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Paper short abstract

This paper examines how autistic migrants navigate contested narratives of neurodiversity, diagnosis, and self-identification. Drawing on the concept of the borderdweller, it explores how multiplicity enables movement beyond strategic essentialism without abandoning identity-based claims to rights.

Paper long abstract

The neurodiversity movement has successfully shifted autism from a medical pathology into the domain of social identity. However, this shift reveals a critical tension central to this panel: while "strategic essentialism" (Spivak, 1988) remains necessary for accessing resources and legal recognition (Ellis, 2023), it risks replicating the very binaries—neurodivergent versus neurotypical—that the movement seeks to dismantle. This paper investigates how autistic migrants navigate these overdetermined spaces, trapped between the liberating potential of self-identification and the rigid gatekeeping of medical diagnosis (Russell, 2020). Drawing on ethnographic fieldwork and the decolonial frameworks of Anzaldúa and Lugones, I expand the concept of the "Borderdweller" to navigate the impasse of essentialised identities. Unlike static narratives of marginality, the Borderdweller embodies "multiplicity", resisting fixed identity while acknowledging the strategic necessity of political categorization. I integrate this with Walker’s (2021) "neuroqueering", which rejects the pathologization of difference in favour of fluidity and nonconformity. This analysis challenges the ossification of identity politics, arguing that current iterations often conflate "oneness" (solidarity) with "sameness" (homogeneity). By reclaiming the original, intersectional ethos of the Combahee River Collective, I ask: What comes after strategic essentialism? How can the figure of the Borderdweller help us move toward a "politics of identity" (Runswick-Cole, 2014) that secures rights without enforcing new borders of exclusion? This paper ultimately explores how marginalized actors can inhabit identity categories strategically without limiting their horizons to state-defined scripts, offering a pathway to recognize commonality within the context of difference.