Abject Bodyminds and the Humanist Subject: Contemporary Neuroqueer Aesthetics Across PanPacific Literature, Film, and Popular Culture

Authors

Abstract

This dissertation seeks to unsettle the entrenched boundaries of the human, offering a crip (disabled and queer) intervention into the parameters of the humanist subject. My research engages with recent affective and cognitive turns in literary and cultural studies, turning to neurodivergence as a mode of critique. Through a neuroqueer (queer and neurodivergent) lens, my work critiques contemporary understandings of the human and the humane that are rooted in intertwined histories that pathologize those who fall outside of relational norms. Such pathologization often plays out through psychiatric and social narratives of neurological difference. In opposition to accounts of neurodivergence that foreclose agency, I propose that neurodivergent creators deploy aesthetic, rhetorical, and affective strategies that disrupt, reshape, and queer dominant discourses. In doing so, they exercise more expansive notions of agency that move beyond the parameters of humanism to embrace neuroabjection and other neuroqueer possibilities. This comparative literature and popular culture project draws on a transnational and multimodal archive of texts that span three cultural and spatial contexts—the virtual, Asian Pacific, and Ethnic American—and includes Latinx literature and poetry, Australian stand-up performance, a Taiwanese novel, a Thai television series, and social media posts. These works, I contend, demonstrate the complex ways in which neuronormativity structures our subjectivity, while also offering necessary reimaginings of affect, care, and the human(e). Many of the texts I draw on reveal the intertwined workings of humanism and neuroableism. For example, in chapter one, I close read the 1978 horror film Halloween, demonstrating how it takes up psychiatric discourse that equates cognitive difference with monstrosity and the in/unhuman. Throughout the project, I situate this figuration of the humanist subject in conversation with a transnational and multimodal archive of texts by neurodivergent creators. This archive, I argue, showcases various forms of crip agency, including aesthetic, rhetorical, and affective possibilities. This dissertation is comprised of four main chapters. Chapter one, “Masked Horrors and the Horror of Masking: On Slashers and Neurodivergence from Halloween (1978) to Thailand’s Dead Friend Forever (2023),” focuses first on the paradigmatic American horror film Halloween (1978), exploring how the piece employs the figure of the psychokiller to convey anxieties around hidden mental illness. I then turn to the recent queer Thai horror series Dead Friend Forever, which I argue intervenes in this genre tradition while offering an exploration of mental illness that resonates more closely with neurodivergent experiences of forced normativity. In my second chapter, “Tenemos Que Enloquecer: Silence, Debility, and Mad Latinx Aesthetics,” I take up the Latinx feminist concept of “loca epistemologies” (named by public intellectuals and podcasters Diosa Femme and Mala Muñoz), turning to a short story by Chicano writer Ramón García and the poetry of Puerto Rican political prisoner turned mental patient Francisco Matos Paoli. I explore how loca epistemologies engage in politics of visibility, not just as a practice of individual liberation but one tied to wider politics that speaks back to systems of silence invested in upholding empire, biopolitics, debility, and death. My third chapter, “It’s All in Your Headcanon: Neuroqueering Online Fandom,” analyzes a corpus of social media posts wherein autistic people use the transformative practices of fandom to queer dominant discourses around autistic embodiment. My final chapter, “Painful Play: Neuroqueer Narratives and Self-Awareness in Qiu Miaojin’s Notes of a Crocodile and Hannah Gadsby’s Nanette,” examines transnational queer and neurodivergent aesthetics by placing autistic comedian Hannah Gadsby’s 2018 Australian stand-up special Nanette in dialogue with Qiu Miaojin’s 1994 Taiwanese novel Notes of a Crocodile. Through a comparative reading, I sketch out an aesthetic approach that prioritizes rhetorical, textual, and self-awareness in contrast to assumptions that cognitive disability is equated to mindlessness. My dissertation deliberately seeks to address bias against neurodivergent people (15-20% of the population) and to redress the ethical, epistemological, and material consequences of their exclusion.

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