4
Disability Studies

Abstract

This review of disability studies literature centers on two anthologies published in 2023: Crip Authorship: Disability as Method, edited by Mara Mills and Rebecca Sanchez, and Crip Genealogies, edited by Mel Y. Chen, Alison Kafer, Eunjung Kim, and Julie Avril Minich. As anthologies, these two publications critically consider collaboration as an organizing principle of disability studies scholarship, disability culture, and disability justice in theory and praxis. When considering Crip Authorship and Crip Genealogies in conversation against the personal and/as political backdrop of 2023 and early 2024, three areas of collaboration emerge as sites to understand the state of field within larger academic institutional structures. First, the collaborative continued engagement with Chris Bell’s (2006) critique of white disability studies by disability studies scholars working to question the aims of the field of disability studies and introduce more concrete decolonial practices to research and writing. Second, the kind of collaboration needed to produce disability studies scholarship and the ways in which scholars collaborate as research, method, and writing practice to do disability studies in theory and practice. And third, the past, present, and ongoing collaborations around ‘crip’ as a theoretical practice, keyword, and organizing term.

Introduction

I begin this 2023 review of disability studies literature with some context: in the summer of 2023, my father died unexpectedly while traveling through Italy with me, my partner, and my younger brother. I am the primary support system for my younger brother, who is intellectually disabled. We have spent the past few months in a whirlwind of new kinds of collaboration, stemming from grief, desperation, and the desire for comfort, consistency, safety.

We learned about repatriation and the impermeability of borders in both life and death. We created a patchwork of communication—across different applications and in a variety of languages and dialects—to receive and exchange the paperwork needed to evidence our stories of trauma. We had to travel internationally and deviate from a plan made months in advance to ensure comfort and safety on a large airplane for nine hours, requiring disclosure of our situation to the airline, flight attendants, and fellow passengers. We experienced some communal support, but were thwarted by the ableist expectations of speed and efficiency, and the financial barriers that so often make comfort and safety inaccessible. We returned to the United States in need of community. We quickly became entangled in the bureaucratic web of US-based disability policy and services while also discovering the beauty of care as a practice and privilege: support coordinators, benefits counselors, therapists, behaviorists, support staff, group homes, supported apartments, interdependent living communities. We developed new relationships and networks of care: lifelong collaborators comprising private organizations, federal funding, paid supports, volunteers, donated time and money, housemates, families, neighbors. These new and iterative collaborations and collaborators have shaped new ways of thinking, living, and being interdependently within the paradigm of disability culture in the United States.

Collaboration is very much at the center of disability studies praxis as a theory, method, and site of analysis. The various types of collaboration studied, practiced, and necessary within disability studies and disability culture appropriately work to organize the two major anthologies published in disability studies scholarship in 2023: the theme of collaboration, as both inherent to the discipline and desperately needed to survive (in general), organizes the disability studies literature currently under review and my capacity to produce such a review of literature while learning to survive amidst the swell of grief, bureaucracy, and academic expectations.

1. Collaborations on ‘White Disability Studies’: Continuing Bell’s Internal Critique of the Field

Chris Bell’s 2006 ‘Introducing White Disability Studies: A Modest Proposal’ continues to be a site of reflection and transformation for those currently working in the field of disability studies. Bell’s initial proposal revealed the not so concealed inherent whiteness of disability studies: ‘I would like to concede the failure of Disability Studies to engage issues of race and ethnicity in a substantive capacity, thereby entrenching whiteness as its constitutive underpinning’ (p. 275). Both anthologies from this year’s work in disability studies continue to concede this failure and work to decenter the whiteness of the field. At the same time, these collections acknowledge how untangling disability studies from ‘White Disability Studies’ is a collaborative effort—not one that can only be served by scholars engaged in questions of decolonizing practices, the experience of BIPOC disabled populations, and disability paradigms outside of the often privileged Global North. To keep Bell’s critique present, and productively unconcluded, is a collaborative process that requires a response from the entire field in the almost twenty years since its publication and onward.

Several authors in both Crip Authorship and Crip Genealogies explicitly cite Bell, offering examples of how their work extends from his earlier proposal. In their introduction to Crip Genealogies, Chen, Kafer, Kim ,and Minich document the publication history of Bell’s ‘Modest Proposal’ as essential reading to the field that is historically situated but also a site of active critique. The first publication was in the second edition of The Disability Studies Reader; it was included again in the third edition but retitled to ‘Is Disability Studies Actually White Disability Studies?’, and then removed from the fourth edition ‘when it was mistakenly thought that the essay’s call was no longer needed’ (p. 29). The critical edge of the authors in this Introduction is clear. The desire to claim that all is now well in the field of disability studies was so 2013. In suggesting the revised title’s question was now answered, the editors of The Disability Studies Reader and the larger field position the threats to Black lives and Black disabled lived in the United States and globally as historically resolved rather than present and impending. Chen, Kafer, Kim, and Minich are clear to point out the reincorporation of Bell’s essay in the fifth edition in 2017 and spare no words on excuses for the initial omission, stating: ‘we are not seeking to claim our own innocence or disavow our own involvement in white disability studies’ (p. 30). Kafer reiterates this idea in her contribution to a chapter in Crip Authorship, citing Bell’s essay as ‘[p]erhaps the most well-known internal critique of disability studies’ (p. 188). In this instance, Kafer focuses on Bell’s essay as ‘a manifesto in everything but name […] in response to ongoing exclusions, erasures, and marginalization’ (p. 188). As a manifesto, Kafer suggests, Bell’s essay is part of a larger crip discourse ‘demanding more just, accountable, and accessible futures’ (p. 187). Such a discourse, though, must be engaged with justice, accountability, and accessibility through a critical lens that acknowledges the historical centering of whiteness. Untangling from those frameworks requires confronting past and present complicity.

Indeed, Bell’s proposal becomes less modest with each passing year, and republication of the call seems just as significant as it did in 2006. When I assigned Bell’s essay to students in 2023, they often commented on its timeliness and relevance to their study of the field of disability studies and their own lived experiences. Appropriately, then, in organizing their introduction to Crip Genealogies, Chen, Kafer, Kim, and Minich extend their discussion of Bell beyond mention of its significance to the field. They offer ways to think about and incorporate Bell’s ‘modest proposal’ into our collective scholarship on a structural and affective level. They point out the utility of the satirical ‘Top 10 list’ in Bell’s essay that often goes unmentioned in citations of his work in favor of a more glossed summary of his argument. Bell’s list of things to do is meant to read in the inverse: to do things like ‘Do not change a thing’ (Bell, p. 278) is to keep the status quo and maintain whiteness as the organizing principle of disability studies scholarship. Chen, Kafer, Kim, and Minich discuss how they worked to curate and craft Crip Genealogies by creating their own lists ‘of how white disability studies works and of scholarly habits to avoid’ (p. 27) in their ongoing practice and in the pages of the book that follow. They also make note of the to-do lists already in circulation in the field of disability in conversation with Bell, such as ‘the more recent work of Angel L. Miles, Akemi Nishida, and Anjali J. Forber-Pratt’ (p. 27). The authors of the introduction note that these collaborations are not just satirical but have moved towards ‘lists of habits to cultivate: lists of feelings, orientations, and practices that help us think ds [disability studies] otherwise’ (p. 27).

Such an effort to ‘think ds otherwise’ also works to put Bell’s essay in more productive conversation with theories of queer and crip futurity that have animated the field in the last twenty years or so, notably from scholars working at the intersections of disability studies, queer theory, and feminist studies (McRuer, Crip Theory [2006]; Kafer, Feminist Queer Crip [2013]; Chen, Animacies [2012]; Kim, Curative Violence [2017]; Minich, Radical Health [2023]). In their contribution to Crip Genealogies, ‘Filipina Supercrip: On the Crip Poetics of Ablenationalism’, Sony Coráñez Bolton points out how Bell’s ‘modest proposal’ is a method that has been and should continue to be extended by using the queer and feminist methodologies that have become central to the theoretical underpinning of disability studies scholarship. To challenge ‘white disability studies’, Coráñez Bolton works from a place of ‘postcolonial disability studies’ centered on the framing of the postcolonial supercrip in the Philippines, marked by successive US and Spanish colonial rule. Coráñez Bolton situates this postcolonial disability studies research of ‘[c]ripping US and Spanish colonialism in the Philippines […] as an intervention into what Chris Bell has called “white disability studies,” ’ that is at the root a postcolonial disability studies ‘feminist and queer project’ (p. 285). In their chapter, Coráñez Bolton argues how the common supercrip narrative of ‘overcoming disability’ keeps ableism in place and creates the necessity of ableist frameworks to thrive under colonial rule. To overcome a disability in the colonial context of the Philippines is to reject disability culture and experience in the service of assimilating to the cultural expectations of those holding imperial power, what Coráñez Bolton calls ‘colonial ablenationalism’. Sami Schalk does not cite Bell explicitly, but her chapter in Crip Genealogies, ‘The Black Panther Party’s 504 Activism as a Genealogical Precursor to Disability Justice Today’, demonstrates how Bell’s tenets are sewn into the fabric of contemporary disability studies research, a continued collaboration of critical propositions. In an effort to think ds otherwise, Schalk retraces a history of disability justice that finds purchase in the practices of the Black Panther Party in the late 1970s—a history that positions the marginalization of, and resistance to, oppressive forces by African American populations entangled with contemporary disability justice efforts. To historicize disability justice in the United States, then, is to make clear that American disability history is African American disability history.

The two anthologies under review also work to extend the critique of white disability studies outside of the familiar parameters of US- and UK-based research sites and histories. While there is an imperative to continue to critique the whiteness at the center of disability studies research within a US context, there is also a need to acknowledge how the Global North occupies major sites of disability studies research. In their respective chapters in Crip Genealogies, Coráñez Bolton and Jasbir Puar acknowledge how doing disability studies about and in the Global South exposes a double bind of existence and resistance: disability is inherently both under colonial occupation. Coráñez Bolton explicitly asks, ‘[w]hat might it mean to look at histories of empire as themselves ruptures in global disability histories?’ (p. 292). To do contemporary disability studies research is to destabilize narratives of empire and colonial rule. Puar echoes this line of questioning in their chapter, ‘Critical Disability Studies and the Question of Palestine: Towards Decolonizing Disability’, by focusing on the ‘question of Palestine’ as a move to decolonize disability and critical disability studies: the infrastructure of settler colonialism in its spatial regulation and restriction of movement across borders is disabling and actively disables in the physical and emotional violences inherent to colonial rule. In the case of Palestine, Puar argues, ‘mass impairment is a predominating source of disability and there has been over the years the use of a “shoot to cripple” approach to disciplining and controlling the colonized’ (p. 118). Puar’s chapter considers the history of settler colonialism in Palestine to demonstrate the significance and existence of crip epistemologies outside of the Global North that require attention and activation. Extending Bell’s initial ‘modest proposal’, Puar interrogates disability studies as a field that privileges perspectives from the Global North. Puar’s ultimate call for action, though, is for the field of disability studies to engage more seriously with ‘southern disability studies’ as a vital field in its own right, as well as to take up Palestinian public health researcher Rita Giacaman’s recent call to invest in scholarship on ‘the entanglement of war, poverty, and disability’ (p. 126).

Yet there is also the call to critically consider what a focus on entanglement means in the context of a decolonial approach. In their chapter ‘Decolonial Disability Studies’ in Crip Authorship, Xuan Thuy Nguyen argues for an approach to doing disability studies in the Global South that does not promote and reiterate what Nguyen calls ‘damage-centered research’ (p. 110). To consider how ‘disability studies and crip theory [can] be decolonial’ (p. 110), Nguyen makes clear that investment in the Global South is not just about shifting the site of research. ‘Decolonial disability studies’, Nguyen asserts, ‘puts disability theory and praxis from the Global South into conversations with the Global North while refusing to accept the master’s narratives about disability from the perspectives of scholars and activists in the North’ (p. 112). Promoting investment in a ‘southern disability studies’ requires collaboration across sites of research, methods, theories, and epistemologies that centers on, works with, and comes from disability culture and scholarship across the Global South.

The desire to critically engage the inherent whiteness of disability studies remains active. Yet figuring out how to do that within the Global North and destabilize its status as the privileged site of research and theoretical inquiry is a vital point of collaboration in our field. It will be significant to follow and take part in this research area in 2024 and beyond as we contend with, and yet find ways to collaborate with, work from Western and Global North academic institutions.

2. Collaborations on Doing Disability Studies Scholarship: Writing in Crip Times

As a discipline, disability studies has been and continues to be one that is activated by collaboration across sites of inquiry and ways of knowing. A cornerstone of the field and larger community of disability justice has been invested in the concept and practice of interdependence (see Kittay, ‘A Theory of Justice’ [2015]; Mingus, ‘Access Intimacy’ [2017]). As a move away from capitalist promotions of the independent, sovereign subject, interdependence acknowledges and values the need and desire for shared support with political and practical effects. The relational component of interdependence demands collaboration across governmental, economic, and social structures while also revealing the need for the kinds of collaboration that are an everyday aspect of disabled and crip lives. Supporting one another’s access needs, from personal care to transportation to healthcare, is a formal and informal process sewn into the fabric of disability justice. Furthermore, from a theoretical perspective, the major interventions and methodological approaches utilized and developed in disability studies engage with and emerge out of interdisciplinary interactions with queer theory, gender studies, history, rhetoric and composition, and English literature. The meeting of these different disciplinary homes shapes disability studies and, arguably, aids in encouraging scholars in the field to continue to think ds otherwise. Additionally, these collaborating disciplines are all invested in strategies and techniques of composition and writing, a shared investment that has been central to research in disability studies for over twenty years. For example, in their introduction to Crip Authorship, ‘On Crip Authorship and Disability as Method’, Mara Mills and Rebecca Sanchez work from Robert McRuer’s theory of de-composition (‘Composing Bodies’ [2004]) to posit that disability culture and disability studies side with ideas of disordering or reordering the writing process. Thus, at its core, disability studies is always unpacking the norms of the scholarly writing process in theory and practice. Mills and Sanchez draw on the practice of research on ‘care collectives’ and the theoretical lenses that have emerged through decades of disability studies engaged with feminist and queer theories to argue for disability studies as a site of ‘collective authorship’, disrupting the capitalist ethos of the individual and the independent sole author. In organizing their anthology, Mills and Sanchez ‘take disability as method, beyond content and author function’ (p. 9) to reconsider ‘what counts as a scholarly contribution’ within a collection that centers but also ‘pushes the conventions of collaborative writing’ (p. 11). The chapters that comprise Crip Authorship utilize collaborative research and writing to produce text-based, typically identifiable scholarly works, but this anthology also pushes the conventions of collaborative writing by deconstructing what counts as a scholarly contribution in a text-based logo-centric discipline through ‘chapters’ that include ‘an edited group chat, song lyrics, a description of a Protactile poem, and examples of crip graphic design’ (p. 11).

The more text-based chapters, though, offer significant examples of what crip authorship does and can look like within expected scholarly contexts. Kafer’s chapter in Crip Authorship, ‘Manifesting Manifestos’, quotes text written with Chen, Kim, and Minich during their collaboration on Crip Genealogies. This verbatim text, Kafer mentions, is also reproduced in Mel Y. Chen’s chapter for Crip Authorship, ‘Chronic Illness, Slowness, and the Time of Writing’. Both Kafer and Chen, in their respective Crip Authorship chapters, offer additional paragraphs contextualizing the quoted content that is not in Crip Genealogies, but gesture to the collaborative process of the anthology, further iterating that collaboration in the two paragraphs reproduced verbatim in the chapters contributed by Kafer and Chen in another anthology published in the same year. This creates a palimpsest approach to authorship—even writing the references out here in this essay crafts layers of sentences that say similar things with a twist, confusing which author was first, last, or deserving of singular credit. Chen and Kafer exceed the typical boundaries of citation—they each build on the ideas of another scholar, but outside of the traditional assumption of prior publication.

This simultaneous citation is deployed differently by Chen and Kafer, respectively, but effectively activates similar critiques of single authorship. Kafer’s chapter considers the history of the manifesto as a genre and its utility to disability studies scholarship, building on prior work locating the space of disability in Donna Haraway’s 1991 ‘Cyborg Manifesto’ (see Kafer, Feminist Queer Crip). Manifestos, Kafer posits in her chapter, in their construction and intentions, tend ‘to draw on conceptualizations of disability’ (p. 181) with the authors of such writings often considered to be ‘mad’, using the genre to dismantle norms and call for accountability, even justice. ‘If manifestos are intended to refuse capitalist logics of property and propriety’, Kafer writes, ‘and to exhibit mad, incoherent multiplicities of voice and meaning, then collaborative writing is an essential mode of the crip manifesto’ (p. 186). As a genre that is tethered to a crip modality, the manifesto is one that Kafer sees could offer potential in disability studies and/as disability justice by ‘cripping authorship’. Chen does not focus explicitly on the manifesto genre; rather, they extend their chapter to the practice of writing and chronic illness, ‘anchored in considerations of temporality, and thinking pragmatically about the time of publishing and the question of access’ (p. 33). A major concern addressed by Chen and Kafer in their respective chapters is the relationship between collaboration, shared or ‘copied’ text, and accusations of ‘ripping off’ other work. Rather than ‘ripping off’, Chen and Kafer offer ‘cripping off’ (Kafer, p. 186; Chen, p. 35). In ‘cripping off’, possibilities for collaboration expand to the process of writing and thinking that often produces the published ‘thing’ typically attributed to a single author. In both chapters, Chen and Kafer extend this an invitation for an ‘explicit turning toward collaboration’ and ‘acknowledge the fundamentally collaborative nature of thinking in making that collaboration known’ (p. 186; p. 35). The separate but intertwined chapters, with references to a larger collaboration between them and others in a separate edited collection, activate this approach to writing and publishing in theory and practice.

The connection Chen and Kafer have to the other anthology considered in this review further activates the theoretical significance and practical applications of collaborative scholarship. In the introduction to Crip Genealogies, which Chen and Kafer wrote with Kim and Minich, the authors use their collaborative process as editors of the anthology to think further through the procedures of collaborative writing. The chapter serves as an example of the need for collaborative writing—to support one another ‘who labor in academic institutions and are committed to finding ways to make them livable’ (p. 1)—and offers a way to produce such writing within the parameters of crafting an introduction by multiple authors for an edited collection. Chen, Kafer, Kim, and Minich point out the significance of writing collaboratively as a practice in attending to different access needs, from processing at different speeds to meeting online in different time zones. The authors acknowledge that this practice is one that would benefit from more analysis and additional application in future scholarship. They liken it to ‘a form of time travel […] a deeply speculative experience […] in which we always ended up in places we hadn’t foreseen. Together’ (pp. 19–20). The chapter moves between and across different modes of presenting their reasoning for writing collaboratively, specifically why and how collaborative writing served the organization and publication of this book on the ways in which ‘crip’ has moved throughout their lives, individually and collectively, and the space of the academy. Different fonts are utilized, at times gesturing towards being associated with a particular single author, but that gesture remains loose. There is a strong attempt here to both resist collapsing the four authors listed into sounding like one voice and to give in to the shared labor of writing together as a crip politics of care. A major intervention is the use of a device they call a ‘sticky note’—a break-out section that appears throughout the chapter to offer additional context or summarize the preceding paragraphs, offering another access point to the information for those who may need it.

Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp, Stacey Park Milbern and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha, Mara Mills and Rebecca Sanchez, and authors of the introduction to Crip Genealogies, each contribute chapters to both anthologies that discuss the collaborative writing processes necessary to produce contemporary scholarship while also modeling that collaboration as co-authored or multi-authored pieces. Milbern and Piepzna-Samarasinha contribute a dialogue, presented as a back-and-forth transcribed conversation, to Crip Genealogies that considers the disability justice work they have both spearheaded as part of the disability arts collective Sins Invalid. As a dialogue, their piece offers an alternative to traditional scholarship by documenting moments in disability cultural history and introducing major theoretical interventions that are at the core of collaborations across disability justice practices, crip theory, and community needs. As long-time collaborators, their conversation gives insight into the power of collaborative research and writing as a modality of support and care. They make this clear in the delivery of the chapter and in their theoretical interventions, of which the biggest contribution is the concept of ‘disability doulaship’, a form of mentorship by and for crip communities in crip spaces (p. 103). By drawing on a practice affiliated with supporting labor and delivery to people about to give and giving birth, Milbern and Piepzna-Samarasinha push the idea of care networks (akin to what Akemi Nishida talks about in their 2022 monograph, Just Care) into relationships that acknowledge the significance of a power difference in terms of experience levels. The lived experience of those in disability justice spaces is valuable and through ‘crip doulaing’, can be mobilized to embolden the activism and self-advocacy of younger disabled people, especially younger disabled queer and trans Black, Indigenous, and people of color. The doulaing that Milbern and Piepzna-Samarasinha promote is one that envisions a lineage of collaboration—a type of community-based advocacy that is invested in the collective of the present and the potential collectives in the future.

Though they mobilize a different term, Ginsburg and Rapp discuss their decades of collaborative research and writing in their contribution to Crip Authorship, ‘Collaborative Research on the Möbius Strip’. As long-time co-authors, Ginsburg and Rapp have contributed significantly to research on family dynamics in and around disability culture, as well as the relationship between disability and practices of mothering. They open their chapter by stating, ‘[o]ur collaborative writing is based on an enduring friendship and feminist academic partnership’ (p. 153). Their chapter serves as an opportunity to reflect on their collaborations, as well as consider what ‘crip authorship’ actually is and, importantly, entails. Ginsburg and Rapp position their relationship and work as mothers of disabled children, members of crip families doing disability studies research, as an example of and study in ‘new kinship imaginaries’ (p. 153), the kinds of worlds that manifest when disability makes the fiction of normativity apparent. As a form of ‘crip authorship’, Ginsburg and Rapp work from their lived experiences to develop scholarship about, rooted in, and produced by a praxis of ‘interdependence’—they think through their collaborative writing as interdependence that is both a method for research and for general survival in an increasingly ableist world. Their collaboration is at the same time a method and site of research, hence the evocation of the Möbius strip. They confess that their work often ‘produces a sense of being simultaneously inside and outside the worlds we are exploring through interdependent ties of kinship and caregiving as well as our collaborative research, writing, teaching, mentoring, and advocacy’ (p. 158). Such a confession speaks to the vulnerability needed to do disability studies research and to produce that research within contemporary academic structures. Their long-standing partnership connects to both Kafer’s and Chen’s calls for ‘crip solidarity’ in their respective chapters in Crip Authorship. Both Ginsburg and Rapp and Kafer and Chen cite blog posts from disability activist Mia Mingus around ideas of ‘crip solidarity’ and ‘access intimacy’ to put language around the reasoning for, and benefits of, their collaboration. Ginsburg and Rapp specifically cite Mingus’s ideas about ‘that elusive, hard-to-describe feeling when someone else “gets” your access needs’ (p. 155). It is precisely that ‘getting’ that Ginsburg and Rapp, Kafer, Chen, and Milbern and Piepzna-Samarasinha access in their different approaches to collaborative writing. That ‘getting’ is rooted in iterations of interdependence that are constantly negotiated, in attending to different processing speeds, and to fostering progress that allows for others to help community leaders or elders move ahead.

However, there is a residue in considerations of collaborative writing that is worth lingering on. Most significantly, the need for crip solidarity remains vital. However, the question as to where we find this within academic spaces that require strict deadlines, prolific publications, and a body of scholarly work that gets harder to produce as universities become more corporate, persists. There also remain the conflicting terms of accessibility that tend to offer inclusion and exclusion simultaneously. In an accessibility paradigm, for every access created, there is often an equal and opposite barrier that arises. This is prevalent within discourse on crip authorship and collaborative writing. Chen and Kafer point this out in their respective chapters on the utility of collaborative writing for survival and solidarity, but are clear to address that crip authorship has to inherently consider the multitude of forms such ‘cripping off’ can take. Single authorship tends to be at the center of the power structures ‘cripping off’ attempts to dismantle within the academy, especially within humanities-based disciplines. Yet the dismantling intended by ‘cripping off’ does not intend to eliminate the practice of single authorship as an option. In discussing the methods ‘cripping off’ and ‘cripping authorship’, both Kafer and Chen offer a way of writing that cannot exist through single authorship, as well as a way of writing that acknowledges that ‘single authoring may necessarily be someone else’s best and only crip mode’ (Kafer, ‘Manifesting’, p. 186; Chen, ‘Chronic Illness’, p. 35).

3. Collaborations on Crip: Future Directions in Brief

A cursory point of synthesis in the two anthologies under review is the deployment of the term crip as an organizing idea. However, that cursory observation is one that calls out for deeper digging. As the field of disability studies continues to ‘think otherwise’ under increasingly inaccessible conditions of capitalism, racism, ableism, and classism, the impact and lineage of calls ‘to crip’, like the shifts and twists embedded in analyses of ‘cripping’ (see Kafer, Feminist Queer Crip; McRuer, Crip Theory; Sandahl, ‘Queering the Crip’; Linton, My Body Politic), deserves consideration. This is present in the chapters that comprise both Crip Genealogies and Crip Authorship, as well as in my own life and work in and on crip time. ‘Crip’, Nguyen writes in their chapter ‘Decolonial Disability Studies’ in Crip Authorship, ‘is a keyword that attends to the radical act of resistance and reimagination in ways that create spaces for radical love and transnational solidarity’ (p. 109). It is the affirmation of love and act of solidarity across and through borders that signifies how these authors have come to ruminate on and reshape crip as a term that now works to define this realm of critical disability studies. Yet, as Kafer pointed out in the foundational text, Feminist Queer Crip, discussions of crip are not ones that can be had with the goal of creating or finding utopia. Such attempts quickly expose the ableism inherent in so many depictions of a utopic fantasy. Kafer, along with Chen, Kim, and Minich, expands on this further in their introduction to Crip Genealogies, commenting on recent trends in the academy to encourage the ‘taking up of crip as a more aesthetic, more theoretical, more high, more edgy term’ (p. 8; original emphasis). Rather than steer further into the aesthetic and/or highly theoretical, the authors surveyed in this review are invested in the material conditions that acts of cripping can uplift, make accessible, make more livable. It is that attention to the material conditions of crip subjects—those doing and being represented by the research—that continues to warrant further encouragement as we continue to operate under the material threats of the pandemic, the neoliberal university structure, and rising global fascism.

I have immense gratitude for the opportunity to engage with these works and this academic field that can carve out a radical space for love and solidarity in times that feel devoid of care and support.

Books Reviewed

References