New Neuroqueer Flags!
So I’m not the biggest fan of the current neuroqueer flags circling around, and so i decided to do my take it on it by incorpertaing the colour scheme of the Queer flag. This version more colourful than versions using the genderqueer flag, and I just associate neurodiversity with lots of colours…
Full colour Neuroqueer flag
Pastel Neuroqueer flag
Low contrast (for sensory sensitivities) Neuroqueer flag
Made for me, by me, but feel free to use with credit!
[PT: New Neuroqueer Flags!
Context:
Neuroqueer was coined by Nick Walker in 2008. He mentioned it for the first time publicly in a Facebook group for autistic folks in 2014, and discovered Athena Lynn Michaels-Dillon (a colleague of his) had also come up with the term independently.
Nick, Athena, and B. Martin Allen, and other friends, went on to found “publishing house Autonomous Press, and its imprint NeuroQueer Books, to publish books with neuroqueer themes (including the annual Spoon Knife multi-genre neuroqueer lit anthology).”
Nick writes, “I originally conceived of neuroqueer as a verb: neuroqueering as the practice of queering (subverting, defying, disrupting, liberating oneself from) neuronormativity and heteronormativity simultaneously.”
“So what does it mean to neuroqueer, as a verb? What are the various practices that fall within the definition of neuroqueering?
- Being both neurodivergent and queer, with some degree of conscious awareness and/or active exploration around how these two aspects of one’s being entwine and interact (or are, perhaps, mutually constitutive and inseparable).
- Embodying and expressing one’s neurodivergence in ways that also queer one’s performance of gender, sexuality, ethnicity, and/or other aspects of one’s identity.
- Engaging in practices intended to undo and subvert one’s own cultural conditioning and one’s ingrained habits of neuronormative and heteronormative performance, with the aim of reclaiming one’s capacity to give more full expression to one’s uniquely weird potentials and inclinations.
- Engaging in the queering of one’s own neurocognitive processes (and one’s outward embodiment and expression of those processes) by intentionally altering them in ways that create significant and lasting increase in one’s divergence from prevailing cultural standards of neuronormativity and heteronormativity.
- Approaching, embodying, and/or experiencing one’s neurodivergence as a form of queerness (e.g., in ways that are inspired by, or similar to, the ways in which queerness is understood and approached in Queer Theory, Gender Studies, and/or queer activism).
- Producing literature, art, scholarship, and/or other cultural artifacts that foreground neuroqueer experiences, perspectives, and voices.
- Producing critical responses to literature and/or other cultural artifacts, focusing on intentional or unintentional characterizations of neuroqueerness and how those characterizations illuminate and/or are illuminated by actual neuroqueer lives and experiences.
- Working to transform social and cultural environments in order to create spaces and communities – and ultimately a society – in which engagement in any or all of the above practices is permitted, accepted, supported, and encouraged.”