‘radical gleaning’: Doing Prac Crip

Abstract

This article develops what I call ‘prac crip’ as an innovative methodology to perform on the page the scholarly realities of working, living and writing with the disability of repetitive strain injury. Prac crip is a prac crit of crips that complicates liberatory crip criticism. It shows how repetitive strain injury changes an approach to practical criticism, but also, by association with ‘crit’, how practices of practical criticism with repetitive strain injury shift some key uses of the ‘crip’. Critical of this mode of cripping as well as cripical, prac crip demonstrates the emancipatory limits of practising crip criticism for those crips the work also hurts in the act.Peter Larkin’s fascination with gleaning runs parallel to the rise of lean. To glean and its derivatives have a ‘distinctive presence’ in his lexis from Pastoral Advert (1988) to Seven Leaf Sermons (2018), a thirty-year period during which lean management has become increasingly global. The article traces through Larkin the eco-politically crucial relationships between the common right of gathering after harvest known as gleaning, historically, a practice for disabled people; the gesture of leaning; and the genealogy of global lean management technologies in the packing of lean meat. The essay explores how disability is an integral part of how its readings are produced, as well as addressing the predicament that work-related upper limb disorders, which are driven by lean managed environments, continue to be driven by writing against lean managed environments.