The violences of disability disclosure and the aberrant possibilities of the crip

Abstract

AbstractThis article delves into the processes of disability disclosure, cripped experiences and a particular theoretical flight with posthuman subjectivity. The article critiques disability disclosure for coercively reifying cripped experiences into normative narratives. Moreover, disclosures determine coercive and performative regimes in educational contexts, where disciplinary power defines possible experiences for cripped folks. Drawing on Foucault's and Butler's works to ground our conversations of reification and coercion, I then pull on and complement Deleuze and Guattari's works to argue that disclosure places the nonsensicality of disability outside conventional determinations of sense, defining the cripped being as nonbeing to maintain the productive boundaries of sense/nonsense. Finally, I play with crippedness that refuses definition and disclosure as a posthuman subjectivity that celebrates fluidity, multiplicity and nonsense. My final section of the article offers a cripped path where the disabled, posthuman subject resists sense‐making and embraces multiplicity, fluidity and nonsensicality as a particularly embodied refusal. This article critically explores the reifying nature of disclosure while envisioning possibilities where crip and posthuman studies converge, promising a shift towards imagining posthuman subjects that honour the nonsensical and multiplicitous nature of cripped experiences that refuse disclosure/definition qua reification, coercion and sense.