From Queer Theory to Crip Theory

How all analysis can be enriched with a disability lens

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Poster from the Differing Bodyminds – Choreographing New Pathways event. © Sonja Jokiniemi.

There’s one academic field adjacent to queer theory that I’ve neglected to cover in this newsletter – certainly to the detriment of my own analysis – and that’s crip theory. Crip theory is an intervention in and around disability studies and queer theory that aims to highlight the overlap between the two fields, suggesting both an analytic and activist way forward. Robert McRuer’s 2006 book Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability, is one of the foundational texts of this field. 

McRuer’s proposes the concept of compulsory able-bodiedness, which is similar to the queer theory of compulsory heterosexuality. In fact, McRuer argues that the systems of compulsory able-bodiedness and compulsory heterosexuality are intertwined, and that they rely on one another to function. Like compulsory heterosexuality, compulsory able-bodiedness also demands displays (ie. performances) of ability in a way that shores up this pre-ordained system. As McRuer writes, “A system of compulsory able-bodiedness repeatedly demands that people with disabilities embody for others an affirmative answer to the unspoken question, “Yes, but in the end, wouldn’t you rather be more like me?”

Both of these systems function as a part of neoliberalism, which centers on the “unrestricted flow of corporate capital.” Neoliberalism can subsume diversity within it as long as it aligns with the goals of privatization and the growth of the free market. Indeed, as McRuer suggests, “Neoliberalism and the condition of postmodernity, in fact, increasingly need able-bodied, heterosexual subjects who are visible and spectacularly tolerant of queer/disabled existences.” Able-bodied, heterosexual subjects are celebrated for their flexibility, while disabled, queer subjects must merely comply. 

As in queer theory, the term “crip” – shortened from “cripple,” most often used as a slur or a pejorative – can be both a verb and a noun. “To crip” has a similar disruptive emphasis as “to queer.” In her 2003 article “Queer The Crip Or Cripping The Queer?”, Carrie Sandahl writes that “Cripping spins mainstream representations or practices to reveal able-bodied assumptions and exclusionary effects.” Analyzing queer, disabled autobiographical performance, Sandahl makes explicit the connection between the two practices. “Both queering and cripping expose the arbitrary delineation between normal and defective and the negative social ramifications of attempts to homogenize humanity, and both disarm what is painful with wicked humor, including camp.”

This practice is necessarily critical, as McRuer notes, tying crip theory to Judith Butler’s definition of critically queer, as in “working the weakness in the norm.” A critically disabled perspective would similarly resist the demands of compulsory able-bodiedness and call attention to its reductive, exclusionary practices. “I would argue that crip theory (in productive conversations with a range of disabled/queer movements) can continuously invoke, in order to further the crisis, the inadequate resolutions that compulsory heterosexuality and compulsory able-bodiedness offer us,” McRuer puts forth. 

McRuer defines five principles of crip theory. The first is “Claiming disability and a disability identity politics while nonetheless nurturing a necessary contestatory relationship to that identity politics.” The second is “Claiming the queer history of coming out—“out of the closets, into the streets”—while simultaneously talking back to the parent culture.” The third is the demand that “another world is possible,” and that this world is an accessible one. The fourth principle is that any movement that denies the fact that a disabled world is not only possible but desirable needs to be “cripped,” – ie. challenged or subverted.  The fifth is a commitment to interrogating and transforming the sites – material and otherwise – where disability emerges, always with an eye to the not-yet-visualized future. 

Such principles resist the call to normalization, also present in queer theory and a critically queer stance. Both crip theory and queer theory represent a turn away from minority rights-based movements, which in most instances tend to position themselves as “good” subjects and distance themselves from “bad” subjects. McRuer and Sandahl point to the power of resisting both composure and coherency, states of being demanded by compulsory heterosexuality and compulsory able-bodiedness (and certainly within the productivity-focused system of neoliberalism). 

The futures imagined through this resistance are expansive. As McRuer suggests, “An accessible society, according to the best, critically disabled perspectives, is not simply one with ramps and Braille signs on “public” buildings, but one in which our ways of relating to, and depending on, each other have been reconfigured.” 

In Alison Kafer’s 2013 book Feminist, Queer, Crip, she takes an interdisciplinary approach to the title concepts, looking at the future through a novel, multifaceted lens. Kafer refutes the notion that "disability is seen as the sign of no future,” using ideas about environmental and reproductive justice, cyborg theory, and trans theory to populate a vision of a desirable disabled future. Building from McRuer and Sandahl’s configurations of coming out as crip, Kafer describes the process of “crip affiliation,” or “claiming crip,” which involves “a method of imagining multiple futures, positioning ‘crip’ as a desired and desirable location regardless of one’s own embodiment or mental/psychological processes.”

This kind of future is desirable because it dismantles ableism and involves a radical acceptance of our vulnerabilities and inherent dependency on one another. This shift in perspective is far-reaching, and it mirrors what Susan Stryker has said about the utility of transness in radically restructuring how we relate to one another, including how we relate to our rapidly changing planet. 

One of Kafer’s essential interventions in the book is the theory of crip time, which echoes the theory of queer time. Kafer notes that theorists like Lee Edelman and Jack Halberstam implicitly reference disability in their work but do not actually take into account the experiences of disabled folks within their theorizing. “Rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds,” Kafer writes. Kafer defines three aspects of queer time that illustrate its radical potential: “strange temporalities”, “imaginative life strategies”, and “eccentric economic practices.” Crip time is both a refusal of normative practices as well as a process of creativity and imagination. 

The field of crip theory has not been without its controversies. For one, the word “crip,” remains controversial, and there have been debates about whether reclaiming it is helpful or harmful. As Sandahl writes, “We must not forget that even as we appropriate the terms queer and cripple, they retain the taint of their power to injure. This taint provides the fuel for a rearticulation.” Moreover, the question of who can come out as or claim crip is contested. McRuer argues that anyone can come out as crip as a means of political identification and resistance, in part because for most, being able-bodied is only a temporary condition. Kafer broaches the possibility of a more expansive crip identification as well. “Thinking through what nondisabled claims to crip might entail will require exploring whether such claims might be more available, or more imaginable, to some people than others (and on what basis),” she writes. 

To be fair, scholars like Kafer are interested in using crip theory as a foundation for activism, though some claim the field isn’t grounded enough in the material concerns of disabled folks. Whatever your understanding of the relationship between theory and praxis is, crip theory can be a useful intervention within cultural studies more broadly, a field that often explores dis/ability only through metaphor. Indeed, the work I do in this newsletter would greatly benefit from the addition of a crip theory or disability studies lens, something I hope to keep in mind going forward.

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There is a huge amount of crip theory I wasn’t able to get to this week. If you have any favorite pieces of crip theory or disability studies work, I would love to hear about them in the comments. Or feel free to share any other thoughts you have about these fields of study.

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