Abstract
This article explores the tensions of crip time when it comes to the ways in which chronically pained people (or: people living with chronic pain) move in/through time in both normative and non-normative ways. In exploring how chronic pain develops slowly, and is often accompanied by disbelief and silencing, the paper considers whether crip time can include liminal spaces of becoming chronically pained, including medicalised spaces/times of testing and diagnosis. The paper then considers how pacing, which can be both a rehabilitative normalizing practice and a practice of self-care, is a part of moving through time in ways which can be read as both normative and non-normative. The paper concludes that there are multiple ways of moving through crip time, and multiple ways of living crip lives—which include liminal spaces, and spaces with conflicting understandings.
Highlights
Time is important to how we define much of disability
The drive to engage in and perform pacing relies on disbelief/uncertainty; this paper will look at how pacing, practiced by chronically pained and fatigued people, is both a normative and non-normative way of moving through time, and can be read as both a practice of normalisation-rehabilitation, and a practice of crip self-care
Crip time can be some, or all of: a refusal to embrace a future; a failure to have a future; a failure to move from past to present to future in a straight line or at the required pace; a failure to progress from dependence to normatively-defined independence; a failure to progress through some, or all, developmental stages, at the right pace or in the right order; and/or a failure to ‘do’ gender, sexuality, race, class, age in temporally-dependent ways
Summary
Time is important to how we define much of disability. Crip time is a developing understanding of how disabled bodyminds are orientated in and move in/through time, and how ableist expectations of ‘normal’ orientations and timespans are part of the construction of disability. Crip time can be some, or all of: a refusal to embrace a (non-disabled) future; a failure to have a future; a failure to move from past to present to future in a straight line or at the required pace; a failure to progress from dependence to normatively-defined independence; a failure to progress through some, or all, developmental stages, at the right pace or in the right order; and/or a failure to ‘do’ gender, sexuality, race, class, age in temporally-dependent ways This messy, expansive, vague-but-specific, tension-riddled and contestatory time is ripe for exploration and questioning. In describing and theorising crip time, I seek ways of understanding non-normative ways of being in/through time
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