CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2025
| Author | Mclaren, Matthew |
|---|---|
| Title | Expanding the Neuroqueer Universe: Intersecting ADHD, Gender and Sexuality in the World of Higher Education |
| Summary | Through-out the 2020s, there has been an explosion in public interest and debate surrounding ADHD facilitated through social media platforms such as TikTok, particularly amongst younger generations. Whilst it was previously assumed that Attention-Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (hereafter ADHD) was a mental disorder restricted to white, heterosexual, hyperactive schoolboys, understandings of ADHD have been rapidly expanding since its introduction in the DSM-II originally referred to as hyperkinetic disorder of childhood (APA, 1968), furthermore including women and adults in future revisions. With an increasing number of young people entering university and questioning whether they are neurodivergent, amidst growing public debates surrounding how to understand and classify ADHD, as well as the question of whether ADHD is being over-diagnosed, understanding the complexities of ADHD subjectivities situated within higher education has emerged as an urgent line of sociological inquiry. Such a project is particularly relevant in relation to LGBTQ+ and women students in higher education, who may have previously flown under the radar neurologically speaking during their formative experiences of schooling, and are currently grappling with undiagnosed ADHD, whilst also adjusting to the intense social and academic demands of the university system as a site of transition into adulthood. These recent developments have also coincided with shifting attitudes towards gender and sexuality, and rapidly expanding language to describe varying gender and sexual identities, with younger generations increasingly more likely to identify outside of the cisgender/heterosexual societal norm. Within the contemporary neuroqueer scholarship, there have been numerous studies researching subjectivity on the spectrum, and how autism intersects with constructs of gender and sexuality. However, neuroqueer studies on ADHD subjectivity have been extremely limited. Therefore, I aim to propose a theoretical intervention through analysing ADHD from a neuroqueer perspective to answer the research question ‘How does ADHD subjectivity intersect with gender/sexuality within higher education in the Global North?.’ Framing the university as a site within which the ADHD subject is exposed to novel social, political, and intellectual ideas, symbolically marking the student’s transition into adulthood, I aim to theorise ADHD subjectivities situated within higher education as being socially significant for how the ADHD constructs their sense of self. Taking inspiration from scholarship on queer world-making and the post-structural linguistic turn, I propose the term ‘neuroqueer universe’ to imagine how our understandings of ADHD are constantly expanding, serving as a site of particularly fierce political contestation over how to classify, distinguish and identify ADHD, and what ADHD’s role in society should be. With an increasing number of young people identifying with ADHD, I argue that expanding our understanding of ADHD is a political imperative, in order to combat recent moral panics generated by right-wing elements surrounding over-diagnosis of autism, ADHD and other forms of neurodivergence. Conducting semi-structured interviews with university students identifying with ADHD across a range of gender identities and sexualities, I employ a neuroqueer, post-structural perspective to examine how gender/sexuality intersects with ADHD subjectivity in higher education, which I imagine to be at the frontier of the neuroqueer universe. Imagining ADHD as a discursive performance rather than a mental disorder, I also aim to queer ADHD as a social category, not to dismiss ADHD lived experiences or claim that ADHD is a meaningless and redundant classification, but rather to theorise ADHD as being almost a hyperactive category in itself which constantly fidgets and moves rather than remaining static. Such a conceptualization allows one to politically cherish the expanding nature of ADHD understandings in the neuroqueer universe. |
| Supervisor | Odak, Petar |
| Department | Gender Studies MA |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2025/mclaren_matthew.pdf |
Visit the CEU Library.
© 2007-2025, Central European University