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#but maybe we can and should make space for a scrum of human experience
sheathandshear · 2 years
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I’m glad that people are starting to move away from “wink wink nudge nudge he’s (always he) special but not ABNORMAL” depictions of autism/ADHD/SPD/what have you but sometimes I think people are being pressured to swing too far in the opposite direction, where if characters aren’t immediately recognizable as having this discrete diagnosis, that’s ableism and Bad Representation.
I think there’s value in writing characters who are clearly neuroatypical but in a way that’s hard to pin down, that doesn’t conform neatly to one DSM-V category or another. Neuroatypical diagnoses describe real experiences in a groupable way but they’re also not laws of nature, they’re culturally and temporally dependent. Even within the Western medical model, what’s considered absolutely “characteristic” of XYZ condition changes.
And the consequences of that often have to do with expanding those categories — understanding gendered presentation of female-socialized ADHD vs. male-socialized ADHD, for example, or racialized diagnosis of ODD vs. autism. Which is good! But I hope that we can also acknowledge that just... humans are diverse, “neuroatypical” and “neurotypical” are not neatly divided opposites, and there are a lot of people who live in cousin-y grey areas where their experience of embodiment/themselves/other people/the world overlaps but is not identical with people who meet more of the “characteristic” features of recognized defined conditions, and exploring those experiences in fiction enriches rather than detracts.
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