Feminist, Queer, Crip

by Alison Kafer

My future, she felt, should be spent not researching disability but overcoming it.

If disability is conceptualized as a terrible unending tragedy, then any future that includes disability can only be a future to avoid. A better future, in other words, is one that excludes disability and disabled bodies; indeed, it is the very absence of disability that signals this better future. The presence of disability, then, signals something else: a future that bears too many traces of the ills of the present to be desirable.

I argue that disability is disavowed in these futures in two ways: first, the value of a future that includes disabled people goes unrecognized, while the value of a disability-free future is seen as self-evident; and second, the political nature of disability, namely its position as a category to be contested and debated, goes unacknowledged.

What Feminist, Queer, Crip offers is a politics of crip futurity, an insistence on thinking these imagined futures—and hence, these lived presents—differently.

The medical model of disability frames atypical bodies and minds as deviant, pathological, and defective, best understood and addressed in medical terms.

In the alternative perspective, which I call the political/relational model, the problem of disability no longer resides in the minds or bodies of individuals but in built environments and social patterns that exclude or stigmatize particular kinds of bodies, minds, and ways of being.

Under a political/relational model of disability, however, the problem of disability is located in inaccessible buildings, discriminatory attitudes, and ideological systems that attribute normalcy and

deviance to particular minds and bodies. The problem of disability is solved not through medical intervention or surgical normalization but through social change and political transformation.

it recognizes instead that medical representations, diagnoses, and treatments of bodily variation are imbued with ideological biases about what constitutes normalcy and deviance. In so doing, it recognizes the possibility of simultaneously desiring to be cured of chronic pain and to be identified and allied with disabled people.

Moreover, not only does disability exist in relation to able-bodiedness/able-mindedness, such that disabled and abled form a constitutive binary, but also, to move to a different register of analysis, disability is experienced in and through relationships; it does not occur in isolation. My choice of a relational model of disability is intended to speak to this reality.

My goal is to contextualize, historically and politically, the meanings typically attributed to disability, thereby positioning “disability” as a set of practices and associations that can be critiqued, contested, and transformed.

Disability can then be understood, in Jasbir Puar's framework, as an assemblage, where “[c]ategories—race, gender, sexuality [and, I would add, disability]—are considered as events, actions, and encounters between bodies, rather

than as simply entities and attributes of subjects.”32

Claiming crip, then, can be a way of acknowledging that we all have bodies and minds with shifting abilities, and wrestling with the political meanings and histories of such shifts.

The medical field in particular has a long tradition of describing disability in reference to time.

Operating on crip time, then, might be not only about a slower speed of movement but also about ableist barriers over which one has little to no control; in either case, crip time involves an awareness that disabled people might need more time to accomplish something or to arrive somewhere.8

In offering these questions, my call is not only for disability studies to enter into theoretical discussions about time, temporality, and futurity, but also for us to wrestle with the ways in which “the future” has been deployed in the service of compulsory able-bodiedness and able-mindedness. Ideas about disability and disabled minds/bodies animate many of our collective evocations of the future; in these imaginings, disability too often serves as the agreed-upon limit of our projected futures. This book is about imagining futures and futurity otherwise.

pregnant women whose fetuses have tested “positive” for various conditions are understood as threats to the future: they have failed to guarantee a better future by bringing the right kind of Child into the present.

Disability activists have long railed against a politics of endless deferral that pours economic and cultural resources into “curing” future disabled people (by preventing them from ever coming into existence) while ignoring the needs and experiences of disabled people in the present.22

The immediate future then mixes with the present, as Johnson uses this moment to plan the next and the next and the next. On one level, this kind of scheduling is more a difference in degree than in kind to the planning everyone does, regardless of attendant care. At another level, though, it requires a different orientation to one's body, a foregrounding of physical needs—eating and sleeping and shitting—and the ways in which they shape our days.

For those who live with chronic fatigue or pain, for example, the present moment must often be measured against the moment to come: if I go to this talk now, I will be too tired for that class later; if I want to make that show tomorrow night, I need to stay home today.69 This idea of conserving energy, of anticipating, can be read as queer in that it bucks American ideals of productivity at all costs, of sacrificing one's body for work.

Fat bodies and disabled bodies appear in different temporal frames here, but neither is permitted to exist as part of a desired present or desirable future.

This presumption of loss, one that extends even to people who never “possessed” what they allegedly “lost,” is a symptom of the compulsory able-bodiedness/able-mindedness challenged by disability studies scholars and activists.

Of course, cyborg theory requires an intervention as well, for, far too often, disability functions in cyborg theory—including Haraway's manifesto—solely as an illustration of the cyborg condition. Markedly absent is any kind of critical engagement with disability, any analysis of the material realities of disabled people's interactions with technology. Disabled bodies are simply presented as exemplary, and self-evident, cyborgs, requiring neither analysis nor critique.

Representing the cyborg/disabled person relationship as both seamless and self-evident obscures the facts of these very technologies. In a context in which most disabled people in the United States are un- or underemployed, and in which almost a third of disabled people live below the poverty line, many of these cyborg technologies remain out of reach of the people for whom they are imagined.32 The “cyborg-style iLimb Hand” heralded in the UK Register, for example, costs eighteen thousand dollars, and the price tag leaps higher if we include not only the device itself but the training and maintenance it likely requires.33 The ability to become cyborg is too often economically determined.34