Panel #6 Session 2
Thursday 30 November - 11:00
Building 25, Room 2
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Chair: Rose Lucas
Queering the past: Representing neuroqueer characters in historical fiction
- Ariella Van Luyn
University of New England
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Academics, activists and online communities use the concept of neuroqueer to understand and resist the normalising practices that medicalise and seek cures for diverse ways of being (Yergeau 2017; Rodas and Yergeau 2018; Egner 2019; Walker 2021). Neuroqueer theory emerges from intersectional feminist scholarship, which argues that, because gender is inherently embodied and performative, disability must, by necessity, be included in understanding the intersection of identities, privilege and marginalisation (Egner 2019). Neuroqueerness combines a neurodiversity paradigm that suggests cognitive difference is part of human diversity (Walker 2021) and a queer framework that understands queerness both as an identity and a verb (Egner 2019).
In fictional texts, the representation of neuroqueer characters thus has the capacity to draw attention to the structural marginalisation of queer and neurodiverse figures and the modes via which they might resist such marginalisation. Rodas and Yergeau (2018) and Hartley (2022) has described a poetics of neuroqueerness: textual and filmic markers that express neuroqueer subjectivities and imagine diverse audiences.
Yet, the representation of neuroqueer characters in historical fiction is complicated. Archival and secondary sources that historical fiction writers draw from typically elide non-normative lives, for example with euphemisms like ‘lifelong companions’ to describe same-sex couples. Writers must read between the lines in search of such figures and engage in acts of revisionism. This paper will use a practice-led research approach to understanding the complex act of representing neuroqueer characters in historical fiction.
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References:
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Egner, J. E. (2019). “The disability rights community was never mine”: Neuroqueer disidentification. Gender & Society, 33(1), 123-147.
Griffin, C. (2022). Relationalities of Refusal: Neuroqueer Disidentification and Post-Normative Approaches to Narrative Recognition. South Atlantic Review, 87(3), 89-110.
Hartley, D. (2022). " Is this to be an empathy test?": Autism and neuroqueer expression in Blade Runner (1982). Science Fiction Film and Television, 15(2), 123-144.
Mejeur, C. (2020). ‘Neuroqueer: Contextualising narrative through embodied experience.’ Modern Languages Association Annual Convention 2020. https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:28245/
Rodas, Julia Miele, and Melanie Yergeau. Autistic Disturbances : Theorizing Autism Poetics from the DSM to Robinson Crusoe. Ann Arbor, Michigan: University of Michigan Press, 2018.
Walker, N. (2021). Neuroqueer heresies: Notes on the neurodivisity paradigm, autistic empowerment and postnormal possibilities. Autonomous Press.
Yergeau, M. (2017). Authoring autism: On rhetoric and neurological queerness. Duke University Press.
Dr Ariella Van Luyn is a senior lecturer in writing at the University of New England. She is the author of a novel, Treading Air, and many works of short fiction. Her research investigates historical fiction and biofiction using a practice-led research methodology.
Motherforklift: Trans-Supportive Parenting in 21st Century Australia
- Kel Purcill
University of the Sunshine Coast
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The heteronormative moral panic and political grandstanding around trans existence recently in Australia has increased interest and attention on trans lives and allyship. While the importance of supportive parentals/families for trans individuals is extensively documented (Abreu et al., 2022; Queensland Government 2023), the experiences of the parental unit/s is often invisible as the focus is usually on the wellbeing of the child (whatever their age). Australian creative narratives with supportive parentals are rare, depicting little of the emotional, cultural and personal labour parents undergo associated with their child’s gender identity (Elkadi et al 2023). Importantly, narratives do not examine or celebrate the associated joys, intimacies and hilarity which attends parenting a trans child. Current narratives do not centre parentals, nor consider the parental’s personhood and experiences of decades of intense social change. Narratives, as a creative form, enable the consideration of alternate experiences, futures and potentially increase empathy to others. This paper discusses the engagement of queer phenomenology (Ahmed 2006) and queer autoethnography through creative praxis to evoke understanding and celebrate parenting of a trans individual. This paper contributes to and extends the positive portrayal of trans-supportive parentals in creative narratives, centring the supportive parental’s experiences..
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Kel Purcill (she/her) is currently undertaking a PhD in Creative Industries (Creative Writing) at the University of the Sunshine Coast. Her PhD thesis, titled ‘Motherforklift: Parenting a Trans individual in Twenty-First Century Australia’ focuses on how a creative non-fiction narrative can counter negative (and absent) depictions and celebrate/recognise trans-supportive parents in Australia. She has had three essay components of her artefact published, one in a University of Utah Press anthology, two forth coming.
Juice: experimental approaches to writing shame and desire in fiction.
- Eve Nucifora-Ryan & Imogen McKenzie
University of Canberra
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Eve Nucifora-Ryan and Imogen McKenzie came individually to an interest in the unrescuable tension of sexuality in our contemporary culture: the ways in which society both desires and derides sexualities and the way those tensions are recreated in bodies and in prose. Through theories of abjection (Kristeva 1982), shame (Probyn 2005), and “dirty writing” (Pullen 2008), we will explore the corporeality of abjection and sex in fiction and how we, as creative practitioners and early-career researchers in the sphere of erotic philosophies, engage in a sexual and abject relationship with the reader.
Salman Rushdie writes, ‘What is forged, in the secret act of reading, is a different kind of identity, as the reader and writer merge, through the medium of the text, to become a collective being that both writes as it reads and reads as it writes, and creates, jointly, that unique work, “their” novel’ (Rushdie 1990:6).
Our experimental process of writing abjection, shame, and desire is also a process of reading – and inviting the audience to ‘read’ abjection alongside us as we encounter each other’s creative work for the first time in our performative panel discussion. With this reading, we aim to create and investigate the simultaneously pleasurable and problematic possibilities of fucking the reader.
Imogen McKenzie is a prospective PhD candidate at the University of Canberra. Working through ficto-critical writing and magical realism, Imogen has explored the philosophical frameworks of sex, religion, and violence. Her current research is occupied with posthuman theories of sexuality, recovery, and becoming.
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Eve Nucifora is a PhD candidate at the University of Canberra. Her creative-led research draws on feminist, psychoanalytical, and affect theories to explore erotic ambivalence as a recurring motif in short prose fiction, expressed through sexuality, place, and sensation. Her stories have been published in Axon and Meniscus literary journals.