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The English countryside in the mid-19th century could be an idyllic retreat. It is breakfast time and you are Charles Dickens, respectable author and exemplar of etiquette, sure that today will be safe and uneventful. Searching the house for your daughters, you also find your overstayed houseguest from Denmark, Hans Christian Andersen – famed author of fairy tales like The Little Mermaid and The Ugly Duckling – face down on the grass, in the middle of a complete meltdown on your lawn, after receiving news of a bad book review. The Victorian era remains the measuring stick for (ostensibly) respectable domesticity, where emotions are repressed and ankles sequestered in attempts at control. Nonetheless, here lies Andersen, actively proving that even great authors were one lawn tantrum away from tearing at this veneer of respectability.
And indeed, Andersen has since been headcanoned, with great enthusiasm, as a 19th-century ‘disaster bi’. A disaster bisexual is less an identity or a diagnosis than a way of reading scenes that spill over. Messy. Earnest. Intensely sincere to the point of social detonation. Seen in modern drama from Bridgerton to Saltburn, they are characterised by living, loving and feeling in a perpetual crescendo, then come to a full stop when they melt down.
The term circulates now as affectionate shorthand, especially online, for people and characters who come in too hot, overshare, and punctuate the resulting social chaos with wit. To the chronically online, Andersen’s correspondence, travels and attachments now read as exasperating yet endearing. But Dickens, that poor man, did not have Tumblr. What he had was a lawn.
As Dickens in 1857, you offer Andersen reassurance. Gentle reason. Perspective. After all, you understand the impact of a bad book review (the criticism of your 1844 novel Martin Chuzzlewit still stings). Nonetheless, your words barely clear the air before Andersen begins to weep. Not quietly. Not briefly. Not in a way that can be absorbed and moved past. A full-throated sob and a heavy stream of tears, earth streaked on his face and shirt. He stays there. The scene does not resolve. The emotional alarm bell keeps ringing, time stretches. Dickens’s daughter Katey stares, struggling to reconcile this sobbing spectacle with her assessment of their Danish guest as ‘a bony bore’. Dickens, the great manager of feeling in fiction, realises, with dawning horror, that he – despite priding himself on being the ‘Inimitable’ – has lost control of the atmosphere entirely.
We have all encountered an Andersen. Some of us have loved one. Some of us have been asked whether we really have the capacity to care for them. Some of us are an Andersen. We could treat Andersen’s collapse as a personality problem: a man who simply felt too much and too openly. But what makes the lawn tantrum intolerable is that the Victorian sense of propriety relied on tightly managed bodies, disciplined masculinity, and a strict division between private interior and public display. These expectations – the norms and scripts that still govern our modern social lives – buy into the fantasy that collapse can be avoided if only the most vulnerable behave better. The question is, when these scripts fail, whose collapse will we tolerate – and how many people will we lose by demanding composure?
The lawn, and situations like it, expose an impasse: what happens when feeling exceeds the social scripts meant to contain it. Neuroqueering – the practice of challenging norms about how bodies, minds and emotions should behave – makes that impasse visible, while neuroqueer excess offers a way to understand what spills beyond those norms.
Seeing Andersen and Dickens through the lens of neuroqueer excess is not an attempt to retrospectively diagnose or categorise them, but to use their scenes of overflow to consider how norms are enforced, resisted, and broken. Neuroqueering, as we use it here, is not an identity to be claimed so much as a verb, a doing.
On Dickens’s lawn, these rules are not theoretical. They show up as expectations: speak proportionately, recover quickly, be gentlemanly. Dickens thus acts not merely as a distressed host but as an enforcer of the Victorian norms that Andersen breaks.
This is where a neuroqueering approach changes the terms of the encounter. Instead of asking why Andersen cannot control himself, it asks why Dickens’s preferred forms of speech, feeling and recovery are treated as natural, proper and morally superior. Scholars such as Nick Walker and M Remi Yergeau examine how these often-invisible rules govern the ways bodies, minds and feelings are permitted to move through the world. Drawing on queer theory and neurodivergent ways of knowing, their work challenges the assumption that acceptable expression must be verbally fluent, emotionally proportionate, reciprocal, and delivered at the correct volume and moment.
Expressed by those on the margins, neuroqueer excess is a demand to be noticed and understood on their own terms
It is from this challenge that we propose the concept of neuroqueer excess. By excess, we do not mean flamboyance alone, nor pathology, nor a failure of self-regulation. Instead, neuroqueer excess is a kind of ‘too muchness’ that emerges when feeling, desire or embodiment refuses to stay within the narrow emotional constraints that society dictates. Unlike camp or queer transgression, neuroqueer excess does not rely on shared codes, irony or legibility; it often fails to be readable at all.
Expressed by those on the margins, it’s a demand to be noticed and understood on their own terms. Those who exist outside established norms of behaviour, dress and mannerisms become hypervisible and surveilled; an example could be effeminate men. Norms like these (for instance, heteronormativity and neuronormativity) can be subverted into an act of disruption and rebellion. Neuroqueer excess provides a way to read these scenes not as personal failures, but as moments where the limits of the social system are exposed.
Andersen’s humiliating and excessive public behaviour subverted 1850s English expectations of masculine restraint, composure and intimacy. Across a very different historical moment, the Australian performance artist Leigh Bowery is a useful parallel. His bold club attire and antics, carried out during the AIDS epidemic in 1980s Britain, troubled a later but no less exacting demand: that queer bodies remain discreet, manageable and quietly grateful for survival. Given that Bowery’s performances included explorations of bodily fluids, simulated birth, outrageous fashions drawn from the grotesque and the aspirational, pushback and containment by institutions was firm and final.
His nightclub, Taboo, was closed after The Mail on Sunday in June 1986 reported widespread drug use there. Later, Bowery’s performance at the Freedom Bar in Soho was reported as pornographic and cancelled by Westminster Council in November 1994. He died of AIDS-related illness five weeks later. It was Bowery’s aesthetic hyperbole – his distorted silhouettes, unapologetic flesh, theatrical filth and refusal of good taste – that proved intolerable because he refused to make himself palatable to those watching.
Seeing Dickens recoil from Andersen, and Britain recoil from Bowery, helps clarify what is at stake in neuroqueer excess across time. Each moment reveals a culture frightened by emotion that refuses to be shepherded back into scripts of propriety, productivity or resilience. Disaster bisexuality simply provides a contemporary name for that old terror: the subject who renders the atmosphere unmanageable. Victorian propriety, AIDS‑era respectability politics, and our present appetite for therapeutic neatness share a common demand: that excess be invisible or else useful. Tracing neuroqueer excess across these moments offers a diagnostic tool, revealing how norms become instruments of oppression, and which bodies and feelings they seek to discipline – on the lawn, in the university, or inside the nightclub.
Dickens was not simply enforcing these norms; he had built his life around them, which explains his discomfort at Andersen’s tantrum on his lawn. Charles John Huffam Dickens was a complicated character, who obsessively sought to control his legacy. Feelings of inferiority had haunted him since childhood, when his father was imprisoned for debt, and ever after Dickens (understandably) worried about money. Over time, as his celebrity as a writer increased, he learned how to control more narratives than those in his novels, selectively editing his life history to provide the illusion of a well-bred gentleman.
In 19th-century England, being a gentleman required more than money; it demanded strict adherence to often-contradictory codes of conduct, wherein family pedigree was also scrutinised. You wouldn’t find Dickens at his exclusive Athenaeum club in London discussing his paternal grandparents’ work in the service industry. No, they were conveniently elided.
Dickens was himself a man of intense emotions, who burned his draft autobiography because he couldn’t bear to recount the trauma of being rejected by his first love. (This painful part of his life was likewise excised. After all, it didn’t align with notions of 19th-century masculinity, which mandated emotional restraint and physical discipline – the so-called English ‘stiff upper lip’.)
Although the public might be secretly pining for scandal, they simultaneously demanded concealment
For an insecure gentleman committed to control, and accustomed to editing out inconvenient truths, Dickens was utterly unprepared for the egregious excess of Andersen’s lawn tantrum – his fellow author’s visceral response to a negative review in the papers. Andersen’s upper lip was quivering and covered in tears – openly exhibiting an ungentlemanly emotional outburst. Dickens’s instinctive response was to contain, quell and return order to his domestic domain. Even his subsequent advice to Andersen (likely intended to reassure) was delivered as a command to repress: ‘Never allow yourself to be upset by the papers …’ Refuse to feel.
Nonetheless, this experience with Andersen foreshadowed the public outrage coming for Dickens the very next year. Given his need for narrative authority, Dickens decided to set the record straight (or, as it turned out, decidedly crooked) when rumours of affairs were swirling amidst his marital breakdown. In June 1858, Dickens published a ‘personal statement’ in The Times, reminding his readers that such rumours were completely false and out of character for him. Unfortunately, the public reacted poorly – the scholar Robert Sawyer suggests that people were perhaps more disturbed by Dickens turning his private issues into public spectacle than by the behaviour itself.
Ironically, Dickens did have a mistress, an actress almost the same age when they met – 18 – as his daughter Katey. He went to great lengths to conceal her because, even though many men had mistresses, it wasn’t something that gentlemen broadcast in polite society. The Victorian veneer of respectability required private matters to remain private. Although the public might be secretly pining for scandal, they simultaneously demanded concealment. This provided a comforting illusion of middle-class Victorian domesticity, where the household functioned as a regulatory machine, grounding respectable society. After all, any unravelling of the domestic sphere would surely send the entirety of England spiralling!
These Victorian anxieties and competing impulses resonate today. At a Coldplay concert in Massachusetts in July 2025, the stadium camera landed on a man with his arms around a woman. The pair were Andy Byron, then chief executive of the data company Astronomer, and Kristin Cabot, its chief people officer. As soon as they realised that their embrace was being projected onto the jumbotron, Byron ducked out of sight and Cabot turned her face away. Coldplay’s Chris Martin joked from the stage that they were either having an affair or were simply very shy. The clip raced across social media, where online detectives identified the pair, investigated their private lives and transformed a few seconds of visible panic into a global morality play about an alleged affair. Both executives subsequently resigned. Yet the fascination lay not simply in what may or may not have happened between them, but in the spectacle of a carefully managed public surface suddenly collapsing. Under today’s norms, public displays of distress threaten to expose the precarious choreography sustaining the fiction that everything is under control.
Back to Andersen’s tantrum on Dickens’s lawn. The problem with the Danish writer’s meltdown is not that he is overwhelmed, nor even that he weeps. It is where this happens. Emotional expression was to be reserved for private spaces, while more public areas required restraint. The lawn bridges these realms – belonging to the domestic sphere, yet publicly visible – carefully designed to be seen and therefore to reflect the moral and emotional discipline of the household within.
A breakdown in a bedroom might be unfortunate but containable. A breakdown on the lawn ruptures the boundary altogether. Perspectives shift uneasily – who is responsible for restoring order? Dickens, as master of the house? Behind the scenes, however, his own household was deteriorating; he would separate from his wife the very next year. We might read Andersen’s meltdown on the lawn as marking the moment when the private secrets of Charles and Catherine Dickens’s home began to seep into public view.
It is tempting to imagine ourselves as more evolved than the Victorians, or more compassionate than Britain at the height of the AIDS crisis. We use gentler language now. We (allegedly) advocate for boundaries rather than etiquette, regulation rather than repression, self‑care rather than self‑command. But these are largely changes in vocabulary, not structure. The underlying demand remains strikingly consistent: that feeling be calibrated, legible, productive and contained. Emotional expression is encouraged, but only when it is proportionate, self‑aware, and oriented toward resolution. Distress must be narrated, not enacted; processed, not performed. Meltdowns are acceptable only in retrospect, rendered tidy through insight and growth. Unresolved or unresolvable excess is still treated as a failure of character.
You almost certainly know someone like this. The one advised to lower their voice. To first calm down. To abstain from mannerisms that are ‘girly’, ‘unladylike’ or ‘weird’. The one whose access to care, work or belonging is conditioned upon composure or obedience. Maybe that person is you.
Excess is not inherently virtuous. It is disruptive, exhausting, sometimes damaging to self and others alike
These norms are to our detriment. Neuroqueer excess is costly and destabilising, but it is also informative. It marks the precise points where our scripts for care, communication and belonging break down.
It is fashionable to treat figures like Andersen or Bowery as delightful radicals, icons of sincerity, or brave affronts to decorum. We must resist this temptation. Excess is not inherently virtuous. It is disruptive, exhausting, sometimes damaging to self and others alike. Andersen, Bowery and Dickens are more complicated than we can do justice to here. None of them emerges from this analysis as a moral exemplar. What they are, instead, are stress tests.
They show us what happens when bodies, affects, desires or ways of communicating exceed what a system can manage. And, crucially, they show us which lives are abandoned when systems fail. Victorian containment scripts did not spare Dickens embarrassment; they contributed to his own scandal. AIDS‑era respectability politics did not merely police aesthetics; they helped determine which queer lives were cared for, treated and mourned, and which were allowed to die amid moralised silence. Bowery’s excess unfolded in a Britain structurally incapable of caring for queer bodies without first demanding obedience, gratitude and discretion.
Our contemporary regimes are no kinder for being therapeutic rather than moral. Today, even with therapeutic discourse, neurodivergent and queer people are still routinely failed by scripts that demand self‑regulation, emotional legibility, resilience narratives, and ‘appropriate’ expression before care will be extended. And those who cannot comply? Like Andersen on the lawn, they become problems to be managed, weirdos to be excluded, and people to rush by in public spaces. Dickens, too, belongs among the failed as a man straining against contradictory societal regimes that lacked healthy emotional outlets. With Andersen, Dickens upheld the norms of his day. Later, the same norms would lead him to a scandalous fall, his missteps converted into public morality tales rather than recognised as the familiar fractures of containment under pressure.
What unites these figures is not heroism, but exposure. They reveal that our systems do not fail accidentally. They fail predictably, repeatably, along familiar lines, for similar people.
Neuroqueer excess teaches us that care cannot rely on scripts of propriety, productivity or emotional neatness. Excess will not always be ethical, enlightening or kind – sometimes, it will be unbearable. But refusing to sit with discomfort, insisting instead on rapid containment, has repeatedly left neurodivergent and queer people without care when it mattered most.
Care, here, is not indulgence. Nor is it discipline. It is something more fragile and demanding: the willingness to remain present when emotions spill past what we know how to manage.
Historically, neurodivergence and queerness were written about by those espousing neither identity, thus displacing the invaluable perspectives of people with lived experience. Recent work of groundbreaking neurodivergent and queer scholars offers the opportunity to redress this gap, seeking to understand people on their own terms. Sometimes referred to as testimonial justice, this emerging realisation requires shifting who speaks, who is listened to, and how we respond when they do. Important work remains, including mourning lost opportunities to empathetically engage with the figures in this essay. Testimonial justice requires us to pause before we interpret, to believe before we correct, and to follow rather than reshape what is being communicated. It requires making space for neurodivergent and queer people to define their own terms, building vocabularies without presuming a deficit, and resisting the impulse to smooth over what feels excessive, contradictory or unfamiliar. Instead, we can respond to excess by sitting alongside the person, resisting the assumption that they are broken, and suppressing our impulse to ‘fix’.
As Dickens, you stifle the instinct for decorum, deciding instead to engage in Andersen’s emotional excess
In other words, we get down on the lawn with Andersen, extending grace without requiring palatability – accepting that we may need to choose comfort within discomfort. Sitting quietly with Andersen, co-regulating on the grass. Engaging with Bowery’s art even amid simulated birth and enema water. The work of care inevitably feels inefficient, unsettling and unresolved – but that does not diminish its importance.
Let us now imagine an alternative lawn.
The same 19th-century morning in the idyllic countryside, and Andersen again undone on the grass, sobbing without measure or end. As Dickens, you stifle the instinct for decorum, deciding instead to engage in Andersen’s emotional excess. Despite still feeling somewhat awkward, you manoeuvre onto the lawn, accidentally leaving a muddy smudge as you pat Andersen’s back. Your friend looks at you, tear-stained and messy, and your initial response is revulsion. Pushing that first feeling away, you instead murmur: ‘It is indeed a most unfortunate review.’
And he replies: ‘I was so proud of it,’ before dissolving into tears again. You are painfully aware of your daughter Katey staring aghast at the scene.
Nothing is resolved. It looks wrong. Yet you stay there together, uncomfortable, and you do not leave. You do not speak over him, or force him inside, or let that moment end your friendship. Grass flattens beneath you both. Mud marks your clothes. The moment remains messy.
Perhaps it’s OK if the lawn is ruined.