Neurodivergent Feminist Teaching & Play

by: Anna Nygren , November 19, 2024

Introduction

This article works on the border of games and education research. It explores the potential of neurodivergent and neuroqueer perspectives on play/games and education. I am writing as a neurodivergent teacher diagnosed with autism—though from a feminist perspective, which is also critical towards the way diagnoses work (Arky 2022). My background is in art and literature, and I am a practising writer and artist; my essayistic article is based on autoethnographic methods (Williams 2020). It explores neurodivergent aspects of the intersections of play and education. George Bataille discusses whether ‘play could essentially amount to the dissolution of all thought; whether the introduction of play within thought did not systematically depart from the possibilities of knowledge, of understanding’ (Bataille 2018). The concepts of games and play are not identical, but I use the concept of play as a borderland between games and research.

Autistic children have been seen as failing when it comes to play—in a neurotypical way of thinking about what play is. When differences in play do not align with the socially constructed understanding of normalcy, as happens to autistic children, they are generally pathologised and considered faults of the individual to be fixed (Waltz 2020). I propose an exploration of literary and experienced worlds as neuroqueerly understood through the concepts of play and games, and how these experiences can be used within pedagogy. My experience of the world often relates phenomenologically to a game structure: there seem to be rules that I need to unveil and accept and relate to—but also outsmart, to find pleasure. I see similar ways of understanding the world in the writings of autistic rhetoric researcher Remi Yergeau, whose work inspires this essay. Within the pedagogy, primarily in higher education, I explore how this game-play structuring of the experience of the world can relate to the concepts of knowledge—and how they partly contradict the ideas of learning presented by Benjamin Bloom (1956) and primarily applied within education. I present this as a kind of failed manifesto trying to map out an understanding of a neurodivergent worldview by overlapping the concepts of games, play, pleasure, thought and feeling.

The Start

Trying to find the design for this essay is a question in itself. I get stuck at the word ‘design;’ I chose it because it lingers between the game design and the universal design for learning (which is frequently referred to in articles on education and neurodivergence). I have a tendency to view the words as worlds, inhabited by creatures, filled with different organs, moving through time and space. In ‘design’ I find a ‘sign’ and a ‘de.’ The prefix de-, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary is:

inherited from French and Latin, from Latin de ‘down, down from, from, off; concerning,’ also used as a prefix in Latin, usually meaning ‘down, off, away, from among, down from,’ but also ‘down to the bottom, totally’ hence ‘completely’ (intensive or completive), which is its sense in many English words. As a Latin prefix it also had the function of undoing or reversing a verb’s action, and hence it came to be used as a pure privative—‘not, do the opposite of, undo’ (Online Ethymology Dictionary).

How then does the opposite of sign play (with) the game? My search continues. I come up with the following potential answers:

• to write your name, usually on a written or printed document, to show that you agree with its contents or have written or created it yourself
• to give an order or information, or make a request, using hand and body movements
• a notice giving information, directions, a warning, etc.
• a movement of the body that gives information or an instruction
• something showing that something else exists or might happen or exist in the future

There is a turn—down, off, away—when giving directions, warnings, when tiling the future, when writing one’s name, and I am already lost or stuck. Did I agree? I will come back to this.

The design I find fitting for this essay is the searching for clues, a move through levels, a fall back to previous levels, an attempt to follow the rules and realising the rules were never mine. The search for the direction has failed. Yet, the design must start with some words or concepts that are essential: So, here they are:

• Play
• Game
• Rules
• Knowledge
• Learning
• Fail

When this article is ready it might remind readers of a manifesto. It will look like a set of rules. Rules might sometimes be manifestos, and manifestos sometimes de-rules. The way for this text is a search for and through a universe, or a perception of a universe that invents and inverts, what is suggested as ‘the right way of winning the game’. I write about autism from a neuroqueer perspective. Neuroqueering, explained by Nick Walker can manifest as:

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 (2021).

And in Authoring Autism (2018) Remi Yergeau writes: ‘[t]o be autistic is to be neuroqueer, and to be neuroqueer is to be idealizing, desiring, sidling’ (2018: 18)

I don’t know what ‘sidling’ means, but the Internet says: ‘1. To move sideways: sidled through the narrow doorway. 2. To advance in an unobtrusive, furtive, or coy way: swindlers who sidle up to tourists.’

Yes.

The sideways movement, the swindling, is, I suggest, part of the game. It is a countermove to the concept of levels in games, where one reaches the next level, or fails. This article will try to work with all the directions of movements. It is probably meant to fail.

I write as an angry non-gamer. A gamer playing in an attempt to escape the ‘I’ by forming multiple avatars, by re/writing rules, by crying and failing and starting over.

Play

Stefania Donzelli (2021), a neurodivergent forest operator and forest pedagogy trainer, makes as their first point in an article on autistic play that:

Play is a fundamental part of childhood and it supports children in their physical, cognitive, social and emotional development. Of course, both human development and play are extremely diverse and, depending on socio-cultural norms, some forms of playing are seen as more beneficial or competent than others. When differences in play do not align to socially constructed understanding of normalcy, as it happens to autistic children, they are generally pathologised and considered faults of the individual to be fixed (Waltz 2020).

It follows that autistic children should be thought to play like typical children, through adult-led experiences, in order to improve later development outcomes (Donzelli 2021, no pagination).

I used italics in the quote to show the parts my eyes react to. First the Play and the Child. The play as fixed in time, in childhood, and that is a childhood focused on Development. And the Development is supposed to have a clear Direction, going through stages well defined. Donzelli points out how a consequence of this is that Play that is not recognised (by neurotypical adults) as play, is pathologised and should be corrected. Then, Donzelli focuses on ‘pretend play’:

Pretend play is a perfect example to reason on autistic play culture because its late appearance and repetitive nature in autistic kids has long been problematised. Firstly, it should be acknowledged that pretend play is a broad category including symbolic, socio-dramatic, role, fantasy and imaginative play … Usually, autistic kids engage later in pretend play. This happens because the monotropic mind prefers to prioritise the acquisition of one skill at a time (Murray et al. 2015).

According to accounts produced by autistic writers on their play, this often implies exploring in-depth the physical world before engaging in its symbolic representations (Nanny Aut 2021) (Donzelli 2021 no pagination).

Noting: Monotropic. Insert: regarding monotropism [and also I want to add fusing…]

The concept of monotropism has been used to explain why autistic people often develop special interests in which they gain a broad knowledge (Murray et al. 2005; Murray 2018). Monotropism is the tendency for us as autistic people to be more strongly drawn to our interests than neurotypicals. The theory of monotropism is based on a model of the mind as an ‘interest system’: everyone is interested in many things, and these interests help us focus our attention. In a monotropic mind, fewer interests tend to arise at any one time, and they attract more resources and energy, making it harder to address things that are outside this field of attention (Murray 2018). Moreover, the monotropic interest is strongly characterised by emotion, in Murray et al’s words ’charged with feeling’ (Murray et al 2005).

Following the feeling I reach the fusing:

In See it feelingly: Classic novels, autistic readers, and the schooling of a no-good English professor (2018), Ralph Savarese writes about reading with autistic people. Using Stephen Shore’s concept of ‘fusing,’ he explores how autistic sensory input can contribute productively to the reading process. By ‘fusing,’ Shore means a kind of merging with another’s suffering; ‘whether real or imagined … being so attuned to the pain that it becomes his own’ (Savarese 2018: 18, Shore 2003). Fusing here means a kind of merging and dissolution between subject and object. The autistic experience then becomes a questioning of the possibility of demarcating individuals and bodies. The fusion occurs through feeling, and can arise in encounters with people, but also in encounters with non-human animals (Grandin 2005), with things—or, as in Savarese’s case, with texts.

Fusing in this text, also means fusing with the game, with the world, with the play.

I use the theories of monotropism and fusing to establish a basis for how an autistic perception can work and examine how this can become both problems and assets in both learning and teaching processes, as well as in an artistic practice. Here it becomes clear how art, pedagogy and a very basic, private experience of the world merge. Both as a teacher and a writer, I think a lot about how to relate to this, and how this relates to questions such as: What is knowledge? Monotropism concentrates attention, rewarding parts over wholes—while the opposite is often true in neurotypical knowledge contexts; and fusing implies a form of knowledge that is experienced through the senses and feelings—an emotional and sensory knowledge that is also often devalued in academic contexts. I see these theories as fundamental to the neuroqueer play, reading, learning, world and the language that I want to be in.

Coming back now to Donzelli, who turns their gaze to the pretend:

Another feature of autistic pretend play, which especially appears in socio-dramatic and role play, is the autistic preference for the enactment of ‘orderly and predictable representations of real life’ (Conn 2015: 1198). For example, autistic kids may spend an extended period of time staging daily routines (Donzelli 2021, no pagination).

I try to understand whether there is a difference or a similarity between pretend and fusing. I try to understand the concept of pretend and whether it has something to do with Reality—a concept that was never ours. To work with this trying, I read George Bataille’s ‘On the Ambiguity of Pleasure and Play,’ a lecture working through psychoanalysis, given in 1958. I don’t mind the context very much at this moment, but I use the reading in my search for the portal to the next level. Bataille writes:

could thinking of play not in essence be the dissolution of all thought? If we introduce play inside thought, do we not precisely distance ourselves from the possibilities of knowledge? (2018: 233)

And Bataille writes:

I underline [that] for me what applies to play applies equally to some other realities: with some exceptions, we all know what play is … But if one tries to substitute a precisely articulated set of words for one’s immediate understanding, even if they may depict the point of view they are trying to express, they nevertheless cannot provide us with the exact and immutable limits of what immediate understanding had sought to capture (2018: 234).

And Bataille writes:

Language probably cannot gain access to the positive expression of pleasure except in delirious terms that destroy the meaning of language (2018: 240).

And Bataille writes:

It is the positive character of pleasure as play that determines its ambiguity (2018: 243).

And Bataille writes:

In fact, play represented as an ultimate truth goes against the impulse constituting knowledge. Knowledge is founded upon a reality which is reduced if not to necessity at least to the probability that sees play as the unlikely part of the real (2018: 247).

I have been told I cannot structure my essays like this, piling up the quotes and then writing something next to it. But I do it anyway. When challenged, I challenge back. Yes. So here, I read about play and pleasure. I don’t know if play and game are always connected, but I have heard the phrase ‘play a game’ too many times not to connect them. Bataille writes about play, not as something meant to follow a pattern. The second quote shows a possibility to think of play outside of what ‘we’ think play is. From an autistic point of view, this is 1, similar to the relation between prejudices about autism and the actual autistic perception/being/life (i.e. ‘we’ think autistics are rigid and stiff, when in fact we might be more like porous, ambiguous, never-taken-for-granted, and of course we are never a unit, but a multitude), and 2, something I am forced to, or rather invited to, do, all the time, since my reality are never the Reality, there is something, unreal I must re-think all the time… Then, Bataille writes about play as a thing that challenges knowledge, meaning, language, reality. As a moment or a mode, where knowledge is always uncertain. While the concept of knowledge (as well as meaning, language and reality), is always complex for the autistic: there has always been a medical instance claiming to know me better than I do (comp. Botha 2021), the voice speaking for the autistics is the research voice of well-meaning (?) outsiders, and they tell me things about myself… since this is the case, this play seems to be a place of resistance. To play is to avoid knowledge and understanding, both on a personal and structural level. Being incomprehensible, then, might be a way to not-approve the whole concept of knowledge. Then play, can also be an alternative mode for researching, learning, teaching. (Am I trying to do just that right now?) The silence mentioned, might seem random, but also relevant. The silence is abstract and actual (my autistic use of language now includes speaking, but for periods of my life I have been non-speaking, and some autistics do not use speech), and here: it is a possibility. A possibility for pleasure and resistance and pleasure in resistance.

While Donzelli’s perspective on play is quite limited to children’s pretend play, Bataille’s philosophical take on play opens up for questions. Combining this, I end up in a place where the autistic adult (as a neuroqueer temporality, where the failure of becoming adult might be a reality and therefore the process of development is non-straight and fucking with everything…) is almost in the position of the play (rather than the player), failing and flawing and being a trickster in the world structured around development, reality, knowledge.

Yes.

(INSERT: This is a game and a play, and you might find yourself asking: how is this about feminist pedagogies? bell hooks writes:

Who are we teaching and what can we learn from them? What should one learn so that they can challenge injustice in their lived experiences and communities? How can the environment of education help challenge oppressive political structures and cultural norms rather than conform to them? (1994 & 2010)

The places I have visited so far suggest the play has a potential to be misunderstood (as not-play) and to be disturbing (encouraging an abandonment of concepts perhaps, or structures, or rules). You might find yourself asking: what could this actually mean for the teaching of games more specifically? I want to answer by asking: is it possible to teach methods of failing and cheating?)

Now:

Game

I should know by now what a game is, but I don’t (I refuse to). So, I search on the internet:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Game_(mind_game)

It is described thus:

‘The Game is a mind game in which the objective is to avoid thinking about The Game itself. Thinking about The Game constitutes a loss, which must be announced each time it occurs.’

This is, like being neurodivergent in a neurotypical world, realising, again and again, that I need to pretend to be in reality (this is why my pretend is never recognised as pretend). The goal is to merge with the game.

And I find:

https://urplay.se/program/170810-the-game-hello

This is a game for Swedish children. To win, they need to speak English. The game here, here is most obviously connected to language, adapting to a foreign language, just like how I learn to speak about my experience through the language of pathologisation.

I find:

https://www.specialstrong.com/top-10-autism-social-skill-activities-for-sensory-issues-in-children/#:~:text=Top%2010%20Social%20Skill%20Activities%20for%20Autism%20to,…%208%208.%20Video%20modelling%20…%20Fler%20objekt

Here, games are used as a kind of conversion therapy. The statement might seem harsh. I think it is all well-meaning. But still, it is meant to change and correct the autistic person.

I think I find a pattern. The games I find are meant to be used as pedagogical tools, straightening, socialising, developing, telling and telling me: I lack something. The game is also meant to trigger a winning instinct, and a need to conform to the game so much that the gaming moment becomes invisible. I should not know that I am playing a game, I should just, live. But what does living mean?

Rules

There is something with the word ‘rule/s’:

The noun: an accepted principle or instruction that states the way things are or should be done, and tells you what you are allowed or are not allowed to do (CITATION NEEDED)

The verb: to control or be the person in charge of something such as a country; to be the most important and controlling influence on someone (Cambridge Dictionary).

My tendency is to like words that are verbs and nouns within the same set of letters. Yes. Because it allows for the act to be a thing that can be touched and for the object to be a thing that moves, can be moved, and that has agency. The rule/s are like that. The Rules, rule—countries and people (countries are people). And my tendency when it comes to this particular word is to obey, and then, to freeze, and then, to want to resist, and then, to want to obey and resist at the same time, and then, to fail.

Remi Yergeau helps me think about this in terms of ‘hacking.’ In ‘Disability Hacktivism’ (2014) they work through a specific context of hacking, related to pedagogy, collectivity, computers, and actual happenings, that I am not familiar with (including some of the words connected to the context). But the rhetoric strikes me as something I very well recognise. Yergeau writes:

Enter the poster child, pitiable and helpless. Enter the celebrity spokesperson, saving the day. Enter cost-burden analyses. Enter pithy quips about the meaning of life and humanity (of which disability and disabled people do not take part). Enter the sad music. Enter the cure, the elusive cure, please fund the cure. Did we mention the cure?

The rhetoric of the telethon denies the humanity and agency of disabled people, all the while reifying the prowess and kindliness of the presumably able-bodied.

In popular discourse on disability, hacking often resembles one of the following motifs:

Hacking as passing.

Hacking as fixing.

Hacking as retrofitting.

These ideas about hacking share a focus on the normalization of bodies. That is, they emphasize fixing, curing, and rehabilitating people, all in the name of normalcy (2014: no pagination).

What Yergeau points out here is how the organised breaking-of-the-rules is still using (with words from Audre Lorde) the master’s tools to dismantle the master’s house. The breaking of rules, becoming inaccessible for the breakers who break through failing to follow, turns into a new kind of winning, reinforcing the game and the competition and again turning the world into something one needs to fight and to beat. Resistance within this context also needs to obey the Rules, the Rules that have inverted the Rules by defining themselves as de-Rules, and I wonder: Can we move next to can we know the difference between obeying and breaking, did we ever have a choice in this wor(l)d with this trouble that we need to (using the words from Donna Haraway) stay in, were we ever a we or were we ever not a we, can the movement move in unexpected ways, is the doom of failing a possibility for another kind of resistance?

I think about the hack (the noun might also refer to: a riding-horse, a taxi, a raven; the verb, mutilation, cutting, renting; the adjective, commonplace / the Swedish word ‘hack’ is one that I usually use to refer to a gap, an opening, into something rigid, quite often, time). A friend of mine argues for biohacking (a kind of diet-ish method) as a way of being with their ADHD, as a diagnosed anorexic I never know when my unfollowing of recommendations regarding eating is hacking the medical institution that totally fucked up my feelings for food by not recognising how eating disorders are not always based on toxic femininity but on trans-gendering and neuroqueering. I think of hacking diagnostic manuals, by following too well, too much, too poetically. I think about the art world which I try to inhabit and how its scepticism towards diagnoses makes my reality as dependent on being diagnosed as autistic for my survival in this world invisible. I think of failing as the only possibility. I think of fucking the fuckers. I think of un-thinking every thought I ever thought.

Yergeau (2014) writes:

What we need, then, is a criptastic reclamation of hacking. A criptastic version of hacking is one that rails against forced normalisation, one that moves from body-tweaking to something collective, activist, and systemic.

… that subvert, dismantle, question, and reinvent many of our archly held notions about what hacking is and what social justice is and what it means to be human. When activists make claims about ‘hacking,’ they’re suggesting we engage in activist work that goes against some kind of institutional grain. There is resistance and tinkering involved in any act of hacking. Hackers are makers (and sometimes breakers) (2014: no pagination).

And I think about following, and choices, and humanity and making. And I wonder again: can we know the difference between obeying and breaking, did we ever have a choice in this wor(l)d with this trouble that we need to stay in, were we ever a we, or were we ever not a we, can the movement move in unexpected ways, is the doom of failing a possibility for another kind of resistance?

Knowledge

For some reason, I have a strong need to refer to and quote some passages from the musical Wicked (2003), which tells the story of the Wicked Witch from The Wizard of Oz (as a teenager my special interest was shoes, and I think what happened with me when being with/in the shoe-world is a parallel to Judy Garland’s world-space-time-travel with the Ruby Slippers, there is something magically ritualistic in the stimming quality of clicking the heels, there is something deeply autistic in the essential relationship between human and thing, there are no limits, there is some sense of home/less/ness, there is something with the empathy (problem), there is something here)It is a story of antagonism and sociality. There is a thing called CADD:

Cassandra Affective Deprivation Disorder (CADD) is a trauma-based folk disorder embraced by neurotypical NT advocacy groups. CADD is caused, such groups claim, by having a romantic relationship with an autistic person … a condition of depression and ill health that comes from the isolation and loneliness of knowing the truth about something or someone, experiencing that truth, but not being believed (Yergeau 2020: 212).

CADD is the telling of a toxic autism and how being in a relationship with the toxic autistic makes people depressed. It is telling of something wicked, which is: autism. When reading about CADD I recognise the rhetoric’s rhetoric, and I remember me embracing the rhetoric, the telling of me as a toxic, selfish, attention seeking, difficult, sick, mad, tragic, wicked person. As a threat against everyone I love and the whole society. Maybe that is why I feel a connection to the Wicked Witch. In the musical (partly set in a school!), they sing:

And Goodness knows
The Wicked’s lives are lonely
Goodness knows
The Wicked die alone
It just shows when you’re Wicked
You’re left only
On your own (Schwartz 1995)

What I sense here, is the working of definitions: Good and Bad. But also, the telling of a struggle, a fight, a winning, a game.

What does this have to do with Knowledge? Everything. As, amongst others, feminist, anti-colonialist, queer and Marxist research and activism have shown, the rendering of knowledge is never neutral. The teaching and teachers are never neutral but merged with, oppressed by, nurtured by, structures of power, yes yes, and being in the system does something, makes something, hurt. It feels like being in a war. Feels like the need to embrace the war as the only way of telling oneself. Because I was already told as a war. The war game is a common genre, but every kind of game has a war inside, in the struggle for winning. In definition of oppositions, antagonisms, against against against. There is nothing innocent in the playing, as there is not in the writing, the telling, the listening, the caring. In an e-mail to a friend, not autistic but living with autoimmune disease and social phobia, I write:

On the Becoming and war-inside:

When being diagnosed with anorexia I was constantly told my actions where not My Actions, it was the Sickness Acting/Speaking. That made me feel 1: what feels like me/my action/my feelings-thoughts/my body—they say it’s not me—there is an enemy inside, but I don’t feel the presence of someone else, I am my enemy… 2: the ‘I’ that I don’t feel, who is that? A strange thing that they say is there, or what? 3: I feel (at least) like 2—I, and not-I, the healthy-I, that they were talking about, and the sick-I that just hurts itself.

Doctors, and parents, talked about (Swedish) ‘mitt friska jag,’ My Healthy/Well I. frisk-fisk. The misspelling spoke more to me than the well-being (the being here as a being, a thing/creature) that I did not understand and that just made me cry…

So, by this I mean: I recognise the metaphor of war.

It also have similarities with the rhetoric about autism: the discussion of ‘people with autism’ vs ‘autistic people/autistics/autists:’ when (non-autistic people, mostly but not only) want to separate the person from the autism.

I think, when living as aut (or whatever this can be called) it’s not really possible (at least that’s my feeling) to really do this separation, and yet, it is also impossible to ignore the medical words, the medical discourse (because it acts on physical, mental, economic, social—etc—levels) so the feeling is: STRANGE. And it can never stop, never just BE, it stays a becoming-process working in different directions always struggling, windling, tracing, following, loooosing, finding, folding, unfolding, edging, failing, falling, bubbling (just trying out words here, some of which I’m not completely sure the meaning of!)

I think what I wanted to share with them (and with you, Dear Reader) is the experience of being explained to myself as my own enemy. I need to fight myself. My self is my enemy. To win the game, I need to lose myself and succeed in creating a new and true self, because the old one is bad, wicked. They tell me so. Because they know, because I don’t know, because my Knowledge, is tainted by illness, by autism, by Me.

(INSERT: This is a game and a play and you might find yourself asking: how is this about feminist pedagogies? bell hooks writes:

Who are we teaching and what can we learn from them? What should one learn so that they can challenge injustice in their lived experiences and communities? How can the environment of education help challenge oppressive political structures and cultural norms rather than conform to them? (1994 & 2010)

The places I have visited so far, suggests the player(s) have potentials to be misunderstood (as a war/victim; mute; evil; trauma; to-be-taught) and to be disturbing (as BREAKERS of rules specifically concerning who are teacher/taught). You might find yourself asking: what could this actually mean for the teaching of games more specifically? I want to answer by asking: is it possible to teach methods of silencing in order to listen to Other Strangers? I want to answer by asking: what is the game that is taught and who is the gamer, and what could happen if the position of game-gamer switched and leaked and reversed?)

Learning

I work as a teacher in literary composition. I work as a writer of plays (the ones staged in theatres) and novels and poetry and essays and academic texts. The words are my worlds. Sometimes, these worlds are strange to me, or I am a stranger in the worlds. I think of the position of the stranger as a possibility. I think of it as a disturbing instance.

In Autistic Disturbances: Theorizing autism poetics from the DSM to Robinson Crusoe (2018) Julia Miele Rodas use the term ‘autism poetics,’ to describe how what has been called ‘language deficits’ can instead be understood as artistic and poetic strategies. The closeness of AUTISTIC/ARTISTIC. In another setting, we write: ‘The autistpoetics uses the pathologization as a party trick.’ (Hjort & Nygren 2022)

Miele Rodas’s autism poetics is not interested in an investigation/reading/poetics that focuses on stories about autism/autistic people. Instead, Miele Rodas’s poetics suggests that autism is in the text itself, in the language and use of language. This is writing autistically, when the language acts in autistic ways; text as subject. This points to the difference between text as subject and writer/reader as subject. In contrast to autism poetics and text as subject, Miele Rodas writes about what can be called ‘autistic motives’ (in reading or writing). Examples of such are autism metaphors (Broderick & Ne’eman 2008) and the author´s representation of literary characters in line with what Stenning has referred to as ‘standard depictions of autistic … deficits’ (2020: 120). This put demands on the reader to be able to do an intertextual reading of the text, reader as subject. As an illustration, Miele Rodas writes about Herman Melville’s Bartleby, the Scrivener: A Story of Wall Street (1853), where Bartleby has been read as autistic by so many people that he has become a literary caricature for autistic people, with the risk of developing a diagnostic loop—i.e. a literary character is read as representative of a specific disability, possibly based on prejudices about this disability, and then becomes a kind of pattern for how readers will understand non-fictional people with the same disability, reducing the autistic voice to a kind of performance (Miele Rodas 2018: 119-120). But she further highlights the possibility of a neuroqueer reading of the same figure, where the silence can instead be understood as resistance or possibility.

Within queer literary studies the word ‘leakage’ is used to describe how the queerness of a text might leak out of a story that on the surface seems to be heteronormative (Rosenberg 2011: 117-125). The leakages might refer to motives or tendencies, nuances in relationships—but in our way of using the term; neuroqueer leakages—we also refer to how language itself has never been neurotypical. Language has been used to do violence against neurodivergent people, against us, but within the violence, we suggest, is also a language that resists itself, that is squirming and bending and hacking. Thus, a neuroqueer reading also undermines the violence, turning it against the abusers (and suggesting the abuser-abused-distinction is also porous and perverse and tickling), saying: ‘so you think you say this, well actually language says this, too.’

Teaching literary composition means working with language and learning in a way that suggests language is like a being, a thing that is important, not a tool but also a tool, not communication but also communication, a thing that cannot be explained. In another context, i.e. not an artistic writing context, but a context where writing is an academic discipline and a pedagogical tool (and goal), Tomlinson & Newman (2017) have studied neurodivergent writing practices and found:

The participants provided substantial commentary on techniques they use when writing, which instructors and employers might use to create welcoming spaces for all writers. The first response category involved games the writers play. This grouping included mind games and organisational tools. One respondent suggested, ‘Play the ‘So What?’ game: remove any comments which you cannot justify including in the text.’ Two noted particular ways of conceptualising language: ‘think only in the language you are writing the text in,’ and ‘view writing for different audiences sort of like writing in various foreign languages.’ (2017: 100)

Here, the act of writing is understood through the concept of playing games. The games are tools for handling the writing situation. The games are also a borderland between languages, which compares the game and the translation (and also works with the concept of a strange of foreign thing within language).

In Taxonomy of Educational Objectives (1956) Benjamin Bloom describes a group of psychologists’ enthusiasm for finding a common language and a common method for evaluating educational progress. They work with ‘human behaviour,’ they work with ‘tests,’ ‘specification,’ ‘classification’ (1965: 5). Learning here, here is viewed as a thing that happens on different levels or stages, and it is a thing with progression. Like levels in a game. It is written as a very ‘human’ thing, concerned with ‘human experience.’ There is something with the ordering that satisfies me while it also frightens. I think of how I usually apply a kind of compulsory analysing of the world of these human beings and experiences, trying to make it comprehensible. Are this group of Bloom’s doing the same? There is a feeling though that they are doing this not in order to survive, which is my neurodivergent intention for the compulsory analysing, but in order to order and sort of rule. I am frightened because of the rules, determining the levels of learning through a hierarchical structure. I feel I will fail. And then, I am the teacher… I feel that I need to play the game (play as in play a trick, i.e. deceive—as in doing it to the game, instead of complying: is that possible?)

I think of the teaching position as an ambiguous movement, depending on who takes the different roles of teacher and student, and who wants to teach and learn and I think of the different orientations and the intentions and I feel the confusion and the anger mixing, landing then in:

Fail

I read about the term GLITCH. Jenny Sundén reads trans/femininity through the concept of glitch, like this:

Technologies always implicate their own failures, breakdowns, and glitches. The purpose [here] is to develop an understanding of gender in general—and femininity in particular—as something fundamentally technological, and, as such, broken. … In particular, the term ‘glitch’ is put to use to account for machinic failures in gender within the digital domain. … Glitch signals the slipperiness of something or someone off balance and a loss of control. It usually refers to a sudden unexpected event, a surge of current or an illegitimate signal that breaks the flow of energy, information, and affect. Glitch is, fundamentally, a struggle with binary code. … On this side of glitch, the tendency is toward hesitation and anticipation, irritation and annoyance, as well as pain and anxiety in the face of technologies and bodies that skip, crash, or get stuck (Sundén 2016: 44-45, comp. Virilio 2005, Haraway 1991, Barad 2003, 2007, Braidotti 2006, Hayles 1999, de Lauretis 1989).

If I understand it right, the Glitch is a way of failing that makes ‘sense’ (or makes sensory things), that is resisting and meaningful and productive, while also playing with the concepts of ‘meaningful’ ‘resisting’ ‘productive.’ It is a way of being next-to a game and a translation and a taxonomy. And the glitch is not something that enters, because it was already there.

I think of glitching the game or the game as a glitch. I think of a game with the intention to glitch and how it could work, as a thing I am already doing:

The childhood games, thinking of the world as a game in order to survive, imagining. I try to narrate myself as a game and a play and a glitch with myself that calls for ‘the dissolution of all thought; whether the introduction of play within thought did not systematically depart from the possibilities of knowledge, of understanding’ (Bataille 2018: 233), and not just dissolution of thought but of I and of game and of narrative and of…

The End

In the call for this issue, I read:

We use the concept [pedagogy] to apply broadly across all aspects of education from the classroom to institutional and political levels. This special issue is positioned to highlight feminist teaching work that is ongoing, in progress, and envisioned for the future of the field. … The dominant method of teaching of games is focused on skills and tends to adopt and foster an ‘apolitical’ stance towards games … Yet, this purported neutrality is still a political stance that habituates students to neoliberal and individualistic mindsets. These dominant structures have power, and even in the case of teachers who want to apply feminist pedagogies in games, the learning curve presents a high obstacle to really know how to implement these things. […] Feminist pedagogies ask critical questions about education such as ‘Who are we teaching and what can we learn from them? What should one learn so that they can challenge injustice in their lived experiences and communities? How can the environment of education help challenge oppressive political structures and cultural norms rather than conform to them?’ (bell hooks 1994 & 2010).

From this, my intention with this essay was to:

explore the potential of neurodivergent and neuroqueer perspectives on 1, play/games and 2, education. George Bataille discusses whether ‘play could essentially amount to the dissolution of all thought; whether the introduction of play within thought did not systematically depart from the possibilities of knowledge, of understanding’ (Bataille 2018). I propose an exploration of literary and experienced worlds as neuroqueerly understood through the concepts of play and games, and how these experiences can be used within pedagogy, and try to map out an understanding of a neurodivergent world view through an overlapping of the concepts of games, play, pleasure, thought and feeling.

I tried to do this. The design for this essay is a failed one, perhaps intentionally failed, perhaps not. It is the search for different rules or collectives in texts or things things things that helps me move in the world. I write in anger:

PLAYING THE NT AUTISM GAME ASKS YOU TO DEFINE YOURSELF AS YOUR ENEMY THE CONCEPT IS SIMPLE SOMEONE WHO I NOT-YOU KNOW YOU KNOW THE RULES OF YOUR SO-CALLED-LIFE KNOW HOW TO FIX AND OVERCOME THE THING CALLED AUTISM (AND HERE, I SUGGEST, YOU CAN ALSO INSERT VARIOUS OTHER KINDS OF SO-CALLED DISABILITIES OR …) TO WIN THE GAME YOU NEED TO BECOME YOU, AND THE TRICK IS YOU DON’T KNOW YOU BECAUSE THIS THING CALLED (AUTISM OR INSERT OTHER) IS SUPPOSED TO BE NOT-YOU. / PLAYING THIS GAME MEANS SOMETIMES USING A RHETORIC OF HACKING. / TO TEACH TO BECOME NT. / THE BORDERS ARE NOT VERY NEATLY CUT THOUGH… PARTLY BECAUSE OF THIS THING CALLED LANGUAGE. MASTERHOUSE & MASTERTOOL… HOW LANGUAGE SHAPE WHAT WE CAN THINK. HOW WE CAN TELL, TO ORGANISE…

And I ask:

HOW IS THIS FEMINIST?

HOW IS THIS PEDAGOGY?

HOW IS THIS…

GAME?

This essay works out of uncertainty and doubt, out of fail and unfail, through the teacher’s role that feels like a student and the wish to be a student (jealous of my students and fear fear fear of failing them, failing me failing to fail), it works with collectives (despite being afraid to plagiarise, and with a constant thought about choosing who to imitate, follow, about theft as a method, about the autistic solitary togetherness) it tries to be a trickster, while afraid of being just lazy and doubting, it is about making up rules to organise, and eating too much text, of being monotropic with texts and therefore failing citation practices (too long quotes), it is about looking for different clues to be able to find a way of being.

I think that is what feminisms do. The try and the try and the try. I think that is what pedagogy perhaps needs so embrace: a kind of undoing, a kind of anarchy, a kind of chaos, the not-yet-imaginable, only present as clues, only graspable through following and un-following and failing and trying and not-knowing, anti-knowing, doubting while simultaneously being completely certain.