Neuronormativity and capitalism
Notes toward a neurodivergent revolution
by Camilla Donzelli
In recent years, the term neurodivergence has entered public discourse. It appears with increasing frequency in digital spaces and in the language of collectives and movements seeking to broaden their scope of inclusivity. It is also appearing more frequently in clinical settings, where it is often used as a diagnostic label. However, this latter usage is both inaccurate and misleading. Neurodivergence and neurodivergent are terms that emerged outside the medical field with fundamentally different aims from those of clinical classification.
The term neurodivergence was coined in the early 2000s by activist Kassiane Asasumasu to describe individuals whose neurocognitive functioning—which shapes how one perceives reality, thinks, behaves, communicates, and relates to others—deviates from dominant social norms in various ways.
In an expanded definition developed by U.S.-based activist and researcher Nick Walker, neurodivergence functions as an umbrella term. It includes not only innate neurocognitive differences (such as autism, ADHD, or Down syndrome, which are present from birth), but also differences acquired over the course of a person’s life. This means that neurodivergence encompasses a vast spectrum of ways of functioning: from schizophrenia to post-traumatic stress disorder, from dyslexia and dyscalculia to brain injuries or neurological changes resulting, for example, from an accident.
Neurotypicality stands in opposition to neurodivergence. Neurotypical refers to forms of neurocognitive functioning that are considered “normal.” This is not a scientific term either. Being neurotypical does not mean having a standard brain configuration. Rather, it means displaying behaviors, ways of thinking, communicating, and relating to others that align with social norms. Therefore, neurotypicality does not describe an objective condition but rather a position within a social hierarchy: the ability to conform to dominant rules of functioning without excessive friction grants access to a group perceived as superior, and thus privileged.
“I am autistic, ADHD, and dyspraxic, and I claim these identities politically,” said Pompeo Matta, a teacher and neurodivergent activist, speaking to Miccia Mag.
“My autistic traits translate into a certain emotionality, sensitivity, and sensory experience that do not match what is expected of a cisgender, white, heterosexual man. I am perceived as an anomaly.”
In this sense, neurodivergence takes on a political meaning. Neurodivergent individuals fall into a social category that is perceived as different and inferior. Therefore, they are oppressed and marginalized.
This raises an unavoidable question: how and why was the standard of “normality” constructed—the very line that separates neurotypicality from neurodivergence?
Neuronormativity as a political construct
“Even the term ‘normality’ is political: it was created deliberately, and it carries specific ethical and moral standards imposed from above,” Matta explained.
“Productivity is the main yardstick. It is on the basis of how much a person produces that they are deemed compliant or non-compliant, worthy of inclusion or not.”
In Empire of Normality: Neurodiversity and Capitalism, Robert Chapman clearly shows how the idea of normality is neither neutral nor merely descriptive, nor does it belong to any supposed natural order. Rather, it is the product of very specific historical and material conditions.
Before the Industrial Revolution and the consolidation of capitalism as an economic system, production was organised around small family units, whose working rhythms were shaped by the changing seasons. In this context, where life revolved around a domestic ecosystem, everyone contributed according to their capacities. While forms of discrimination rooted in customs, beliefs, and social hierarchies certainly existed, people with cognitive differences or physical impairments could still find a place within the communal production system.
With the rise of industrial societies, however, a model of surveillance emerged—one that was actively constructed to discipline bodies and minds in line with growing productive demands. Through theories and tools developed within the modern human sciences, this model defined and consolidated standards of behaviour and efficiency, which were then elevated to measures of people’s social value.
In the early nineteenth century, Belgian scholar Adolphe Quetelet introduced the figure of the “average man,” a statistical model constructed by aggregating population data. Far from being an innocent description, this prototype was quickly interpreted as a normative ideal—a benchmark for identifying desirable and therefore “healthy” personal traits.
By the mid-nineteenth century, at the height of colonial expansion, British mathematician Francis Galton radicalised this logic by pushing it toward eugenics. If desirable traits exist, he argued, then a hierarchy must also exist between those who possess them and those who do not. It therefore became the responsibility of state authorities to intervene in order to “improve” the population, setting aside those perceived as inferior, undesirable, or defective.
These ideas were later absorbed into psychiatry.
At the beginning of the twentieth century, German psychiatrist Emil Kraepelin proposed a systemization that organized the discipline around fixed categories designed to clearly classify and separate those who aligned with capitalist normality from those who deviated from it.
Diagnoses became administrative tools useful for managing the workforce and determining who was considered “fit” and who was not. Thus, psychiatry became embedded at the heart of the industrial project, cataloging, ordering, and rendering human behavior predictable and “adjustable” in the name of efficiency.
In the following decades, this logic was further solidified with the publication of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) by the American Psychiatric Association. Now in its fifth edition, the DSM remains a key international reference for psychiatric diagnosis. Within its pages, classifications are presented as neutral, scientific, and universal. In reality, however, they have reflected shifting production needs and the social values attached to them over time.
A clear example is homosexuality. In a period of major economic expansion such as the postwar era, it was perceived as a threat to the reproduction of the workforce secured by the heterosexual nuclear family. As a result, it remained classified as a “mental disorder” in the DSM until the late 1980s.
In the current phase, with neoliberalism as the dominant economic model, this evolution has reached its peak. The ideal individual is flexible, high-performing, and constantly self-regulating. Those who cannot sustain this pace are pushed toward self-blame and the compulsive consumption of individualized solutions, ranging from medication to privatized psychotherapy.
Far from having shed its colonial and disciplinary roots, psychiatry continues to function, in many cases, as a social technology that distinguishes between those who are fully integrable into the market and those who are framed as a supposed “cost” and therefore in need of being “fixed.”
Neuronormativity is built upon this long genealogy. It is an ideology that has emerged within the context of capitalist colonial expansion, establishing the existence of a “correct,” hierarchically “superior” way of functioning. Neuronormativity operates as a social grammar that underpins every sphere of life and enforces a constant division of worth between those who can conform and those who cannot.
From the medical model to the neurodiversity paradigm
For generations, every form of neurocognitive difference has been interpreted almost exclusively through the lens of the medical model. This approach is both a product and a tool of capitalist neuronormative logic, and it locates the “problem” within the individual: if a person struggles to communicate, concentrate, work, or regulate their emotions, the issue is considered to be within them, not in the context they inhabit. The question then becomes how to correct the individual, how to reduce the “deficit” so they can function at the system’s pace.
This singular lens has pathologized differences that are not necessarily dysfunctional in and of themselves. They only become so when judged inadequate in relation to a narrow model of functioning built around the needs of capitalism.
The first major shift occurred with the social model of disability, which was developed in the 1970s by the Union of Physically Impaired Against Segregation (UPIAS), a radical activist group based in London. This model is articulated in a document titled Fundamental Principles of Disability and puts forward a simple yet revolutionary claim: people are not disabled by nature but by environments that are not built to accommodate them—workplaces, schools, healthcare systems, and public spaces that are designed around a single type of body and mind.
“It is society, as it is structured, that creates disability,” explained Pompeo Matta. “That’s why it’s more accurate to speak of disablement as a verb. External conditions determine our relationship with the world.”
Within this framework, the first critical reflections began to take shape in the 1990s. Discussions emerging from online communities of autistic activists—who were becoming increasingly aware of their shared condition of structural disadvantage—were initially crystallized by sociologist Judy Singer, to whom the term neurodiversity is commonly attributed. Singer starts from a straightforward intuition: just as biodiversity exists within ecosystems, neurodiversity exists within the human species.
Neurological differences are therefore not anomalies to be fixed, but rather natural variations that are essential to the survival and evolution of the human species.
In the following years, this insight was further developed by neurodivergent activists and theorists, most notably Nick Walker, who expanded the concept of neurodiversity into a fully articulated paradigm. Walker offers a new lens to interpret reality, dismantling the normal/abnormal dichotomy and restoring full legitimacy to the countless ways human minds can be configured and function.
Although the neurodiversity paradigm opposes the medical model, it does not deny the concrete challenges that can come with identifying as neurodivergent—challenges that can be intense, chronic, and disabling, beyond socially imposed barriers. The neurodiversity paradigm instead emphasizes that these difficulties are often amplified by the context and cannot be understood as individual failings or intrinsic deficits.
It is not about denying disability, but about dismantling the mechanisms that turn it into oppression, exclusion, and precarity, holding the system itself accountable.
Beyond inclusion: neurodivergence against capitalism
Around the paradigm of neurodiversity, a movement has emerged that rejects pathological labels, demanding full recognition of different ways of functioning and the construction of a social system capable of accommodating and valuing their specificities.
However, the challenge remains to maintain revolutionary positions that can firmly resist the blows of the capitalist system, which is highly skilled at co-opting even the most radical demands. We see this in the way companies and public institutions increasingly implement so-called inclusion policies: programs that promise to “leverage neurodivergent talent,” often focusing on a selective representation of autism and other neurocognitive differences. The traits deemed valuable are reduced to precision, hyperfocus, and analytical ability, extracted from context and put at the service of productivity. Anything that exceeds these traits—such as fatigue, different rhythms, crises, burnout, and reliance on support networks—is either silenced or treated as an individual problem to be managed privately.
These strategies are harmful because they strip the neurodiversity movement of its political core. Even when they produce immediate improvements, such as greater rights, protections, and accessibility, they primarily benefit neurodivergent people who already occupy relatively privileged positions: white, non-poor, highly educated, and less exposed—or entirely unexposed—to pervasive intersections of disability.
In this way, demands are reduced to concessions: a few individual accommodations, an internal policy, a communication campaign. Space is granted within the system, without challenging the very foundations that are the structural cause of exclusion.
“Fabrizio Acanfora [professor, writer, and neurodivergent activist] talks about the coexistence of differences, where no one includes anyone because no one has the power to include anyone,” Matta explained. “Who decides who includes whom? The concept of inclusion implies power relations. But I don’t want to be included, because I’m already here. We should be able to coexist freely, participating and contributing according to our own characteristics and abilities. It’s not about sitting at the table to negotiate a bit more space—it’s about overturning that table. Destroying in order to rebuild.”
But how can we destroy and rebuild? By forming a united front. In a word: alliance.
The neurodiversity movement is a key ally in collective liberation struggles, as it strikes at the symbolic and material core of power: the idea of normality. A normality presented as objective, natural, neutral, but which in reality is the product of historical, economic, and colonial power relations. Questioning it means exposing the mechanisms that produce oppression, inequality, and discrimination far beyond the field of disability.
In this sense, neurodivergence is not a “niche issue,” but a lens through which we can see how control, selection, and exclusion operate within our societies. The same logic that labels certain bodies and minds as defective or inadequate is the one that marginalizes queer and trans identities, exploits and kills non-white bodies, and treats territories and communities as expendable in the name of profit. It is a logic that measures the value of life in terms of productivity, adaptability, and output.
For this reason, the neurodiversity movement is a natural ally of all movements that share a radical consciousness: liberation is impossible within the boundaries of the status quo. Being recognized, visible, or included in a system that continues to produce exclusion is not enough. The system itself must be challenged.
In this process, the neurodiversity paradigm provides invaluable tools. In attempting to create an environment where diversity can exist and thrive, it forces us to rethink everything built to serve the needs of capitalist productivity: time, dictated by the tyranny of performance; space, compressed and designed to accommodate only “abled” bodies and minds; and relationships, now frayed by the neoliberal myth of individual autonomy.
Imagining a different world is not an abstract exercise. It means envisioning a society in which differences are no longer treated as deviations to be corrected or exceptions to be tolerated, but as a constitutive part of human experience and the social fabric.
A world where everyone can acknowledge their own finitude and their need for others without shame, making interdependence not an individual failure but a shared, everyday practice. In such a world, the rhythms of life would no longer be dictated by the logic of capitalist accumulation, but by the concrete needs of bodies and minds that move, think, learn, and communicate in diverse ways and at different paces.
It would be a world that is perhaps less “efficient,” but infinitely more livable.
And the question is not whether such a world is possible, but how much good it could do—not only for neurodivergent people, but for everyone.
Leggi anche
