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Neuroqueerness as Fugitive Practice: Reading Against the Grain of Applied Behavioral Analysis Scholarship

In its relatively short lifespan, applied behavioral analysis—the shaping of human behavior through operant conditioning—has risen to a state of eminence in the teaching and treatment of autistic children. This article reads the archive of behaviorist scholarship with and against the grain to two ends. First, I argue that behaviorism is a prevailing form of what gender studies scholar Kyla Schuller terms biophilanthropy, a form of biopolitics in which the technologies of control are rebranded as philanthropic ventures. I use biopolitics to demonstrate how inclusion into the capitalist society marks some (the includable) for life and some (the nonincludable) for (social) death, and some for violence aimed at recuperating the normative future. I use a case study from the corpus of behaviorist scholarship, “Effects of Punishment Procedures on the Self-Stimulatory Behavior of an Autistic Child,” to demonstrate how futurity is leveraged to seduce the teacher into the biopolitical project. My second use of this archive is to engage in a critical rereading of the text, locating moments of embodied resistance by the subject of the experiment. I make critical connections between the overlooked resistances within the archive of behaviorism and place these fugitive practices in continuity with contemporary notions of “neuroqueer(ing)” theorized by autistic scholars and activists.