Nick Walker

Be careful how much you adjust those shorts big guy… 😉

Nick Walker.

Nick Walker

Nick walker

Nick Walker

Taking a swig of his energy drink, Nick feels a rush of strength surging through his body. He groans as the drink goes down his throat, and his muscles start expanding. Everything feels tighter as his muscles fight for space, making him think of the 5 remaining cans in his bag.

Stills from Nick Walker’s latest YT video. Just look at the size of that roid gut! 🤯

Nick Walker

["The entwined nature of neuronormativity and heteronormativity means that the compulsory performance of neurotypicality is never a gender-neutral performance, but instead is strongly tied to the performance of binary heteronormative gender roles. Normative performance of whichever gender one was assigned at birth is central to what it means to be "normal" in the eyes of the present dominant culture. Thus, when the enforcers of normativity demand that a child "act normal," it's ultimately a demand to either act like a "normal boy" or like a "normal girl," whether or not the demand is explicitly phrased that way.

Since normative performance is always gendered, deviations from neuronormative embodiment are also inevitably deviations from heteronormative embodiment. Whether a given deviation gets interpreted by the enforcers of normativity as a violation of neuronormativity or as a violation of heteronormativity often depends entirely on context and circumstances. In a context in which a child is known to be autistic (or neurodivergent in some other specific and culturally pathologized way), the child's non-normative usage of their hands is likely to be pathologized as a "symptom" of their neurodivergence. But in a different context, those who are policing the child's embodiment are unaware of the child's neurodivergence, the same non-normative hand movements might be flagged as gender violations: children whom adults have labeled as girls might be reprimanded for drumming on the table with their hands or running their fingers vigorously and repeatedly through their hair, on the grounds that such actions are "unladylike"; children whom adults have labeled as boys might be attacked or ridiculed for flapping their hands, on the grounds that such gestures are "gay."

Thus, there are some autistic people who were forced in childhood to suppress their natural hand movements because those hand movements were flagged as "symptoms of autism" and targeted for elimination by autistiphobic adults, and other autistic people who weren't recognized as autistic in childhood but were still forced to suppress their hand movements because those hand movements were violations of heteronormativity that got them targeted for homophobic and transphobic abuse by adults and/or peers. And of course, there are many who were targeted on both neuronormative and heteronormative grounds at different times— e.g., autistics who in their youth were abused by adults for moving their hands autistically, and by homophobic peers who read those same hand movements as queer. The professional ABA perpetrator and the homophobic schoolyard bully are ultimately in the same line of work, enforcing the same compulsory normativity from different angles.

Since distinctively autistic movements of the hands violate the rules of both neuronormative performance and heteronormative performance, to refuse to suppress such movements functions as a simultaneous queering of both neuronormativity and heteronormativity. When an autistic person chooses to allow themselves to follow some or all of the impulses toward non-normative hand movement that spontaneously arise in them, rather than suppressing those impulses in the interest of normative performance, that's a form of neuroqueering."]

nick walker, from neuroqueer heresies: notes on the neurodiversity paradigm, autistic empowerment, and postnormal possibilities, 2021

Nick Walker