QUEERING THE CRIP OR CRIPPING THE QUEER?

Abstract

As the interdisciplinary field of disability studies develops its own theoretical paradigms, it necessarily borrows from various sources. Such borrowing means that disability scholars have not had to reinvent the wheel but have been able to build on the conceptual foundations of identity-based theories that have grown out of other interdisciplinary fields, such as gender studies and critical race studies. But disability studies offers as much to its predecessors as it borrows from them. This essay explores the productive reciprocity between queer theory and disability studies, queer identity and crip identity, queer activism and crip activism.1 Those who claim both identities may be best positioned to illuminate their connections, to pinpoint where queerness and “cripdom” intersect, separate, and coincide. Crip, queer, solo autobiographical performance artists, who explicitly identify themselves as both crip and queer in their work, provide us not only with a verbal articulation of these issues but with an embodied text. The theater scholar Jill Dolan notes that live performance offers a forum for “embodying and enacting new communities of performers and spectators, by actualizing the potential of well-meaning political buttons that two-dimensionally purport to ‘celebrate diversity.’” She reminds us that the theater is a “place to experiment with the production of cultural meanings, on bodies willing to try a range of different significations for spectators willing to read them.”2 The four solo performances that I discuss in this essay—Greg Walloch’s White Disabled Talent, Robert DeFelice’s Crippled, Queer, and Legally Blond(e), Julia Trahan’s Nickels from Heaven, and Terry Galloway’s Out All Night and Lost My Shoes—experiment with the cultural meanings of crip and queer in theory, practice, and representation;