A lame argument: profoundly disabled embodiment as critical gender politics

Abstract

In this paper I explore how disabled embodiment offers radical theory and practice for gender politics. I use Adrienne Rich’s classic treaties ‘lesbian existence [and] the lesbian continuum’ and Judith Butler’s twenty-first-century queer interrogation of ‘the category of The Human’ to highlight the exclusion of disablement from gender politics despite its radical potential for theory and praxis. Using a crip ethos I not only explore the consequences of this exclusion for disabled people, but also the resultant limitations of able-bodied perception, theory and practice. A crip ethos facilitates politics and practices where disabled embodiment becomes a profound, severe, and radical challenge to normativity in all its aspects, and a vehicle through which to move beyond such restrictive frameworks.