Crip Time Research Articles

‘Don’t worry. It’s just the baby blues’: representations of new motherhood in contemporary graphic memoirs

ABSTRACT All bodies are governed by principles of temporality, yet regarding their roles as (potential) mothers, female bodies are kept under particularly strict observation. I argue that comics’ power to offer ‘a more inclusive perspective of medicine’ can be made fruitful to interrogate the impact that implicit temporal regimes that govern pregnancy, birth and the postnatal period have on new mothers. Analysing two autobiographical comics, Teresa Wong’s Dear Scarlet and Lucy Knisley’s Kid Gloves, I examine how Knisley’s struggles with pre-eclampsia and Wong’s postnatal depression turn their time as new mothers into a period of ‘crip time’ in which their chrono-normative time experience is altered. Both artists use different aesthetic means to illustrate experiences that differ from the positive image of an easy birth, swift recovery and blissful postnatal period perpetuated by contemporary discourses. I suggest that the medium of comics is particularly suited to illustrate these shifts in their subjective time experience. My paper explores how Knisley’s and Wong’s graphic narratives create alternative representations of the corporeal experience of the postpartum period, providing a social commentary on the discursive constraints of motherhood and an underrepresented time in women’s lives.

“I’m also prepared to not find me. It's great when I do, but it doesn't hurt if I don't”: crip time and anticipatory erasure for disabled archival users

Using data collected through semi-structured interviews with disabled archival users, this article foregrounds disabled people's relationships with time, specifically to pasts and representations thereof in archival material. It illustrates the ways in which disabled people use their knowledge of how disability is understood—in archives and in society—to anticipate their erasure in archival material. First, focusing on the past, this data illustrates the prevalence of disability stereotypes, tropes, and limited perspectives within the records that document disabled people. Second, in witnessing such representations (or lack thereof), disabled researchers described how they are affectively impacted in the present moment: witnessing the violence of the past is emotionally difficult for many disabled people researching their histories. Third, using past experiences of archival erasure, interviewees described coming to expect and anticipate future absences—anticipation as an affective mode helped them prepare to encounter forms of erasure, to protect themselves against possible harms, and to hope for something different, all of which reflects their experiences of how disability is understood in society. This data reflect the way anticipation is a central facet of crip time—the multiple ways that disabled people experience time, pace, and temporal moments—to show how disabled people feel through multiple temporal landscapes and approach historical and archival representation.

Introduction: The Time Elapsed

The Introduction highlights broad developments within age studies reflected in this issue of 19. Detecting a shift in emphasis away from concern with representations of the old, it explores heuristic forms of attention to the processes of ageing, its meanings, and its biopolitics across the life course. Queer temporalities are a distinct area of critical interest: the non-normative experiences of time generated through narrative attention to non-aligned age perspectives; subjective immersion in the tempos of later life; and — for more radically experimental writers — deliberate departure from age-related ‘realism’ about time. Fruitful connections are opened up here with queer theory, disability studies, and ‘crip time’ theory, admitting allied investments in diversifying expectations for the temporal horizon and subjective experience of living across time. A second area of concentration activates older perspectives and portrays older subjects as representatives of history in ways that lend critical purchase on the present moment. Contributions to the issue show these deployments of old age as ‘anachronism’ serving a wide variety of political agendas. Considering the articles in their historical context of publication, the Covid-19 pandemic, and testing their political claims against the greater visibility it has given to the precariousness of late life, the Introduction predicts an intensification of interest in the activist credentials of age studies, with stronger emphasis to be expected on frameworks of care.

Introduction: Cripistemologies of Crisis

The increasing recognition of critical disability studies as a generative body of work across disciplines is inseparable from a collective need to make sense of ongoing moments of socio-political crisis, emergency, and exceptionality. Theorizations of crip time emergent from lived experiences of disability are critical to the ongoing work of understanding and surviving a chronically debilitating socio-political context. Our current political moment seems to protract states of crisis to such a degree that the very notions of emergency and crisis shift under the weight of their simultaneous seeming banality and urgent ubiquity. “Cripistemologies of Crisis: Emergent Knowledges for the Present” contends that epistemologies of chronicity, illness, and trauma offer indispensable lenses through which to rethink—and care for—our collective present. The essays within “Cripistemologies of Crisis” reframe our understandings of both social and personal crisis, and to explore how crisis and emergency shape the experiences and knowledges of our bodyminds in time and space. In doing so, the authors collectively offer an epistemological toolkit to theorize and survive everyday states of trauma, madness, and illness as the lived impacts of such quotidian and ongoing violence. “Cripistemologies of Crisis” asks, then, what crip futures can be conjured through a centering of experiential, collective, and speculative ways of knowing with/in/through crisis.

After Crip, Crip Afters

What does it mean to be attached to crip? What might such attachments make possible, and what might they foreclose? In this hybrid essay—part scholarly article, part creative nonfiction—the author reflects on the concepts of crip and crip time. In an attempt to mark crip time through form, the essay proceeds across two sets of numbers: the list that comprises the body of the text and the list of endnotes that accompany it. Readers may choose to read the two sets concurrently, following each endnote as it appears, or read the two parts consecutively, so that the endnotes function as a kind of afterword. The essay critiques the reduction of crip time to slowness or extended time, noting how both are often sites of debilitation and violence. Centered on the question of what might come after crip and on the possibilities of crip afters, the essay challenges approaches to disability that presume it has a discrete before and after. How do logics of innocence and punishment undergird such models of disability? And how do such notions then determine who is seen as deserving of care?

Thrice Unseen, Forever on Borrowed Time

Designed to amplify and archive narratives frequently erased in official accounts of faculty life, this article centers a Latina feminist testimonio approach in its personal examination of mentally disabled faculty members and crip time, or the unique temporalities experienced by disabled individuals and the temporal strategies that they purposefully deploy. The analysis specifically focuses on mentally disabled faculty who are multiply marginalized, or those who often go “thrice unseen” within neoliberal US academia. It is framed throughout by a series of personal observations regarding the singular characteristics of crip time as it is lived by the author, herself a mentally disabled faculty member. Building on the scholarship of disability, queer, and ethnic studies scholars, it explores fraught concepts such as the pressure to pass for neurotypical, societal expectations regarding marriage and reproduction, academic collegiality, and the politics of workplace disclosure. The article closes with a consideration of crip time as pandemic time, as it ponders the distinct parallels between temporal existence during a pandemic and a life always lived through crip time, as well as the potential for reimaging time in a post-COVID world.

Reclaiming the Radical Politics of Self-Care

Since 2016, searches for and discussions of self-care in the United States have increased significantly. While authors who identify as people of color and/or queer critique the capitalist co-optation of this term by linking it conceptually to the work of Audre Lorde, engagement with disability remains conspicuously absent all around, given that Lorde’s use of this concept comes from her 1988 essay on cancer, “A Burst of Light.” This article proposes a reclamation of the radical crip, feminist, queer, and racialized roots of self-care offered by Lorde. Using crip-of-color critique, this article argues that a radical politics of self-care is inextricably tied to the lived experiences and temporalities of multiply marginalized disabled people. It attempts to hold the complexity of claiming time for ourselves to slow down, to take care, while also understanding the real urgency of our contemporary moment. This piece thus proposes that, while crip time is often about slowing and adapting models of time and productivity, crip time as a concept is also urgently needed to understand self-care outside of capitalist imperatives.

Introduction

This introduction connects the temporal regimes that disabled people and communities negotiate with the universalization of “crip time” during the COVID-19 pandemic, in full swing at the time of this writing. It discusses the articles and artwork in this special issue in terms of how they express the temporalities lived by disabled subjects both as confining and, potentially, as means of critiquing and transforming the time discipline of late-stage capitalism.

Six Types of Waiting in Berlin, 2017

In Six Types of Waiting in Berlin, Christine Sun Kim’s drawings provide a fascinating constellation of cultural and sensorial experiences with time. Originally from the United States, the artist shares her account of how time (and waiting) is measured differently according to the cities in which she has lived, with each place having its own advantages and drawbacks. While each environment in which one must tediously wait—an immigration office, the health insurance office, the doctor’s office, the bank, an art supplies shop, and the grocery store—is familiar, the subtext of the drawings is how the artist’s relationship with time is also measured by her style of communication. Kim uses American Sign Language and asks questions in a written form using an iPhone on a daily basis as she goes about her chores. “Crip time” is thus also punctuated by the pauses in writing/scrawling questions, in reading, and the creativity involved in ad-lib responding between deaf and non-deaf sensorial modalities.

Reproducing fatness and disability: Risk avoidance and the womb

ABSTRACT This article focuses on neoliberal discourses of health, “obesity,” and disability by analyzing pregnancy biopedagogies, specifically maternal “obesity,” through United States government agencies and public health campaigns warning against fat pregnancy. This discourse constructs fat women as irresponsible mothers and deficient citizens who put their bad habits ahead of their unborn children’s health. Focusing on pre-pregnancy weight essentializes women, reducing them to their reproductive capacities and exposing them to increased state interference in their reproductive choices. Conceptualizing health as risk avoidance seeks a future in which fatness and neurodiversity do not exist. I propose cripping and fattening time as possible remedies for this erasure. Reconceptualizing time allows fat people to live in the present without prescriptive cures to achieve normativity. Fat time and crip time challenge the capitalist logic that the only desirable bodies and minds are lean, intelligent, fast, independent, and productive. Instead, these non-normative temporalities provide a slower and more sprawling experience of time and offer an expansive understanding of what minds and bodies are expected to do and be.

Crip Time in the Medieval Monastery: Cistercian Writers on the Time-Scapes of Infirmity,c. 1150-1250

This article analyses monastic narratives of infirmity through the lens of ‘crip time’, a term that denotes the temporal rhythms associated with and/or made possible by disability. Drawing on twelf...

Bodies of Hope

Hope for persons with disabilities is most often associated with the possibility of cure. When cure is not achievable, there remains a dire lack in our socio-cultural imagination around and construction of hopeful disabled futurity. This paper explores Karl Rahner’s eschatology as a means of both deconstructing narrow visions of curative hope and affirming the presence of theological hope that already exists in the lives of disabled people. Ultimately, this paper argues that “crip time”—the time embodied by persons with disabilities—witnesses to a prophetic relationship with time in its openness to the life-giving possibilities of the absolute future.

"Time is a Great Teacher, but Unfortunately It Kills All Its Pupils": Insights from Psychiatric Service User Engagement.

:In this Foundations article, the authors reflect on the meaning of time through their past work creating novel roles for psychiatric service users to be involved in the education of health professions trainees and faculty. Inspired by music composer Hector Berlioz, the authors explore and critique the ableist, chrononormative temporalities of academia, and medical education. The authors introduce the conception of crip time from critical disability studies and use it to reflect on their experiences of the different temporalities that people bring to service user engagement and other collaborative projects. “Crip time” can help challenge notions of pace and productivity to create a more inclusive space for teachers and learners in health professions education.

A Poetics of Crip Time and Pandemic Time: Arts Education and Disability Justice

A Poetics of Crip Time and Pandemic Time: Arts Education and Disability Justice

Reflections on Advocating for Age-Appropriate Care in B.C.: An Intricate Dance of Crip Time and Governmental Processes


 
 
 What happens when you’re chronically ill and your community supports can no longer care for you at home? In B.C., you go into a long-term care facility, if there are beds available, where the average age of clients is 85. Multiple sclerosis (MS) affects four times more women than men, and many women face these decisions in their thirties and forties. Those who enter long- term care facilities often never leave, and are forced to live in a medicalized environment designed for people twice their age. Advocating for change as a disabled activist requires an intricate dance, weaving in the strands of crip time and the political calendar to achieve change for those who are forced to live in a time that is out of step with their needs and desires.
 
 

Stasis-Maintenance-(Un)productive-Presence: Parenting a Disabled Child as Crip Time

In what follows, I represent and analyze time as "crip time" in the context of parenting a child with disabilities. That is, I seek to challenge, reimagine, and even upend, the normalized structures that often order our lives in time and our expectations of what makes for a meaningful life in the present, and as a result, a desirable, or even possible future. Using Alison Kafer's Feminist, Queer, Crip as a foundation, in four autoethnographic accounts, recounting a typical day in my life with my 15-year-old son, I consider time as Stasis, Maintenance, (Un)productive, and Presence.

Cripping Kairos: The Risky Rhetorical Performance of Autism Disclosure for the College Student

This article draws on qualitative interviews with one autistic student about his experiences accessing higher education, focusing on disability disclosure as a time-based rhetorical practice. I explore how Mike exploits the kairotic dimensions of autism disclosure in risky and contradictory ways to pursue his larger educational goals. Autistic students are often assumed to be unacceptably awkward, incapable of intentional stances, and fundamentally not rhetorical. These assumptions, however, obscure the complexity inherent in their rhetorical practices; this complexity is particularly salient in the timing of disability disclosure. I argue that Mike embodies a temporal expertise that expands the concept of crip time – often conceived as a delay or extension of normative time frames – to encompass time as a rhetorical resource for disabled rhetors.

Performing Normal But Becoming Crip: Living with Chronic Pain

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.

Ordinary Extraordinary Activism: Student-led filmmaking in disability studies

Abstract In this article, we, as disability studies educators in Toronto, Canada, reflect on our interpretations of a student group's call to 'people' disability culture. This request tasked us with mapping disability culture in Canada, and representing it through the arts-based approach of new disability documentary. We produced five student-directed films, Ordinary Extraordinary Activism, that bridge theory with lived experience by profiling activists whose lives involve participating in disability culture. Here, we describe how our work supported and transcended the affirmative model by drawing on intersectionality and Disability Justice. We critically consider the aesthetic and representational tensions of producing films under crip time. Through this writing, we reflect on the three-year process of filmmaking as a gesture of online pedagogy and analyse three out of five films.

Review of Crip Times: Disability, Globalization, and Resistance by Robert McRuer (NYU Press)

In his new book <i>Crip Times: Disability, Globalization, and Resistance</i>, Robert McRuer offers his notion of "crip time" as an analytic through which we may critique the spatio-temporalities of austerity, late capitalism, and the cultural logic of neoliberalism. McRuer’s position is that disability is at the core of a global politics of austerity and of neoliberalism. What does it mean that disability is central to a global politics of austerity? For McRuer, it means that thinking about austerity through "crip time" can highlight an ongoing politics of representation of disability. That is, neoliberalism actively produces certain ways of being disabled that are conducive to its continued operation. But, "crip time" points to the ways in which this politics of representation does not fully capture disability. Disability exceeds austerity and neoliberalism. <i>Crip Times</i>, then, offers a critical examination of how disability is represented within the cultural logic of neoliberalism. At the same time, McRuer cautions against, as some past projects in disability and queer theory have done, fully rejecting or embracing the politics of identity, representation, and rights.