Creative disclosures of difference: The crip body in the temporal space of higher education

Abstract

The term ‘crip’ is a contestatory one, being both a fluid and ever-changing term which has been claimed by those people to whom it did not originally refer, for example, those who have mental illness and/or chronic pain, and for those with whom it can now be intertwined, for example, those who identify as queer and crip. Similarly to ‘queer’, ‘crip’, from the word ‘cripple’, is a term which begets change and political action. Critically claiming the term ‘crip’ is to recognise the ethical, epistemic and political responsibilities behind such claims. Crip deconstructs the binary between disabled and able bodies, and how such binaries are brought into existence. Understandings of the crip body are gained through reading queer and feminist theories about the body and understanding that disability is a political category rather than an individual pathology. Feminist theory has long been associated with bridging theory and practice and explorations of the intersections of crip, queer and feminist praxis will explore this further. Disability is experienced in an individual body and resonates through and from a medicalised discursive model. This individual experience of disability constructs disabled bodies as abject and aberrant. The crip body contests this construction, highlighting the systemic social and political statuses that would prefer to frame it this way. Thus, in both the physical and politico/social model, individual bodies are treated with an expectation that familial and medical support will be utilised, rather than increasing social supports or bringing about widespread social change. In contrast, a political/relational model has the ‘problem’ of disability not residing in individuals, but in the temporal and built environment of the university site and in the cultural and social models that require individuals and their friends and family to negotiate such spaces for them. The question is how are norms of embodiment allied with queered understandings of crip and disability? This paper will identify and explore the intersections of queer and crip status in an individual crip body, utilising an autobiographical narrative of disclosure allied with the creative production of poetry. While affirming personal affiliations and identifications with feminist, queer and crip, these terms will nevertheless be critiqued. The politico/medical model of disability theory will be contested by an unpacking of crip theory, with a narrativised, autobiographical focus.