Crip teleportation: the animal that therefore I am—or I am not

Abstract

This paper examines how disabled body-minds are discursively dehumanized or superhumanized. It draws on Critical Disability Studies and the Crip Studies scholarship and focuses on invisible mental disabilities, mainly those of the neurodiversity spectrum. The efforts of animalization and super-humanization draw on a mechanism that resonates with Parmenides’s Zeno paradox. As the autistic scholar Melanie Yergeau (2018) discusses, a neuroqueer body-mind is always in constant motion, being relocated from one identity category to another, from humanity to animality and vice-versa, subject to an excessively strict rhetoric model. Concomitantly, animals in slaughtering facilities are humanized to make their deaths seem smoother. To short-circuit the models that evaluate how fit human and animal bodies are for the neoliberal guidelines of productivity, the paper also brings Jasbir Puars’s intersectional approach on capacity and debility into the discussion. Keywords: Animal studies. Neurodiversity. Neurodivergence. Crip studies. Demirhetoric.