Perceived Risk
What I anticipate may happen.
Original scholarship · Conceptual framework
Neurocultural Throttling
A Lived-Experience-Informed Framework for Understanding Intersectional Regulation of Neurodivergent Expression
What happens when neurodivergent expression is interpreted through everything else the world already believes about the person expressing it?
Neurocultural Throttling grew from my attempt to understand the calculations that can emerge when neurotype, racialization, identity, interpretation, and power meet in the same room.
Watch · Guided introduction
A way into the framework before the full paper.
This video walks through the question that led to the framework, the scholarship surrounding it, and several of its central distinctions. The full paper goes considerably deeper into the research, limitations, boundaries, positionality, and proposed research agenda.
The question behind the framework
How can the same behavior mean one thing to the person doing it and something very different to the person observing it?
I had language for autistic masking and camouflaging. I had language for racial code-switching, minority stress, intersectionality, and the ways marginalized people learn to navigate environments that were not necessarily designed with them in mind.
What I kept struggling to name was what could happen between those conversations, particularly when neurodivergent expression was not interpreted independently of race, gender, culture, status, or other socially situated identities.
Neurocultural Throttling is my attempt to investigate that space without replacing the concepts that already help us understand it.
The core idea
What is Neurocultural Throttling?
Neurocultural Throttling describes context-responsive regulation of neurodivergent or culturally situated expression when a person anticipates that its meaning or consequence may change because neurotype and another marginalized identity are being interpreted together.
In everyday language
Sometimes we learn that the same behavior can be understood differently depending on who is doing it. Neurocultural Throttling describes some of the adjustments a person may make after learning that their neurodivergence and another marginalized identity can change how their behavior is read.
Evaluative Risk
What observers or institutions can actually be shown to do.
Perceived Latitude
How much room I believe I have.
Granted Latitude
How much room the environment actually gives me.
A boundary that matters
Not another word for masking.
Masking, camouflaging, racial code-switching, identity shifting, minority stress, emotional regulation, and intersectionality already explain important parts of this terrain. Neurocultural Throttling is not an argument that those concepts are wrong or obsolete.
The framework focuses more narrowly on what may happen when neurotype and another marginalized identity shape the meaning of one another's expression, and on the regulation that may follow when a person learns to anticipate that interpretation.
The question shifts
At first
How much should I regulate?
The framework eventually asks
Why has this environment made so much regulation feel necessary?
Who gets more room?
Read the paper
Go deeper than the video can.
The full paper develops the scholarly foundation for the framework, emerging Black autistic research, the distinctions between perceived and evaluative risk and latitude, compensatory effort, limitations, potential organizational misuse, and a proposed research agenda.
Important boundary
What this framework is not.
Neurocultural Throttling is a lived-experience-informed conceptual framework and scholarly synthesis. It is not a diagnosis, a validated psychological mechanism, an employee assessment, or a method for teaching marginalized neurodivergent people to regulate themselves more effectively.
Where this goes next
The language is intentionally provisional.
Its value will depend not simply on whether the theory makes intellectual sense, but whether racialized and otherwise marginalized neurodivergent people recognize the experience it attempts to describe, challenge it, refine it, or ultimately prefer different language.