(Neuro) Queer Theory
What is queer is absolutely uncatagorizable; it is unstable in the most liberating way. Queer theory has to do with infinite possibilities and, as such, is bound up with transgression.
Queer theory grew out of feminism, in particular the work of Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick. In 2009, José Esteban Muñoz published Cruising Utopia, which tied together and reframed queer scholarship, and has since become a touchstone for queer theorists.
The word “queer” is notoriously difficult to define, which has become its prevailing characteristic—and so much so that “the insistence on indefinability hints at queer theory as a lens that emphasizes the slipperiness of meaning and the transgression of categories and boundaries” (McCann and Monaghan 2). As a tentative starting point for thinking about queer, as a place from which to launch a web of notions regarding a particular queer idea, person, or text, we can understand queer as dealing with the singular, the exceptionally unique.
In Queer Theory Now (2020) Hannah McCann and Whitney Monaghan explain, “queer is a ‘deliberately ambiguous term’ that is simultaneously a way of naming, describing, doing and being. This is where queer theory finds its rhetorical potential as a term to challenge, interrogate, destabilise and subvert” (1).
While queer theory developed out of the LGBTQ+ movement, often queer theory is part of discussions of intersectionality in other fields. Typically, queerness becomes part of the consideration as a tool for analyzing the question of (non)-normativity in the original field.
What is Neuroqueer Theory?
When we explore the intersectionality between queer theory and perception (or aesthetics), we create a framework for analyzing anomalies in the field of neuroscience. In Neuroqueer Heresies, Nick Walker (she/her) coins the term neuroqueer theory to address the occurrences of neurodiversity that abound beyond our of neuro-normal conditioning. As Walker puts it, “Neuroqueer Theory, at its core, is about applying Queer Theory to the realm of neurodiversity, with the goal of developing practices which foster creative personal and cultural transformations that subvert and transcend the limitations of neuronormativity and cisheteronormativity.”
The Neuroqueer Theory Anthology
My chapter will appear in the forthcoming Neuroqueer Theory Anthology (edited by Nick Walker, Autonomous Press, 2026).
“Toward a Neuroqueer Aesthetic” Neuroqueer Theory Anthology.
Chapter Abstract
This chapter engages Modernist art and literature from the early twentieth century to argue for a neuro-queer-aesthetic paradigm shift. Beginning with cross-modal Modernist art as a threshold case of perceptive potential, I rely on recent studies in clinical synesthesia to explore practices of spectatorship that subvert neuronormative perceptive patterns that would figure cross-modal sensation as impossible. Cross-modal works of art aim to stimulate one sensory modality (sight, sound, taste, touch, or smell) by providing a stimulus in a different sense modality. When the Futurist painters, for instance, insist on painting sounds, noises, and smells, they are not speaking metaphorically. Clinical synesthesia is a type of neurodivergence. It is a scientifically validated phenomenon of cross-modal perception that occurs in approximately four percent of the population. Generally, clinical synesthesia is an automatic and involuntary condition in which an individual, when presented with a sensory stimulus in one sense modality, experiences a concurrent sensation in a different sense modality. The most common form of synesthesia is called grapheme-color synesthesia. In these cases, individuals perceive some letters and numbers as strongly associated with particular colors. Forms of synesthesia vary widely, though, to include any combination of sensory modalites. Consider, for instance, the case of lexical-gustatory synesthesia, in which a person experiences certain tastes triggered by particular words. In all cases of clinical synesthesia, the pairs of synesthetic combinations—like which specific words cause which specific tastes—are unique for each individual but consistent throughout that person’s lifetime. Recently, however, the research of cognitive neuroscientist Danko Nikolić finds that one-shot synesthesia also exists. One-shot synesthesia is a singular occurrence of synesthesia that does not repeat during an individual’s lifetime. Nikolić suggests it is brought on by the ongoing mental processes that are taking place in the moments preceding the occurrence. This opens the door for the prospect that cross-modal perception is a somewhat controllable and rather flexible phenomenon of neurodivergence. Furthermore, from a neuro-scientific perspective, the potential for cross-modal sensory perception depends on the idiosyncratic associations stored in the semantic network of the brain, making it highly subjective. This chapter proposes methods of spectatorship that depend on altered brain states, derived from meditation techniques, to coax receptivity to cross-modal perception-like experiences by temporarily inhibiting linear logic. The resulting occurrences of cross-modal perception, or one-shot synesthesia, would be absolutely unique for each individual and unrepeatable even for that individual.
Not only does receptivity to such cross-modal experiences call for a paradigm shift, but the interpretive impermanence fostered by these spectatorship practices is also a put-off for traditional academic discussions within a neuronormative framework. I therefore propose a neuro-queer-aesthetic paradigm shift that would work towards cultivating the necessary openness to alterity. From a perceptive register that challenges the limitations imposed by normativity, one must be willing to see beyond what cultural conditioning maintains is obvious or even logical. Not only that, one must also be willing to compassionately attend to each new experience of each new moment. Similarly, in Cruising Utopia, José Esteban Muñoz characterizes queerness as an “ecstatic and horizontal temporality” that is “a path and a movement to a greater openness to the world” (25). It is from this intersectional standpoint that I offer a neuro-queer-aesthetic paradigm shift as a means of amplifying perceptive possibilities that would ultimately increase compassionate engagement with alterity. Participation in this type of queer utopia, Muñoz continues, “is the work of not settling for the present, of asking and looking beyond the here and now. Such a hermeneutic would then be epistemologically and ontologically humble in that it would not claim the epistemological certitude of a queerness that we simply “know” but, instead, strain to activate the no-longer-conscious and to extend a glance toward that which is future-dawning, anticipatory illuminations of the not-yet-conscious” (28 emphasis original). Cross-modal works of art destabilize both what there is to know and how we might come to know it. Clinical synesthesia activates what Muñoz calls “the no-longer-conscious” by stimulating sensory associations stored in the mind but inhibited by neuronormative conditioning, and its potential for “anticipatory illuminations,” which would expand conscious awareness, is fecund.
There are, of course, implications for scholarship as well. In the final sentence of her essay “Against Interpretation” (1964), Susan Sontag writes: “In place of a hermeneutics we need an erotics of art.” Let us understand an “erotics of art” as an unrepeatable sensuous experience, and one which we create cooperatively as it unfolds. In place of a hermeneutics, then, a neuro-queer-aesthetic act of scholarly criticism would offer, borrowing Sontag’s words, “a really accurate, sharp, loving description” of our unique sensory engagement with works of art and literature.