PUBLISHED IN FERAL FEMINISMS (ISSN 2292-146X) This study examines how autistic queer and trans communities within US-based English-language digital platforms mobilize collective discourse practices to resist pathologizing narratives and construct alternative frameworks for understanding neuroqueer experience. Neuroqueer, following Walker (2021), designates here both an identity and a critical practice: the active destabilization of normative assumptions about neurological differences, gender, and sexuality through their mutual entanglement. Drawing on neuroqueer theory (Walker and Raymaker 2021; Yergeau 2018), Fricker's (2007) framework of epistemic injustice, and critical discourse analysis (Fairclough 1995) extended through multimodal analysis (Kress and Van Leeuwen 2006), this study analyzed 6,568 Reddit posts and 23,993 community responses across 64 neurodivergent and queer digital communities over a six-month period in 2024. The analysis reveals counter-discursive practices through which neuroqueer communities challenge pathologizing narratives via linguistic reappropriation, the creation of new identity categories, environmental reframing of functional difficulties, and multimodal cultural production. These findings contribute to neuroqueer theory by demonstrating how digital communities perform the "/" between disability studies and gender/queer studies in lived practice, destabilizing categorical boundaries while generating alternative epistemologies that center experiential knowledge over clinical authority through language use.
Emma Machado de Souza (Sat,) studied this question.