders, and further, their relation to (dis)abilities. Queer imagery can be drawn subtly but read powerfully. In (Fe)(Male) for instance, it can be seen in the soft pink washes of colour and the expansive negative spaces that rebound, 42 accept, and outright reject the defining edge of a contour line. Queer imagery is a fighting back, a reinvigoration of self, and a celebration of resilience. Figure 6: (Fe)(Male) These first images in particular borrow similar visual themes of the initial emotion portraits from the previous section: a muted palette of pinks and pronounced dark mark making. Like in those emotion portraits, rigid lines and flowing planes are used to visualize juxtaposition. Here though, features of soft planes of pastels, many of which are pink, are life giving and life affirming; they counter and undermine the rigidity of heteronormativity and reject dichotomous notions of male/female, man/woman, abled/disabled, represented by thick black/dark horizontal and vertical contour lines. 43 Figure 7: Pink & Dark The vocabulary of sinuous plane and solid contour line is evolved and shifted further in the triptych Pink & Dark. Here, hard black line collides with gauzy pink plane; boundaries are sharply drawn, carving the figure/face from the background with contour lines. The pink softness, particularly in the first two figures, are not offered space to mingle, breathe, and bleed. The figures are drawn tightly, wound up and held in place by these constricting lines and planes of black, yet they are ensconced and surrounded by pink, waiting for a break in line to spill and seep into the figures. Figure three shows the success of this mingling; the face looks out, awash in glowing pink, breathing in the life of the colour, even as the black contour lines define and encircle her. She is working from within the confines of these contour lines, queering the rules, to breathe life into herself and the world around her. Line in these drawings is used in various ways. The dynamic lines of the first figure denote a texture of hair, but also due to their vertical nature, are imposing on the negative space and pink plane on either side of the composition. This is further explored in figure two, where the textural lines, now horizontal, still encompass the figure entirely and in two spaces actually thicken into dark black planes, or bands, around the head. In contrast, figure three’s use of horizontal lines lacks this constricting nature; here they seem to denote a horizon. The stacked texture lines build upwards, arresting before the shoulders and neck of the figure as she peers out from the foundation they have made for her. She lifts herself above the constriction of these lines and pours outwards into the white negative space of the composition, blurring the lines between foreground and background, coming out into the space around her. They also play within the means of expected gender expression, and utilize the tools of femininity to undermine it. Dreamy pink colour planes are activated and revered: they celebrate softness and femininity even as they seek to undo the harmful and limiting compulsory 44 expressions attached to it. As a queer woman I spent a significant amount of time fleeing from pink, fearing the markers that come with it, the ways that my body would be read when in close proximity to it. But now, I’ve come to see the disarming power and the celebration of the colour: how playing within the rules of pink can open side doors and windows into institutions and spaces queer women have historically been denied because of our sexuality. Figure 8: Queer Bodyminds Queer imagery is also a love of the body, an erotic and celebratory exploration of queer excess and relationality to bodies. These depictions in Queer Bodyminds feature soft curving lines and pink washes that gently graze and touch the body. The negative spaces are caressed and enveloped by the lines and planes of pink of the figures etched into the canvas. These are love letters to bodies, seen and unseen, and a positioning of my own neuroqueer body towards them. We hail each other, stand before and with one another. These bodies are both a queering of the historical male gaze in art history, a rejection of heternormative feminine lust and sexuality. Further, they are a neuroqueer expression of the love of the body, a rejection of the autist “clinically crafted as a subject in need of disciplining and normalization” (Yergeau 2018, 26). Indeed, rather there is attention paid to dwelling in the undisciplined and exquisite excesses of the body; to feel as the neuroqueer bodymind feels and move as the neuroqueer bodymind 45 moves. Figure 9: As Above Queer imagery is also an exploration of queer time and queer potential of the non-human other of nature. Queer time celebrates the out of syncness that accompanies being queer, and questions the construction of history through biological futurism, as well as desire, and subject formation (Edelman 2004; Halberstam 2005; Stockton 2009; Love 2007; Freeman 2010; McCallum and Tuhkanen 2011). Queer time rejects chrononormativity or the “use of time to organize human bodies toward maximum productivity,” muddying the impetus of moving forward for the sake of tomorrow, or the sake of the next generation (Freeman 2010, 3). The queer body does not come to figure in formations of the future and is thus denied subjectivity. Therefore queer time is often seen as “growing sideways,” sometimes even backwards, in its truncated march towards some sort of queer futurity (Stockton 2009, 16). Queer time is even an embracing of death: queers stand “outside the cycles of reproduction” causing anxiety and alarm for heteronormative bodies mired in heteronormative futurities and heteronormative time (Edeleman 1998, 29). Imagery for queer time celebrates this jouissance, this embrace: flinging the self into the cycles of nature and the acceptance of death (Edelman 2004). For in death, there is of course, always new life. 46 Triptych As Above, remarks on the connection between queer time and the inherent queerness of nature. In the first and third figures, feminine figures embrace the queer death drive and the acknowledgment of an inherently queer nature. Flowers and mountains erupt from heads and hands against sterile white backgrounds. The time as human is short; cultural and societal norms of binary sex and gender and human created policed and distinguished categories of human and non human do not apply to nor concern her (Sandilands 2010). She is both in sync with the queer natural world around her from the human world that rejects her, and simultaneously out of sync with the human world for accepting the queer nature that her fellow humans refuse to see. Here also, in playing with imagery of the non-human other, I “imagine disability as human variation, a form of human biodiversity” (Garland-Thomson 2011, 603). Disabled bodyminds show “persistent forms of human biodiversity” in which we “witness sturdiness more than fragility, interdependence more than isolation” (Garland-Thomson 2015, 13). A diverse population, complete with disabled bodyminds that have fostered “adaptability and resourcefulness” that are frequently “underdeveloped in those whose bodies fit smoothly into the prevailing, sustaining environment” ensures human futurity (Garland-Thomson 2011, 64). In the second image of the triptych As Above sits a figure, her neck elongated and vivisected by the pages of a calendar, her head erupting as if from time itself. Her body, though seemingly situated in the reproductive time cycles of days and weeks, looks to and grows backwards and sideways. Her forward movement is slanted and stalled: her figure hunched and her head in the past in “unruly contours of growing that don’t bespeak continuance”(Stockton 2009, 13). She is propelled and anchored by the queer death drive; a denial and acceptance of the authority of biological —and ablebodied/ableminded— futurism on her body. This central image in particular remarks specifically as well about the neuroqueer relation to queer time: here also is 47 visual imagery of the celebration of the neuroqueer bodymind’s out of synchness with time, and the executive dysfunction that seems to lock up the bodymind in productive or chrononormative time. Here, neuroqueer hyperfocusing —the ability to focus on special interests or certain tasks and not notice time passing— is not pathologized but merely visually represented as a type of neuroqueering of time, perhaps even, an extension of neuroqueer existence. Figure 10: Puported to be Mindblind Queer imagery then also considers and opens space for these various neuroqueer existences, or, neuroqueer potentialities. Neuroqueer potentialities in queer imagery emerged as I drew queer sexuality and gender expression and drew neuroqueer experiences and sensations. Intense colour saturation floods the planes of these images, and figures rise explosively to the foreground. If queer imagery is about the celebration, love, and empowerment of the queer body —soft queer faces and lovely curving bodies— neuroqueer potentialities explores the representation, celebration, love, and empowerment of the autistic or, neuroqueer expression/positioning. In particular, these images all suggest and unpack complex themes of being neuroqueer or experiencing life as neuroqueer. They consider what overstimulation, prosopagnosia, synesthesia, or complex relationships to sensory perception and emotions look like, all while utilizing many of the visual themes developed by queer imagery, as neuroqueer is 48 an encompassing identity. I am neuroqueer. I am not queer and autistic, it is not a case of chicken and egg, it is all, always, and all at once. Perhaps what is most intriguing in these depictions, is the successful renderings of more complex emotions. In the first image of the triptych Purported to be Mindblind, the figure is revolted as society presses its expectations, rules, and norms in on them; their face is upturned in a tortuous grimace, while within them dwells a maelstrom of emotions that they cannot get out of their body. The second figure similarly shows a battle raging between a dichotomized mind and body: she is split in two. The senses seem to overwhelm, breaking and rupturing her bodymind until she is too overcome to cope with the expectations and needs of what allistic society asks of her. In the third image, extra eyes jut from the figure’s head, an immediate visual representation of the difficulties of making consistent and prolonged eye contact, and of the visually overstimulating nature of the world around her. At the same time however, her two ‘real’ eyes look straight ahead, peering out certain and precise. She stands as an inverse to the first image and second images in the triptych; while the world presses in menacingly, as well as outwardly from within her body, in the third, she appears to have struck a balance with the world around her. With her world —her senses and emotions— at peace within her, she is able to discern the sensations and emotions of the world pressing against her even amongst the scribbling chaos encircling her. This harmony, though tentative, suggests that there is a space for her in the alien world around her when she is accepted as she is. 49 Figure 11: (over)Stimulations This harmony can be seen further in the triptych (over)Stimulations. The central figure, haloed by bizarre and grotesque faces, wards off overstimulation and anxiety by protecting and shrouding her ears. She takes an active role in her world, and is aware but not overcome or overwhelmed by her senses. Her hands raise up, ready to move her headphones over her ears; she recognizes that the senses around her that seek to disturb her, also form and create life around her. Rather than seeing her sensitive senses as a heavy and often strange burden, they are a gift that must be nurtured and protected. The lines of eyes on either side of her, when read in accordance with this central figure, become just lines or lists of repetitive items; they are just things in the world to perceive and be perceived by, and like the monstrous faces encircling her, cannot harm her. 5.3 Doublings & Hauntings The drawings in “Doublings & Hauntings” are about unpacking and teasing apart and illustrating the spectres and social constructions that are bound up in the dichotomous thinking of heteronormative and ablebodied/ableminded discourses that mark out the queer and disabled bodymind. 50 If gender is a socially constructed copy (Butler 2006), so too is ability (Abrams 2011). Thus a doubling hints towards the copy or replicate nature of these constructs. Some of these doubled images can be joy filled: a way to poke at and unravel the seemingly tightly girded confines of gender, sexuality, and ability to make room for the undisciplined —ticcing, flapping, fidgeting— disabled bodymind. Doublings can also be satirical, compositions featuring mirrored images contemplate the legacies of the object of the mirror: the history of the autistic child observed, diagnosed, and made more ‘normal’ through the two way mirror in applied behaviour analysis (ABA) sessions (Yergeau 2018). Still other doublings and mirrorings are sorrowful or contemplative; they show the grief of being a bodymind ensnared in an ablebodied/ableminded complex, one that considers neuroqueer repetitive word and sound stimming—echolalic mirroring—as a ticcing pathology to be altered, rather than regarded as a self soothing, coping, or learning technique. They ruminate on the masking and camouflaging of the neuroqueer, the desperate turn to copying and imitating that the bodymind undergoes in order to survive. Doubling compositions highlight the enormous amounts of energy, time, and power lost to traversing and attempting to untangle the neuroqueer from the ablebodied/ableminded social constructions of gender, sexuality, and disability. The imagery of this visual theme deeply considers the social constructions of gender, sexuality, and disability through compositions with multiple theories and entries into how the neuroqueer is doubled and haunted. These images examine the disabled bodymind as haunted by the spectre of the ablebodied/ableminded figure, a ghostly vision doubled, mirrored, or superimposed over the disabled bodymind. They simultaneously narrate the bodymind as what it ‘should have been’ even as they express the bodymind as it actually is. 51 The first of these triptychs is an example of doubling, or a mirroring. Mirror images in particular implicate the troubling nature of dichotomous thinking. Replicating a mirror duplicate image is as simple as selecting a layer on a screen and duplicating it, but these binary oppositions, like the doubled image, lack a kind of depth, complexity, and nuance. The composition becomes filled, but the mirrored image is a mere hollow binary copy and it becomes difficult to discern which idea was the creative original figure in the first place. Figure 12: light/reft light/reft is, from a cursory glance, playing with the idea of left brain versus right brain, particularly in the first image, that features a ghostly brain etched in white above the yellow and pink flesh of the figures. All three images feature mirror figures, and illustrate the fallacies of binary thinking that dichotomizes rationl/emotional; brain/body; male/female; hetero/homo; abled/disabled. Rather than celebrate these pernicious dichotomies, light/reft playfully asks to look at the space between, throughout, and around the binary. In the first image, the off-center layout, white negative space between the figures, and colour planes are equally as visually enticing as the pink and yellow mirror figures in the foreground. The white brains crowning their flowing bodies are doubled twice, once in the mirror reflection, and again on top of the original image, emphasizing not only the empty 52 promises of a binary system that values mind over body, but pointing cynically towards the neuroqueer and their contested relations with the mirror in general. These figures and their brains, duplicated and mirrored, point caustically to how autists are considered to not be fully formed subjects: lacking Theory of Mind, as somehow having failed Lacan’s mirror stage (Grosz 1994; Poulin 2019), or how easily the neuroqueer can be swept up in the ‘Broken-Mirror theory’ of autism popularized ten years ago —now contested— that dysfunctioning mirror neurons cause behavioural and developmental impairments prevalent in ASD (Heyes and Catmur 2021). The central image of the triptych depicts an uncanny threat of the Doppelgänger, the copied body phantom “which threatens to steal away the subject’s very identity and position” (Grosz 1994, 215). Yet the images on a flat pink plane harmonize, rather than compete with one another visually; there is no deranged fear of “finding itself, its space and place, taken over or displaced by an indiscernible double” (215). Instead, there is a bridging between their mirrored binary figures: the flat pink fleshy plane they exist on rests in the background and they are faintly etched compared to the strong contour lines that grip and assert the foreground of the composition between them. These lines and the fleshy pink poking out between them suggest an (in)betweenness, or ambiguous fluidity, a negation of the subject without its relation to the Other: a particularly frightful concept for the carefully constructed and guarded borders between disability and the ablebodied/ableminded. It hints at the leakages and slippages of this border and the farce of mastery of mind over body. Instead, it challenges strong and fixed identifications of the self as solitary, remarking on the “permeability of the body, its necessary dependence on an outside, its liability to collapse into this outside,” or, to the Other, to disease, disability, and death (Grosz 1994, 193). 53 The third image of light/reft, like the first, plays with notions of left and right brain, but differs from the first in its depiction with self portrait imagery. This image, a portrait of my face in profile, is particularly poignant as it seeks to pull apart the layers of dichotomous, and often simultaneous, social/anti-social masking that the neuroqueer participates in. Split down the middle of the canvas, the faces—my faces— while remaining still and composed, reflect social, personable, and extrovert against anti-social, unapproachable, and introvert. The flowing constricting and expanding tendrils drifting concentrically around and around the figures detail the exhaustive effort of this dualness. Unlike in the first two images in the triptych, which are true mirrorings, glassy and still, the third has a flow and energy despite its mirror quality. The placement, its lines flowing and ebbing, is indicative of time and seasons changing: of growth. Though both visages are the same on either side, the colour of the lines encircling them shows playfulness and serenity; an infinite spiral of motion and rest. Perhaps the inclusions of the circling lines here indicates less a binary or duality, and more of a cycle or continuum. They offer an insight into the constant social ‘coming out’ that occurs on a daily basis for the neuroqueer and the labour this involves, but suggest also that perhaps there is not always work to be done unpacking and dismantling harmful binaries. Perhaps there is also room to play and queer from within a confining narrative of disability as loss: their faces just grazing, almost kissing. 54 Figure 13: pink fractals The double figures in the triptych pink fractals, unlike the triptych above, use doublings as hauntings, which as a kind of thematic imagery, can be read in multiple ways. Like the porous line between ability and disability, the “haunting, ghostly apparition, reminds us that the past and the present are neither discrete nor sequential” (Freccero 2007, 196). These figures can also be imagined as bodies haunted by the disabled spectres of the past, bodies that were, as Simi Linton writes in Claiming Disability: Knowledge and Identity, once confined to haunt “institutions... attics and basements” (Linton 1998, 3) that now have had their doors flung open, these spectres within set loose to haunt “normality in our time…. no longer willing to be relegated to the fringes of culture” (Davis 1999, 500). The gauzy pink planes that fill the figures in this triptych then show bodyminds as haunted: jagged outcroppings from the contour lines illustrate that other bodies “are never singular, but rather haunted, strengthened, underscored by countless other bodies” (Clare 2015, 11). These haunting chaotic lines that depart from the contour lines, carving out figures in these compositions remark on another kind of haunting: one between the artist and the machine. This stylized mark-making specifically occurs when the iPad screen heats after continuous and prolonged use and the palm rejection attribute of the drawing program begins to 55 recognize my hand resting on the screen as I draw, as another stylus. Implicated as machine by machine, I haunt the screen with my own body; composition haunted by the relationality between human and nonhuman other, the cripkin machine. My hand and arm move across the canvas and the capacitive touch technology of the iPad races lines neurotically between the tip of the pencil-as-stylus and my hand-as-stylus. The results are frantic jittering lines that rupture and burst in staccato across the composition; erupting at random junctures and places, questioning who is stylus and who is human. The drawing is haunted by human failing to be hailed as human. A lasting (and ironic) insult: the neuroqueer artist who relies on the digital tool is again misrecognized as not fully human. Yet perhaps there is more whimsy than slight to being misrecognized, for being hailed as a nonhuman other, for sharing and haunting a screen. Besides being a rather glib remark about how the spectre of autistic savant as robot/machine stereotpye is never too far from a neuroqueer narrative, it asserts the historicity that queer and disabled bodies —as well as the nonhuman other— are denied full humanity, or ‘human’ rights. Here the machine hails the neuroqueer bodymind as peer. Together, machine and neuroqueer artist are similarly haunted by their inability to perfectly parse human nuances of language (both spoken language and body language), emotion, and facial features: the bursting lines occur predominantly around the faces and hands in figures one and two. The machine and the artist come together as cohorts, neuroqueer and cripkin: haunting compositions “pregnant with unfulfilled possibility” rather than their similarly patterned pasts of misrecognition and failings, but accounting for —by haunting— their “repression in the present” (Gordon 2008, 183). The struggle to ascertain a strictly defined line that clearly denotes the face haunts the completed image on the machine’s screen just as it haunts the neuroqueer’s hand. The jittering line thus obscures as much as it delineates a feature. In this sense, the jittering machine line sufficiently 56 denotes the struggles of the neuroqueer artist. It manages through its hauntings to contemplate neurodiverse qualities like prosopagnosia and synesthesia as well as the exhaustive efforts of social masking. The failings in the algorithms that mark out the resting hand as its kin in fact best capture the nuance of the neuroqueer and the nonhuman other perspective. Figure 14: borders The final triptych, borders in “Doublings & Hauntings” incorporates doublings, mirrorings, and hauntings. Similarly to the above triptychs, the first two figures feature mirrored and duplicate images. However, there is a playfulness and fluidity present in these that is also present in the third image of the previous triptych. The wavering navy lines and planes in the first image in particular indicate movement and fluidity between binaries and borders. Above her head and around her torso wavers a halo of faint white lines, dispersing in the plane around her. The soft blue plane surrounds her; cloaks but does not constrict her. The sketched figure in the background of this composition is doubled faintly, mirrored behind the figure in the foreground. The interplay of these fluid, gauzy, and spectral parts as well as the limited application of hard contour lines points to queered movements between and through borders, openings into and out of oppressive social, cultural, and even sensory norms. It suggests progress: thinking and dwelling past the harms, to ponder feeling and questing about with the entirety of the neuroqueer bodymind to an entire range of emotions, not just paranoid or 57 depressive ones, in order to consider hopefully “that the future may be different from the present” (Sedgewick 2003, 146). The second image is another attempt to master a language that speaks about moving beyond dichotomous thinking through doublings and hauntings, by using a triplicate. Here each figure of the triplicate is rotated, offering whimsical suggestions of turning, thinking, and speaking sideways. It indicates that there is strength and intelligence in the neuroqueer way of seeing and speaking to things, rather than merely being socially bereft or odd. The figure, in her replicate state, renders her harder to pin down by oppressive and marginalizing powers; if she is many, there too are many avenues open to her to navigate away from repression. Even the inversion of colour in the second figure indicates the dynamic and chameleon aptitude that she is capable of to adapt to diverse circumstances if she must. Finally, the last image in this triptych shows that there can be a wholeness in a doubling or haunting. The third image features a striking, compelling figure, centered in the composition. She is whole, unflinchingly meeting the gaze of her viewer. Her mind opened to the sky and her body consumed and rooted in the earth. Here the doubling illustrates a unity of mind and body; sense and emotion. While her features remain austere, there is a simple yet flowing feeling to the elements of the light blue plane above her head, and the dark blue one encircling her torso. In its wholeness, this image indicates the blurring and binding of future with present and past. There is grief for the doubled life that the neuroqueer lives: the little girl she should have been, the girl she was ridiculed for being, the woman she was rejected for becoming, yet the embrace and even love of all the doubled and haunted visages she has had to perform and 58 laboured over, for love here means to “destroy the object as well as trying to repair it” (Love 2010, 239). The blue plane that rises from her torso and fills her neck, stops at a third of her face, indicating the slipping and removal of the mask. The mask however, need not be thrown away. To do so would be to reject the little girl and woman she toiled over to ensure her survival. Rather, she keeps these gently worn masks around her mouth and lips, ready to slip into them if needed. The blue plane, speckled with light, shows the tenuous and ebbing nature of this grief and trauma; yes it is heavy, but it is not enough to drown under. The pale blue plane of her face reaches out to bubble into the sky, her mind and senses uncontained and unrestricted. 5.4 Digital Figures The images in “Digital Figures” speak towards the movement from analog to digital that the humanities and arts have taken. They offer windows into a feminist digital art praxis and reject corporate paywalls, digital monopolies, platform exclusive content, and the capital exploitation of digital and cyber augmentation. They consider the difficulties of becoming posthuman in a world that is corporatizing the new frontier of digital at an alarming rate, and scrutinize the genesis to a digital life when not everyone has historically been recognized as fully human in their analog lives. Technology still excludes users in designs thought of as barrier free or accessible, yet “‘the removal of barriers’ obviously does not fulfill the responsibility of designers to provide environments that can be fully interpreted and experienced with quality” (Mace et al 1991, 159). An approach to design informed by Universal Design (UD) “acknowledge[s] the fluidity of bodies in conversation with environments'' and emphasizes seven design tenets: “equitable use, flexibility, simplicity, perceptibility, tolerance for error, physical effort, and proportionality of scale in size and space” (Baglieri 2020, 49). And while designing 59 with these UD tenets in mind reveals the “possibility to construct inclusivity by perceiving disabled people as participants belonging to and in public life” (49), UD in its applications since its inception in the 1990s has become more of a marketing concept, divorcing it from the “politicized work of disabled designers and activists, as well as from the notion of disability as a marginalized identity” (Hamraie 2016a, 286). UD as a “neutral, common sense ‘good design’” (286), as it has come to be known, does not take into account complex philosophical issues, like designing for high support needs disabled people who are denied full autonomy (Davy 2015). As UD is often a mere application of checklists of bureaucratic qualities, it does not “guarantee substantive changes and meaningful access” (Hamraie 2016a, 296). Thus an inclusive and creative UD is desperately needed to be mainstreamed, not just one that sees design “revised, stretched, or modified to fit so-called marginal cases” (Davy 2015, 135). These images recognize and attempt to visually render the difficulties, barriers, and bias coded into the digital, contemplating crip design and analyzing misfitting relationships between machines, technology, and the disabled bodymind. Imagery in “Digital Figures” also further fantasizes about cripkin machine and neuroqueer relationships: the heady and creative results of openly contemplating kinship with machines through posthuman theory. Here I seek to draw out my thoughts of the posthuman as “coming into focus of new conditions for knowledge production and consequently new relational encounters,” or as Braidotti calls for, the “and/and'' rather than the binarist “either/or'' of ‘being’ human (Braidotti 2019, 52-53). It is also a call to consider the need for a “qualitative shift” in the posthumanitites, one that includes “feminist/queer/migrant/poor/decolonial/diasporic/disabled/diseased humanities” in its discourses (Braidotti 2017, 89). 60 Figure 15: Stream designs The first triptych in this theme, Stream design, features compositions that highlight the tensions of being a disabled artist: of the constructive powers of dwelling in, creating, and thriving in a digital world against the confining aspects of technology designed to guard and delineate against difference and the disabled user experience. The figure in the first image depicts the bust of a figure, shoulders, neck, and half of a face in flowing soft pinks and purple washes. The top half of her head though breaks apart into cubes of assorted sizes, dispersing into grey creams like the background behind and above her. Her mind, occupied with the “emotional and physical labors of creating access” (Hamraie 2016b, 262) becomes the permeating thought: tumbling, spilling, and spreading as cubes. In her attempts to be accommodated in her environment, “carry[ing] out the labor of requesting and creating access” for herself, she highlights herself as misfit, “keeping the structures that produce disability exclusion intact” (Hamraie 2016b, 264). Like a “square peg in a round hole” or a hard cube pressing up from her fleshy mind, the material relationship of her flesh to her environment makes her misfit (Garland-Thomson 2011, 593). Solid black contour lines here structure her figure, but also are used to visualize the laborious existence of misfitting into the designed environment. The central positioning of the figure balance between positive and negative space 61 and stable nature of the overall composition suggest an answer to a question not even uttered: that neuroqueer is always already misfit in any environment. The triptych’s central image’s figure rests on a background split almost diagonally by fractaled and layered purple, pink, and orange triangles. She emerges dynamically from a wall of data surrounding her as well as from the white plane of the background, her facial features disconnected from contour lines that would adjoin her to the rest of her figure. Her neck, jaw, and lips are a navy plane, appearing like a night sky of white stars: a reminder of the power in allowing the mask to slip down slightly. This composition considers merging with the digital in order to tread past misfitting. Though she appears to stand apart from the data stream building around her, it simultaneously seems to spill from her lips behind her navy mask, as she contemplates building herself into the structures and towers. The pink, purple, and orange of the fractals around her are mirrored in the hazy shading of her face and the colour of her pupils: perhaps there is fitting to be done here, a suggestion of alterity. She seeks an intermingling between fitting and misfitting of her neuroqueer bodymind to the cripkin machine. The final image of the triptych Stream design is an attempt to render this alterity. The image depicts a figure in pink and red, bisected at the bridge of the nose. The top half of her face and head appear to lever upwards, revealing a light cobalt blue sky of stars contained within her. The blue wash of planes behind her suggests a spilling of the digital within her into the world around her. From the sides of her cracked face appear her own two hands, reaching out from within herself, pulling a single wire taught between her fingers, as though she has pulled loose a seam that usually stitches her bodymind tightly shut. Here the figure actively cracks the facsimile of the masked bodymind: her hands that reach out enquiring from within this crack. The rupture of her face and the wire unspooling from within her hint that she seeks to 62 intermingle but the “bureaucratic codes, standards, and legal compliance approaches to accessibility” do not remove the barriers facing her (Hamrie 2016, 293). There is a need for tools designed to further initiate interactivity between her inner world and the outside. This figure is actively seeking to harness her misfitting, to find crip design, not just “‘universal’ design whose value is tied to its appeal to nondisabled people” (Williamson 2019, 190). Crip designs reject the particular “kind of invisibility” of UD products, where accessible means “indistinguishable from standard designs” (200). The figure in this composition —like the neuroqueer artist— is interested in a design that is “more experimental, hypothetical…[a] dramatic departure from the minimums of regulation” (190). This composition is the most fluid, the most unfinished of the triptych: it asks to imagine cripping digital drawing tools. What would a crip design offer here for the disabled artist: how it would fit or misfit, and how it would perform as well as communicate with the sensitive neuroqueer bodymind. The second set of triptychs in “Digital Figures” advances further into the potentials of cripping the digital rather than retreating from the neoliberal, biocapitalist, and potentially eugenist shadow cast over posthumanism (Murray 2020). Here I am counting on the “precursors of posthuman thought” in feminist theory’s “neo-materialist and vitalist tradition that stresses the embodied, embedded and sexed roots of subjectivity and their unexplored resources” as I read these images alongside posthumanism (Braidotti 2019, 40). Braidotti offers alternatives to the aforementioned criticisms of the posthuman, placating the paranoid reader: for “innovative methods and practices of accountability, we can turn to feminist thought” (40). While it remains paramount to critically engage with posthumanism and account for the “relationship between disability and technology” and ruminate cautiously about what “exactly technologized bodies are supposed to be, and equally what they are for,” (Murray 2020, 55) Braidotti suggests that the 63 “embedded and embodied empiricism at work” found in feminist theory, postcolonial theory, and critical race theory offer posthumanism “source[s] of counterknowledges, methods and values” (Braidotti 2019, 36). So while I dwell in imagined drawings, seeking and teasing out the nonhuman other as companion and cohort, illustrating the neuroqueer as belonging with nonhuman other, I remain guardedly aware of the kind of ghost in the machine problems and paradoxes that come with the posthuman. Figure 16: Digital Bodies In the triptych Digital Bodies, drawings are studies of hybridities and fluidities: a posthuman optimism that imagines the queering of the boundary of human/machine. Each composition features a centered figure, soft yet saturated colours, and flowing, nebulous streams or tendrils of data. The first image is of a soft feminine face and torso: steady contour lines and soft magenta shapes structure her face, while a blooming pink cloudlike plane billows from her head. This cloud at first appears to imitate flowing hair, but on closer inspection, has numbers and equations carved in relief into it, as though the structures and data she is composed of spills from her body. A play between negative white space and positive magenta planes forms her torso and uplifted hands. Her hands lift towards her face, palms up, fingers outstretched, the data 64 swirling through her and around her conducted by her will. This image constructs the posthuman as it was originally imagined and captured by theorists in the 1990s: “full of an almost revolutionary potential to collapse or eradicate categories and boundaries” (Murray 2020, 35). Clearly these dizzying revelations have not come to pass, yet here is the optimism of the promise of the figure of the posthuman: a vision of the collapsing between human and data. In the second figure, another melding of mind/body and digital/physical occurs. The figure, centered in the image, closes her eyes as a pale pink plane descends from her opened skull down past her nose. Crowning her head like a halo and expanding beyond the pictorial plane is a brightly coloured radial graph. The intricate data of this graph flows in lines and waves like strands of hair, or the braiding fibres of connective tissue. Below her face, the abating rectangular flesh toned plane of her neck, shoulders, and chest suggests that the data above her is slowly absorbing her body. Here is the transformative potential of Braidotti’s posthuman thought, that there is no “extinction/survival binary” of human or posthuman, rather an “and/and” (Braidotti 2019, 52). Indeed, the figure invites a Deleuezian “thousand plateaus of possible becomings, each following its own multi-directional course,” and her digital and human visages are tranquil, glowing, and brimming with this potential (52). In the final image, the figure, akin to the previous, suggests a transformation of human and machine. Lines of purple binary code cascade down a suggestion of an outline of hair and head and spill onto a face emerging out of orange, pink, and purple planes. The lack of contour line detailing the face suggests the novelty of such a metamorphosis and suggests that the borders of what comprises a body image (according to Schilder) is not entirely fixed in ending at the flesh. Indeed, the way the bodymind subject posits its own body image includes “the remarkable power of incorporating and expelling outside and inside in an ongoing interchange” 65 (Grosz 1994, 79). Things that touch the flesh of the body that remain “long enough will be incorporated into the body image” and particular detachable parts of the body, from abject bodily fluids to wearable assistive and adaptive technologies, when next to the body surface’s “thinner” areas are psychically invested with the self (79-80). Meaning that there is something of the subject bound up in the object “once part of the subject’s body and body image” (81). This has interesting connotations for a relational subjectivity to the nonhuman other of the digital or machine. Perhaps as humans dwell further into digital realms, so too do non-human others become citizens of the physical non-digital realm. As many disabled bodyminds must consistently come to terms with the leaky body and acknowledge the contours of the body image as porous and “osmotic” (79) it is reasonable that this imbedding and investing of the subject into the object is not as horror filled for us. The unfinished and unrendered quality of the face remarks on this: the manner of object/subject, download/upload, digital/physical is yet to be determined. The future of such relations and dwellings between the human and nonhuman other is in flux and suggest potential in the posthuman figure for the disabled bodymind. 66 Conclusion It is critical to approach these drawings with a phenomenological lens, meaning to not judge them, but allow them to express their multiple and subjective meanings. The reactions that come up as I reflect back on these drawings are multiple: I see struggling faces and figures and the diagnostic terminologies that trouble and mark my disability. Yet simultaneously, they evoke other responses in other viewers. My process has fascinatingly revealed to me that despite my impairments, I actually do have a rich understanding of human facial expressions and emotion. The artistic research process by means of drawing my social and emotional experiences reveals the wisdom embedded in my unique point of view. These drawings of people, faces, and expressions highlight social, cultural, and emotional norms and simultaneously reveal my own dysfunctions and hidden abilities within these realms. The process of drawing a face, rather than looking into one, allows for the slowing down of time and space to observe and express complex emotional circumstances in social contexts. Drawing as a way of thinking is a skill that I have been building since my childhood, to better focus my attention and to better understand the world around me. The more important the assignment or task, the more heavily text will be annotated with drawings or markings to make sense of the words on it. Consequently, it is functionally practical that my thesis, the largest assignment I have undertaken so far in my academic career, would overflow with markings, drawn annotations, and images. Moving forward as I write this conclusion, my work has been selected and curated for display by the Arts Council of the Central Okanagan (ARTSCO) for Light Up Kelowna 2021 Pride. For one month, my thesis drawings will play in triptychs across three projectors late into the night. As I forge my way forward as an artist and scholar, I can think of no better analogy than lighting up darkness with brilliant displays of neuroqueer imagery. 67 Bibliography Abrams, Kathryn. 2011. "Performing Interdependence: Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor in the Examined Life." Columbia Journal of Gender and Law 21 (2): 474-491. 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Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Interdisciplinary Studies
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International
Graduate
Dulic, Aleksandra
Neuroqueer imaging : an autistic autoethnography
Text
Still Image