Disability Studies and Crip Theory

A review of Crip Genealogies, edited by Mel Y. Chen, Alison Kafer, Eunjung Kim, and Julie Avril Minich, Duke University Press, 2023.

Crip Genealogies is an anthology of texts that claim the pejorative word crip as a moniker to distance themselves from earlier contributions in the field of disability studies. Crip is a diminutive for “cripple” and is used as a slur to designate people with visible forms of disabilities, mostly physical and mobility impairments. It is also a word associated with violence and ghetto culture, as the Crips are one of the largest and most violent associations of street gangs in Los Angeles. Reclaiming crip as a definition of self-identity is a way to return the stigma against the verbal offenders and to express pride in being a member of the disability community. In the academic world, it is also a way to carve a niche for critical disability studies and to express solidarity with non-normative forms of living that may also include queerness and ethnic pride. Symptomatic of this convergence between academic currents and social movements is the proliferation of acronyms to designate minoritarian identities that may be based on sexual orientation and gender identity (LGBTQ+), race and ethnicity (BIPOC, pronounced “bye-pock,” which stands for Black, Indigenous, and people of color), mental health and physical disability (MMINDS, an acronym which stands for Mad, “mentally ill,” neurodivergent, disabled, survivor), or an intersection thereof (SDQTBIPOC, which stands for sick and disabled, queer and trans non-white persons). Most contributors to Crip Genealogies are part of this extensive community and define themselves as queer persons of color, diversely abled, and straddling the line between scholarship and activism. The publication is meant to provide foundational basis for crip theory as a discipline opposed to the apolitical and normative aspects of disability studies and that is “disrupting the established histories and imagined futures of the field.”

Crip ancestors

A genealogy is a history designed to shed light on a person’s origins or a family’s ancestral line. It involves forefathers, ancestors, elders, lineages, progenitors, siblings, cousins, relatives, and descendance. It also build upon myths of origin, narratives of displacement, acts of foundation, coming-of-age stories, acknowledgements of cultural transmission and biological inheritance. In cultural term, a genealogy may include schools of thought, intellectual traditions, disciplinary boundaries, seminal texts, and anthologies or primers. Part of the motivation of many contributors to this volume is to palliate the lack of ancestors and role models they can turn to when they try to ground their scholarly and activist practices. “Where are our queer elders?”, ponder two activists during a panel discussion in which they are asked to name their “crip ancestors.” The lack of obvious answers (beyond the figures of Frida Kahlo, Audre Lorde, and Gloria Anzaldúa) leads them to reflect on “the conditions that will allow disabled QTBIPOC elderhood to flourish,” some of which having to do with the avoidance of premature death, social exhaustion, cultivated marginality, and academic bickering. But the main responsibility for the invisibility of the crip queer-of-color subject falls on the cultivated whiteness of disability studies as an academic discipline and of disability rights as a social movement. According to Sami Schalk, “the early disability rights movement was often very white, middle-class, and single-issue focused.” Leslie Frye considers “how investments in whiteness that underwrite US disability rights have been obscured and where the traces of this movement’s racial legacy lie.” Investments in “making the cripple visible” led to the invisibilization of race, gender, sexuality, and all the other axes of individual or collective identity. The editor’s intention is therefore to underscore “not only the whiteness of the field but also the way in which it both stays white and perpetuates whiteness.” 

Histories of social movements often involve a succession of “waves” or the passing of the baton from one cause to the other. One refers to “third-wave feminism” or the “third wave of the civil rights movement” to describe the succession of challenges that feminism or the fight against racial discrimination had to face, in a linear progression that goes from oppression and alienation to self-determination and enlightenment. Likewise, the fight for disability rights seems like the logical next step once “we’ve done race/gender/sexuality.” The temporality of disability studies charts a progression from self-awareness and nascent identity to the mobilization for equal access and equal treatment, then the affirmation of pride and visibility, culminating in the disability justice movement and crip theory. It is believed that recognizing disability history will inspire persons with disabilities to feel a greater sense of pride, reduce harassment and bullying, and help keep students with disabilities in schools or universities. The authors reject such genealogies built around change, progress, and modernity. They refuse to engage in celebratory commemorations of disabled people’s advancement punctuated by legislative victories, from the Rehabilitation Act of 1973 to the Education for All Handicapped Children Act of 1975, the Americans with Disabilities Act in 1990, and the Affordable Care Act of 2010. They are critical of the term “genealogy” itself, which creates “the illusion of descent as a line,” or of metaphors of genealogical trees, epistemological roots, native soil, and disciplinary fields, which inscribe “colonial temporalities and spatialities into our conceptions of scholarship.” ”Even the rhizome can be colonial,” they note in the introduction. Their ambition is to build “epistemologies of radicalized disability that do not comply with compulsory improvement, personal initiative, and change on the way to a good life.” The mixed genealogies they call forth need to “stay with the trouble” and nurture crip theory’s revolutionary potential: “crip disrupts convention and undermines social norms.” Not unlike what the deinstitutionalization movement did for people locked up in hospital wards and collective homes, crip genealogies deconstruct all aspects of institutions. 

A new wave of deinstitutionalization

Deinstitutionalization is a political and a social process which provides for the shift from institutional care and other isolating and segregating settings to independent living. The Independent Living philosophy is based on the assumption that people with disabilities should have the same civil rights, options, and control over choices in their own lives, as do people without disabilities. Crip Genealogies advocates a new wave of deinstitutionalization. The institutions under consideration are mostly academic: the authors grapple with the place of disability studies, and of crip theory as a nascent discipline, within the space of the North American university. The university’s dependency on diversity and inclusiveness is something both to be valued and criticized: according to Mel Y. Chen, “disability can confer a selective entitlement, or reveal an interior hierarchization.” Some forms of behaviors or modes of teaching and learning are valued over others: “in the university, agitated gesture—whether in the form of politically legible protest, aggressive physicality, or movement (including stillness or slowness) inopportune to class habitus—has no proper home, save perhaps in the possibilities of dance training or intramural sport.” For scholars coming from abroad, such as Eunjung Kim, “the institutional legitimacy in US academia came with a price, as it valued certain kinds of writing and thinking over others.” The unmarked human who embodies all scholarly virtues and properties continues to be “white, non disabled, masculine, ‘functionally’ social, and creditable.” “Academia, ableist to its core, rejects disability in its love for abilities.” The result, for scholars who don’t fit, is a feeling that they don’t really belong. This feeling is shared by the four editors: ”as the four of us worked together, we all confessed feelings of inadequacy to each other.” The “academic impostor syndrome” noted by Julie Avril Minich combines with a “disability impostor syndrome”: “I know I am not the only disability scholar to feel, constantly and simultaneously, both not academic enough and not crip enough.” But in the end, writes Alison Kafer, “we owe our loyalties to people, not to institutions.”

The authors are also critical of the disability rights movement as it has been institutionalized. Focusing its demands on self-determination, legal rights, and non-discrimination, the disability rights movement led to the advancement of disabled people who were considered as “good citizens” (white, heterosexual, and affluent) at the expense of others (non-white, queer, and poor). Nor did it question the fact that belonging to the working class or to an ethnic minority are factors that promote disabilities: precariousness, which affects a large part of these categories, is one of the main causes of disability because it comes with degraded, even dangerous living conditions and limited access to healthcare. People of color and queer people of color are often confronted with stigmatizing diagnoses of disability, such as “mental retardation” or “gender identity disorder,” whereas white people tend to receive less negatively connoted diagnoses, such as “attention-deficit hyperactivity disorder” (ADHD) or “gender dysphoria.” Historically, pejorative labels were often used by public authorities with a view to disqualifying immigrants, African-Americans, the poor, but also women whose “debility” was a major argument for sterilization (including white women whose behavior corrupted whiteness). This explains why minority rights movements have often perceived the need to distance themselves from disability in order to avoid being further stigmatized, involuntarily contributing to making queer people-of-color with disabilities invisible (this is by no means general: Sami Schalk claims the Black Panther Party has been an early supporter of disability rights.) It is this invisibilization that the disability justice movement tries to repair, by taking a close interest in intersectionality and also in mental disorders, which are also marginalized by the disability rights movement. For Tari Young-Jung Na, writing from the perspective of South Korea, the deinstitutionalization movement must expand into a movement for the liberation of nonnormative beings in society, including transgender people, sex workers, people living with HIV/AIDS, and other victims of “incarceration without walls.”

Decentering disability

The editors of Crip Genealogies made a laudable effort to include perspectives coming from outside the United States. The anthology contains chapters reflecting viewpoints or evidence from South Korea, Palestine, Vietnam, Kenya, the Czech Republic, the Philippines, and Australia. One of the contribution was written in Korean and translated into English, thereby contributing to a distancing from Anglosphere imperialism, although the editors acknowledge they included too few references in languages other than English in their bibliography. The article from South Korea indeed shows that modernity is not always synonymous with the West: in Korea, it came from neighboring Japan, both during the imperial occupation with the isolation of Hansen’s disease patients, and in more recent years with the import of the Independent Living movement through seminars and training. For Jasbir Puar, settler colonialism is very much alive in the West Bank, where a “number of Palestinians are maimed by Israel on a daily basis” and a policy of extreme spatial regulation keeps an entire population in a debilitating chokehold.  The analysis of a dance film, Rhizophora, featuring young patients affected by Agent Orange in a Vietnam Friendship Village, demonstrates “the possibility of queering and cripping chemical kinships that exist as alternatives to normative familial structures.” Faith Njahîra, who lives with muscular dystrophy, discovered late in childhood that she was disabled: growing up in Kenya, she experienced no markers of difference during primary school except remarks about her “walking style” and invocation of “chest problems” to limit participation in physical education. Kateřina Kolářová, who positions herself as a feminist, queer and crip scholar, reminds us that whiteness takes a different value in postsocialist Eastern Europe, where it is reproduced in conjunction with the pathologization of Roma people. Sony Coráñez Bolton uses the concept of “supercrip,” disabled individuals believed to have superior abilities to compensate their impairment, to analyze a novel written in Spanish by mestizo Filipino José Reyes. Mel Y. Chen describes a site-specific work of art by Indigenous Australian artist Fiona Foley installed in the Queensland State Library in Brisbane. Coming back to America, ethnic minority perspectives are offered on Asian Americans whose illness punctuates the myth of the”model minority”; an experimental zine project by a self-identified “queer crip Chicanx/Tejanx single mother” in South Texas; and the activism of the Black Panther Party as a precursor to today’s disability justice movement.

Assembling this edited volume in times of COVID-19 took place under the shadow of home confinement, city lock-downs, overcrowded hospitals, mandated teleworking, and Zoom conferences. For scholars critically engaged with disability studies, there are several lessons to draw from this pandemic. Because COVID-19 is associated with old age, fragility of the immune system, respiratory problems, or other health concerns, there is a worrying tendency to treat the lives of those most at risk as less valuable, as more or less expendable. Triage in hospitals became the most terrifying illustration of the hierarchy of human lives, between lives worthy of living and lives left to die. For Achille Mbembe, to kill or to let live, or “to make live and let die,” are the principal attributes of the sovereign state. As disability studies have shown, many disabled persons already experience a kind of social death. The coronavirus crisis has only provided an infallible justification for this death, making it more physical than social. At the same time, the pandemic situation and the imposed lockdowns made whole populations experience what is in fact only a banal fact of life or a permanent condition for millions of people living with disabilities. Being condemned to stay at home because public space is not accessible, facing shortages of beds and medical equipment in hospitals overloaded with patients, having to rely on social media to maintain a network of friends and relatives: all these situations sound familiar for a part of the population overlooked by public policies. As Jasbir Puar notes, “what has been widely fetishized as ‘pandemic time’ is actually what ‘crip time’ has always been—never on time, waiting out time, needing more time, unable to keep up with time, forced time at home, too long a waiting time.” The rapid development of remote working and videoconference, which has long been requested by people with disabilities to facilitate their participation in the economy and society, shows that a previously unsurmountable challenge becomes suddenly feasible once it is perceived as the only solution to continue to run the country’s economy and allow able-bodied people to carry out their activities. The authors remind us that “texting, now used by everyone, was created as assistive technology for Deaf people.” Likewise, videoconferencing can be considered as a crip technology.

Pertinence and impertinence

I realize my review may fall within “the reductive and extractive citational practices” that the authors criticize in their introduction. Why do I take an interest in crip theory, and why do I think this intellectual endeavor needs to be known beyond a small circle of social activists and academic pundits? Simply put, because of the pertinence of the question it raises, but also on behalf of the impertinence with which it addresses issues of pressing concern. The pertinence, or relevance, of crip theory seems obvious. The question of gender and sexuality, of race and identity, of minorities and rights, are at the center of contemporary debates. As Crip Genealogies makes it clear, the terms “queer” or “crip” are not limited to questions of gender or disability: from the moment we deviate from the norm, we are no longer really “straight” or “fit” even if we are otherwise heterosexual, able-bodied, or white. Disability justice activists, claiming the impossibility to achieve normality, suggest imagining new social configurations, new solidarity movements, a new public sphere which would not base participation in social life on abilities or capacities. The impertinence, or irreverence, of crip theory is just as remarkable. Crip Genealogies is relatively measured in this respect. To the more radically inclined, I recommend the reading of Testo Junkie by the transgender activist and philosopher Paul B. Preciado. Subtitled Sex, Drugs, and Biopolitics in the Pharmacopornographic Era in its English edition, it chronicles the author’s multifaceted and liminal experience taking testosterone and other pharmaceutical drugs as a political and performative act in order to undo all normative categories of gender, health, and ableness. Despite the obvious provocations, there can be something stimulating and positive about a crip theory approach. It allows us to desacralize, if need be, the discourse on disability and ableness, to remind us of its human character – not halfway but through and through. Disability studies share with ableism a number of implicit, unquestioned assumptions about what is “right” or what is “normal.” Crip theory makes fun of these conveniences, it jostles them cheerfully and not without humor. Again, this will not be to everyone’s taste. But that’s no reason not to listen to what crip theory has to tell us about human beings in their embodied and racialized selves, the way gender and ethnicity shape who we are, the forms of injustice that exist in relation to people who do not recognize themselves in the heteronormativity and whiteness inherent in our culture. Crip theory is here to stay, and should be engaged with a positive and open mind.