The World-Making Potential of Contemporary Crip/Queer Literary and Cultural Production

Abstract

Like “queer,” “crip” has been, historically, a pejorative word that has been reclaimed by the very people it was meant to wound. Derived in English from “cripple,” “crip” has been used as a more radical and defiant word than disability over the past few decades, similar to the ways in which queer has been used by LGBT people. Because of the edginess and defiance of the two reclaimed words, “crip” and “queer” have also been very closely related terms. This chapter will examine some of the processes of contemporary crip/queer cultural and literary production, examining both works that use these terms directly and some of their predecessors that share their outspoken boldness, even if they use somewhat different language. Culture, as Raymond Williams famously suggested, is in one sense about shared values or norms, about “the particular way of life … of a people, a period, a group, or humanity in general.” To suggest, however, that the production of culture or cultures might be somehow “crip” or “queer” (or both) is to imply, perhaps paradoxically, either that particular people, periods, or groups might have characteristics that identify them as crip or queer or that some forms of cultural production, whether tied to identity or not, might generatively de-form or pervert “particular ways of life,” transforming, in potentially world-making ways, that which is normative. In his groundbreaking 1999 memoir Exile and Pride: Disability, Queerness, and Liberation , Eli Clare reflects at length on the generative power of queer and crip as descriptors. In the process, he provides a glimpse of the origins of crip/queer cultural production: Queer , like cripple , is an ironic and serious word I use to describe myself and others in my communities … I adore its defiant external edge, its comfortable internal truth. Queer belongs to me. So does cripple for many of the same reasons. Queer and cripple are cousins: words to shock, words to infuse with pride and self-love, words to resist internalized hatred, words to help forge a politics. They have been gladly chosen – queer by many gay/lesbian/bi/trans people, cripple , or crip , by many disabled people.