Feminist, Queer, Crip Quotes

“People with chronic illness, pain, and fatigue have been among the most critical of this aspect of the social model, rightly noting that social and structural changes will do little to make one's joints stop aching or to alleviate back pain. Nor will changes in architecture and attitude heal diabetes or cancer or fatigue. Focusing exclusively on disabling barriers, as a strict social model seems to do, renders pain and fatigue irrelevant to the project of disability politics.”
― Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip

“Of fortune cookies and tarot cards they have no need: my wheelchair, burn scars, and gnarled hands apparently tell them all they need to know. My future is written on my body.”
― Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip

“it becomes obvious that people with disabilities have experiences, by virtue of their disabilities, which non-disabled people do not have, and which are [or can be] sources of knowledge that is not directly accessible to non-disabled people. Some of this knowledge, for example, how to live with a suffering body, would be of enormous practical help to most people…. Much of it would enrich and expand our culture, and some of it has the potential to change our thinking and our ways of life profoundly.”
― Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip

“In the logic of ableism, anyone who can handle such an (allegedly) horrible life must be strong; a lesser man would have given up in despair years ago. Indeed, Reeve's refusal to “give up” is precisely why the FBL selected Reeve for their model of strength; in the “billboard backstories” section of their website, they praise Reeve for trying to “beat paralysis and the spinal cord injuries” rather than “giv[ing] up.” Asserting that Goldberg is successful because of her hard work suggests that other people with dyslexia and learning disabilities who have not met with similar success have simply failed to engage in hard work; unlike Whoopi Goldberg, they are apparently unwilling to devote themselves to success. Similarly, by positioning Weihenmayer's ascent of Everest as a matter of vision, the FBL implies that most blind people, who have not ascended Everest or accomplished equivalently astounding feats, are lacking not only eyesight but vision. The disabled people populating these billboards epitomize the paradoxical figure of the supercrip: supercrips are those disabled figures favored in the media, products of either extremely low expectations (disability by definition means incompetence, so anything a disabled person does, no matter how mundane or banal, merits exaggerated praise) or extremely high expectations (disabled people must accomplish incredibly difficult, and therefore inspiring, tasks to be worthy of nondisabled attention).”
― Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip

“By presenting these concepts as apolitical, the Foundation for a Better Life (FBL) renders them natural, accepted, commonsense, and therefore beyond the scope of debate or discussion. The FBL operates on the assumption that we all know and agree what a better life entails, and what values are necessary to achieve it; there is no need for argument or critique. Representations of disability and illness play a large role in this campaign, with a significant number of billboards praising individuals with disabilities for having the strength of character to “overcome” their disabilities. The depoliticization mandated by these billboards and the FBL itself is made possible through reference to the disabled body; in other words, it is not just that the FBL depoliticizes disability, but that it does so in order to depoliticize all the values featured in its campaign. Indeed, the presence of the disabled body is used to render this campaign not as ideology but as common sense.”
― Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip

“Thinking through crip temporalities and futurities requires, then, a grappling with nostalgia, a recognition of the powerful role nostalgia plays in approaches to the body. Indeed, fears about longevity “under any circumstances”—fears of disability, in other words—are often bound up in a kind of compulsory nostalgia for the lost able mind/body, the nostalgic past mind/body that perhaps never was.”
― Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip

“Futurity has often been framed in curative terms, a time frame that casts disabled people (as) out of time, or as obstacles to the arc of progress. In our disabled state, we are not part of the dominant narratives of progress, but once rehabilitated, normalized, and hopefully cured, we play a starring role: the sign of progress, the proof of development, the triumph over the mind or body.”
― Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip

“How can a trail running shoe with an outer sole designed like a goat's hoof help me avoid compressing my spinal cord into a Slinky® on the side of some unsuspecting conifer, thereby rendering me a drooling, misshapen non-extreme-trail-running husk of my former self, forced to roam the earth in a motorized wheelchair with my name, embossed on one of those cute little license plates you get at carnivals or state fairs, fastened to the back?”
― Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip

“Presenting the cyborg/disability connection in a purely positive light also ignores the fact that, for many people, adaptive technologies can be painful;”
― Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip

“The disabled people populating these billboards epitomize the paradoxical figure of the supercrip: supercrips are those disabled figures favored in the media, products of either extremely low expectations (disability by definition means incompetence, so anything a disabled person does, no matter how mundane or banal, merits exaggerated praise) or extremely high expectations (disabled people must accomplish incredibly difficult, and therefore inspiring, tasks to be worthy of nondisabled attention).”
― Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip

“People with impairments are disabled by their environments; or, to put it differently, impairments aren't disabling, social and architectural barriers are.”
― Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip

“Wearing a blindfold to “experience blindness” is going to do little to teach someone about ableism,”
― Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip

“positioning ableism—not disability—as the obstacle to a good life.”
― Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip

“Those who have been most vocal in imagining my future as ripe with opportunities have been other disabled people, who are themselves resisting negative interpretations of their futures. They tell stories of lives lived fully, and my future, according to them, involves not isolation and pathos but community and possibility: I could write books, teach, travel, love and be loved; I might raise children or become a community organizer or make art; I could engage in activist struggles for the rights of disabled people or get involved in other movements for social justice.”
― Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip

“Impaired people are disabled by their environments”
― Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip

“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 bodies, minds, and ways of being.”
― Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip

“As a wheelchair user, I can easily tell when I have rolled into a poor, undervalued neighborhood: The sidewalk becomes cracked and curb cuts get increasingly precarious or disappear altogether.”
― Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip

“Continuing to accept disability as the reason to keep abortion legal, and casting abortion as the only reasonable choice when dealing with disability, is a narrowing of both abortion rights and the terms of debate. So, too, is the assumption that the meaning of “suffering” or “quality of life” is self-evident and monolithic; rather than using these concepts as if they “obviously” led us to only one conclusion, we could attend instead to their shifts in meanings across different registers, contexts, or bodies/minds.”
― Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip

“Andrea Smith explains that “the pro-life versus pro-choice paradigm reifies and masks the structures of white supremacy and capitalism that undergird the reproductive choices that women make.” As Smith and other activists and scholars detail, the language of choice presents women more as consumers than citizens, opening the door for some women to be cast as bad decision makers and for some choices to be deemed bad or inappropriate. Moreover, the language of choice fails to take into account how different women have different access to different choices; it removes from analysis the conditions under which women and families make decisions about reproduction.”
― Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip

“[O]nly certain kinds of interactions with the environment are recognized as such; swimming in the ocean and wading in mountain streams are more likely to be understood as meaningful ways to interact with water, while running one's fingers under a faucet is not. But why not? The answer lies partly in long-standing assumptions that nature and the environment only exist “out there,” outside of our houses and neighborhoods; the answer lies, too, in long-standing—and even less visible—assumptions that only certain ways of understanding and acting on one's relation to the environment (including other humans) are acceptable. These assumptions have significant material effects. Seeing nature as only “out there,” or faucet water as categorically different from ocean water, makes environmental justice work all the more difficult.”
― Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip

“I have often observed rangers asking hikers what kind of terrain they want, how long they want to hike, and what level of difficulty best suits their needs. As a wheelchair user, however, I am seldom asked these kinds of questions, as if my desired level of difficulty were self-evident.”
― Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip

“It was not just the disabled hikers' presence on the trail that garnered criticism, however, but the very idea that a backcountry cabin would be retrofitted with a wheelchair ramp and accessible bathroom. Challenging the need for the ramp, one reporter asked “why people in wheelchairs could drag themselves up the trail and not drag themselves up the steps to the hut?” If the hikers were able to complete such an arduous hike, in other words, surely they were capable of crawling up the steps to the cabin. This challenge to the appropriateness of the Galehead ramp exemplifies the ways in which nondisabled access is made invisible while disabled access is made hypervisible. Steps are themselves an accommodation, just one made for a different kind of body; as Jill Gravink notes, rather than focus on ramps as being out of place, the reporter could have just as easily focused on stairs, demanding of nondisabled hikers, “Why bother putting steps on the hut at all? Why not drag yourself in through a window?”
― Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip

“A non-ableist cyborg politics refuses to isolate those of us cyborged through illness or disability from other cyborgs. Disabled people, in other words, can no longer be cast as modeling a cyborged existence that nondisabled people have yet to achieve. Such a move only strengthens the abled/disabled binary, suggesting that disabled people are fundamentally and essentially different from nondisabled people. If, as Haraway and others argue, technoculture is pervasive, then disabled people are not alone in the cyborgian realm. Cyborg theory could then turn itself to interrogations, for example, of why the very same technology is alternately described as “assistive” or “time-saving” depending on whether a disabled or nondisabled person is using it. In this framework, “cyborg” becomes an opportunity for exploring or interrogating the abled/disabled binary.”
― Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip

“In the FBL worldview, disabled people thrive not because of civil rights laws and protection from discrimination, but because of their personal integrity, courage, and ability to overcome obstacles.”
― Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip

“This focus on personal responsibility precludes any discussion of social, political, or collective responsibility. There are no billboards touting solidarity, or social change, or community development; none of the images celebrate disparate groups coming together to engage in coalition work. There is no recognition of ableism or discrimination or oppression in these materials, only an insistence that individuals take responsibility for their own successes and failures. As a result, disability is depoliticized, presented as a fact of life requiring determination and courage, not as a system marking some bodies, ways of thinking, and patterns of movement as deviant and unworthy.”
― Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip

“To eliminate disability is to eliminate the possibility of discovering alternative ways of being in the world, to foreclose the possibility of recognizing and valuing our interdependence.”
― Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip

“As illustrated by Woman on the Edge of Time, and as manifested in the furor surrounding McCullough and Duchesneau's reproductive choices, disability is often seen as a difference that has no place in the future. Disability is a problem that must be eliminated, a hindrance to one's future opportunities, a drag on one's quality of life. Speaking directly about the Duchesneau and McCullough case, bioethicist Alta Charo argues, “The question is whether the parents have violated the sacred duty of parenthood, which is to maximize to some reasonable degree the advantages available to their children. I'm loath to say it, but I think it's a shame to set limits on a child's potential.” Similar claims are made in opposition to same-sex parenting; critics argue that children raised in queer households will have a lower quality of life than children raised in heterosexual ones. However, in both of these situations, it is assumed not only that disability and queerness inherently and irreversibly lower one's quality of life but also that there is only one possible understanding of “quality of life” and that everyone knows what “it” is without discussion or elaboration.”
― Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip

“Quality of life” is a familiar refrain in discussions of disability, as the term has often been used as a measure of the worth of disabled people's lives. “Measure” is perhaps too precise a term, as the meaning or criteria of “quality” of life are often taken to be common sense. Many people, regardless of dis/ability, may use the term to examine their own experiences, but disabled people often find their own quality of life described by others as if it were self-evident in their appearance or diagnosis; such discussions almost always include descriptions of the disabled person's (assumed) level of function and pain. Yet accurately evaluating function is not as easy as it might seem. If a disabled person has never been given any kind of adaptive therapy or training, or if someone has no access to adaptive equipment (or only to substandard equipment), then one's function might be much lower than one's ability. Quality of life, then, is affected by one's access to resources and bodies of knowledge rather than a necessary fact of the body/mind. Indeed, descriptions of another's pain and suffering often rely more on assumption than fact, as do presumptions about what level of function is required for a good quality of life.”
― Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip

“We need to be much more vigilant and aware of the risks inherent in touting the importance of family involvement and family care. Too easily, those calls can be reinterpreted to mean that the only care worth supporting is that provided by relatives, inadvertently demonizing and pathologizing the use of paid attendants. This is not to say that family members who provide attendant care for their disabled relatives should not themselves be compensated for their work; indeed, I support consumer-directed attendant services that allow disabled people to hire their own attendants, including family members. But, as Laura Hershey explains, seeing attendant care as something best provided by a family member too easily perpetuates the idea that disability is a private problem concerning the family that has no place in the public sphere. This attitude, in turn, leads to the continued devaluation of caregiving; abysmal wages and working conditions are justified on the basis that family members—almost always women—would be doing this work anyway and therefore any compensation, no matter how meager, is sufficient.”
― Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip

“Living in “prognosis time” is thus a liminal temporality, a casting out of time; rather than a stable, steady progression through the stages of life, time is arrested, stopped. Paradoxically, even as the very notion of “prognosis” sets up the future as known and knowable, futurity itself becomes tenuous, precarious.”
― Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip