#crip theory

[identitty-dickruption]

hey, disabled person! do you feel tired all the time? do you feel like you’re working twice as hard as abled people for half the outcome? do you take longer to do every single little thing than an abled person would see as reasonable? well. I would like to introduce you to the concept of crip labour (I first came across this in Smilges, 2023 but I cannot verify whether they came up with the term)

crip labour is a term to describe all the extra work disabled people do on a day-to-day basis. it’s also a form of labour that is invisible to abled people, because they just don’t have to think about most of it. it includes:

the extra labour required to get ready to leave the house in the morning (e.g. the extra steps involved in getting dressed or having a shower)

the social labour required in order to communicate your needs to abled people

the labour involved in having to plan ahead (e.g. knowing where accessible toilets are, knowing where ramp access is, knowing which venues are safe for you to be in)

the administrative labour involved in gaining access to particular institutions (e.g. applying for disability welfare, applying for education access plans, etc)

having a term to describe all the labour involved in keeping yourself alive and happy helps to make that labour more visible. it gives us a way to point out that we are doing more and with less capacity, and it helps to explain why so many of us are so exhausted all the goddamn time

so I hope this is a helpful term for people to bring into their lives!

[butchtheworld]

crip tips

i'm an experienced disabled person (EDS, CFS, POTS, chronic pain). here are some of the things that help me get by as a college student (note: i use a wheelchair and a cane most days. i also am fortunate enough to have decent medical care, meds, and my aforementioned mobility aids)

shower chair. i can't stand for long enough to shower, and especially not if it's a hot shower. i got a cheap one off of amazon that has three legs and a plastic seat. that plastic seat makes it super easy to keep clean. i know there's a weird sort of embarrassment about sitting in the shower, but PLEASE, it is so much better than sitting on the floor in the shower or falling. in my dorms, there are two (2) showers with fold-down seats. i put a small towel down on the seat so i'm not bare-ass on this dorm bathroom surface, then i wash it down after.

normal wheelchair gloves are fingerless, which suck for winter. BUT, winter cycling gloves have the same cushioning on the palms and grip material and fingers. they're not super warm, but throw on a pair of thin gloves underneath (or, if you're like me, propelling keeps your hands super hot anyways).

an ice pack on the back of your neck can help with migraines and dizziness. i keep a small one in my freezer at all times. i tuck it into a hairband so it can be hands-free.

PLEASE adjust your cane/crutch/crutches to the right height. it helps so much with shoulder/elbow pain and balance. if it doesn't feel right, it probably isn't. the handle of my cane hits around the height of my wrist if my arm is just hanging down.

if you have hyper mobility, try high-rise shoes. i wear only high-rise converse and doc martens, which i can lace tightly around my ankles to keep them from rolling or sliding out of place.

(MENTIONS FOOD AND CALORIES) keep an easy, high-in-calorie food around. for me, eating on high pain days is essentially impossible. so, i need something that i can get myself to eat (like ice cream or canned soup or chips) that won't take any effort. ice cream is a great one for me, since it's sweet and cold and dense. even if it's not healthy, nothing is more unhealthy than not eating.

please, please, please find a community of disabled people. most of my close friends are able-bodied and, as much as i love them, they just can't understand it like other disabled people do. i found two great communities on my college campus, but i've also heard that support groups are a great way to meet people within the community

if you have any other tips, reblog with them. i remember the beginning days of my illness and how daunting all of this was. this is how we support our community.

[koko-from-the-future]

Physically disabled self harm [TW]

One reason I identity more strongly with the cripple community as opposed to the neuropunk or MAD community is that things as "small" and sadly common among those with mental illness (self harm) is even different with those who are physically disabled.

. No one told me that forcing my limbs into dangerous positions just to prove to myself I was "really disabled" was self harm.

. No one told me that not giving myself aid after dislocating my joints because "I should get used to it" was self harm.

. No one told me that staring at the sun so I could have a SEIZURE to once again prove to myself I wasn't faking it was self harm.

Even something as (excuse the pun) 'cut and dry' as self harm can be undertaken and experienced in such an atypical way to the point where even able-bodied mentally ill/ND people will not only not recognise your SH as SH but they will outright DISPUTE your experience and diminish your pain.

-A cybergirl with 2 physically disabilities, a schizospec disorder and a developmental disability

[chronicallycouchbound]

Internalized Ableism As Means For Unhoused Survival

We need to dissect the cultural context of homelessness as it relates to disability. I’ve spent most of my life unhoused, while also being a disabled person who didn’t have a clear understanding that I was disabled, and both of these experiences had huge impacts on my experiences of ableism, especially internalized.

It needs to be understood that it’s not always rooted in internalized ableism for someone to not identify as disabled, especially regarding physical disabilities. Including choosing to hide disability, pain, or weakness. It also includes choosing not to use mobility aids or other assistive devices that could, in theory, be helpful for their day-to-day life. Instead, they grit their teeth through the pain or find alternatives to manage. This is akin to (and may overlap with) autistic masking.

Being on the streets comes with a culture that allows for strength to often guarantee safety. The ability to physically defend yourself, carry your belongings, withstand harsh weather, use survival expertise, etc. are often necessary skills. Showing weakness is vulnerability. Vulnerability allows for situations where you are more likely to be targeted because attackers can recognize your difficulties and take advantage of them. This danger is amplified if you are a part of other marginalized groups.

When I was a young queer and trans person growing up on the streets, my homelessness was inextricably linked to those experiences. If I were to seem like I was disabled, I was putting myself in a more vulnerable position. Once I started using mobility aids on the streets, I experienced significantly more dangerous situations than I had before. I faced more direct physical violence and threats as a result of it. It wasn’t just me fearing that I might face judgment for being visibly disabled, it was that I was facing real-world repercussions, both within the unhoused and housed community. I was targeted by housed people frequently due to the inherent publicity of unhoused experiences.

Unhoused people spend significantly more time in public. As a currently unstably housed person, but housed nonetheless, I have the privilege of privacy for my pain. I can crawl in my apartment freely without anyone literally kicking me while I’m down. I can scream, I can sob, I can dissociate, I can do whatever I need to, with or without aids, and not face violence from the people around me.

I also have access to more supportive aids just by having housing. I now have in-home care attendants, something that was impossible without a home. I have a bed I can rest in at any time. I have a microwave for hot pads. I have a bathroom. I have electricity. I have food. These things were never guaranteed while unhoused and disabled. Unsurprisingly, I have significantly fewer emergency room trips, unmanageable flares, missed doctor appointments, etc. now that I have even unstable housing.

When you have more time in the public eye, there are more opportunities for facing ableism and houseism from the general populace. Those two experiences intertwined, and being chronically homeless, led to me having to navigate internalized ableism as a survival skill because there was a direct link to the ableism I faced daily.

Some disabled people on the streets, especially if they can’t hide their disability, feel more pressure to present themselves as inspiration porn. Inspiration porn panders to ableist narratives about disabled experiences, and can even give you an edge while panhandling. It also acts as a protective factor, there’s a mindset that if you’re not held back by disability, then you are not disabled. Thus, your disability cannot be exploited by others, and you are just as strong as a physically abled person. It’s something we do because we have to in order to survive, whether or not we’re conscious of the ableist narratives we’re feeding into.

There are times when I have to choose to do actions that are more harmful for me, such as presenting as more abled, for my immediate safety. I have to weigh the risks, and often, the risk of being attacked is far greater than the risk of falling, fainting, or being injured. This is not internalized ableism, it isn’t subconscious, it is for protection. Presenting as disabled is difficult enough, but when other marginalizations are added to it, it is exponentially more dangerous. Even more so than it is for me to not use aids or to not accept help at times.

If I wasn’t able to be recognized as disabled, I was granted more privileges akin to those my able-bodied peers automatically receive. If a bathroom wasn’t accessible for me, but I did my best with it instead of asking for accommodations (which is often seen as being picky, needy, or ungrateful) then I was more likely to be allowed to use that bathroom again. The same goes for couch surfing at a friend's house, needing to carry everything I own up three flights of stairs, if I didn’t mention that it was difficult for me or said no to help, then I was being a good guest by not making my hosts uncomfortable. Making concessions like this whenever I could gave me more access to safety.

When my disabilities became more serious, and I wasn't able to keep making concessions, I would fall in that bathroom, I would faint on the stairs, and I immediately was more unsafe. I couldn’t hide my disability anymore, the choice was taken from me. No amount of pandering to abled people would make me able to do those things anymore. For me, that felt like a personal failure. I had been told my whole life that I could and should push through my disabling symptoms and conditions, and I took that as fact. Not being able to do that was a heavy and horrifying feeling for me.

It’s taken years (and is an ongoing process) to find safe enough spaces where I can ask for help. Where I can freely use mobility aids, show my actual pain, wear braces, wear compression garments, cry, rest, and otherwise exist as my disabled self without being harmed. It’s taken equally as long (and is still ongoing) to find grace within myself and advocate for the accommodations I need and actually use them. I still struggle with the pressure to feed into inspiration porn, something that the cripple reclamation movement is focused on deconstructing. I struggle with accepting help, asking for help, or even looking like I might need help. But I also recognize that beautiful things can happen when I get what I need.

It heals internalized houseism to be dismantling my internalized ableism, and vice versa.

Unhoused disabled people are allowed to be weak. Unhoused disabled people are allowed to cry, to scream, to be in pain, to ask for help. Unhoused disabled people are allowed to be human, just like everyone else.

[thehallstara]

happy @blaseballzinejam day i spent the past month reading journal articles about crip theory for this zine. there's two pages of apa citations. you should read it.

[spoonietimelordy]

I'm watching an EDS conference and the Dr said that EDS isn't an illness but a body form and it's just so true (like autism being a neurotype). Because yes EDS is at its core just a different shape of Connective tissue. So EDS isn't just a single thing but a body which cause a lot of different illnesses, but we often forget that it protect us from other things, we are less likely to break bones for exemple. EDS is like autism a base for a spectrum of traits, both negative and positive (even if for EDS it's mostly negative ones sadly for us).

[socialist-microwave-laser]

i can talk about the abysmal dearth of resources for veterans in the us while also being pissed as fuck that all the organizations that give people ptsd service dogs for free and/or at a reduced cost require you to have been a veteran (sometimes first responders also qualify) because mad adult civilians aren't sexy enough to be turned into inspiration porn fodder

[runrundoyourstuff]

toying with the idea that The Owl House is to disability studies/crip theory as Steven Universe is to queer theory

[crippleprophet]

in the final stretch of my thesis & wondering if anybody happens to know of any work exploring embracing abjection from a crip perspective? tried to do a cursory search but was only turning up Crip Theory which obv i’m already citing lol. if not i think Stryker’s Performing Transgender Rage can certainly support a lot of weight so we’ll be okay 💕

[runcible-spoons]

"Crip joy is not the same as having a happy disabled identity — to be cheerful in being disabled. Not every part of being disabled needs to be celebrated, including improvement in ability. The pressure to be happy, to say that your pain and fatigue are not awful, to not say 'I feel like shit', is ableist in nature — the kind of ableism that is reflected in the willingness to make pain 'indescribable' rather than undesirable or hard to hear, and the idea that to medicate oneself is to attempt normalization, to succumb to the pressure to pass as abled, rather than control your own pain. It is this kind of attitude that upholds the invisibility of an invisible illness — and the idea that you are not really ill at all"

Alice Hattrick, Ill Feelings (318-319, Fitzcarraldo).

[identitty-dickruption]

related to crip labour, I also like the concepts of crip time and mad time

crip/mad time refers to the way that time functions differently for disabled people. this includes a pretty broad range of things, such as:

the way that disabled people have to live on a different timeline than what is expected (e.g. taking longer to graduate or not graduating at all)

the way time slows down when experiencing certain symptoms (e.g. pain makes time stretch out forever, as can depression)

the way being sick can feel like a sort of time travel (e.g. sleeping all day can make time feel like it is skipping forward)

“living in crip/mad time” means acknowledging that we do not live in the same way as your average abled person, and that this messes with the passage of time. because it covers such a broad range of experiences I’m not sure how useful it really is in practice, but it’s a good reminder that being disabled has a big impact on every part of life, including things that people often see as stable (such as the passage of time!)

[the-argonaut]

'Writing open letters to the dead can surely be read as a queer crip interruption of the linear time of past/present/future as separate and distinct planes' Alison Kafer, Feminist, Queer, Crip p.42

[libraryben]

Open Access

Introduction: On Crip Authorship and Disability as Method. Mara Mills and Rebecca Sanchez

Section I: Writing

1.Writing While Adjunct. Mimi Khúc.

2. Chronic Illness, Slowness, and the Time of Writing. Mel Y. Chen.

3. Composing Perseveration / Perseverative Composing. M. Remi Yergeau.

4. Mad Black Rants. La Marr Jurelle Bruce.

5. Plain Language for Disability Culture. Kelsie Acton.

6. Peter Pan World: In-System Authorship. Isolation Nation.

7. LatDisCrit and Counterstories. Alexis Padilla.

Section II: Research

8. Virtual Ethnography. Emily Lim Rogers.

9. Learning Disability Justice Through Critical Participatory Action Research. Laura J. Wernick.

10. Decolonial Disability Studies. Xuan Thuy Nguyen.

11. On Still Reading Like a Depressed Transsexual. Cameron Awkward-Rich.

12. On Trauma in Research on Illness, Disability, and Care. Laura Mauldin.

13. Injury, Recovery, and Representation in Shikaakwa. Laurence Ralph.

14. Collaborative Research on the Möbius Strip. Faye Ginsburg and Rayna Rapp.

15. Lessons in Yielding: Crip Refusal and Ethical Research Praxis. Zoë H. Wool.

16. Creating a Fully Accessible Digital Helen Keller Archive. Helen Selsdon.

Section III: Genre

17. Manifesting Manifestos. Alison Kafer.

18. Public Scholarship as Disability Justice. Jaipreet Virdi.

19. Crip Autotheory. Ellen Samuels.

20. Disability Life Writing in India. Mohaiminul Islam and Ujjwal Jana.

21. The History and Politics of Krip-Hop. Leroy F. Moore, Jr. and Keith Jones.

22. Verbal and Nonverbal Metaphor. Asa Ito.

Section IV: Publishing

23. Accessible Academic Publishing. Cynthia Wu.

24. #DisabilityStudiesTooWhite. Kristen Bowen, Rachel Kuo, and Mara Mills.

25. A Philosophical Analysis of ASL/English Bilingual Publishing. Teresa Blankmeyer Burke.

26. Crip World-Making. Robert McRuer.

27. Disability in the Library and Librarianship. Stephanie S. Rosen.

28. The Rebuttal: A Protactile Poem. John Lee Clark.

Section V: Media

29. Crip Making. Aimi Hamraie.

30. Fiction Podcasts Model Description by Design. Georgina Kleege.

31. Podcasting for Disability Justice. Bri M.

32. Willful Dictionaries and Crip Authorship in CART. Louise Hickman.

33. How to Model AAC. Lateef H. McLeod.

34. Digital Spaces and the Right to Information for Deaf People During the COVID-19 Pandemic in Zimbabwe. Lovemore Chidemo, Agness Chindimba, and Onai Hara.

35. Crip Indigenous Storytelling Across the Digital Divide. Jen Deerinwater.

[chronicallycouchbound]

About:

⌂ 24 ⌂ on/off homeless ⌂ disabled ⌂ mad ⌂ neurodivergent ⌂ queer ⌂ trans ⌂ DID system ⌂ currently precariously housed ⌂ multi-marginalized ⌂ writer ⌂ artist ⌂ zero income ⌂ mixed race ⌂ community organizer ⌂ abolitionist ⌂ pagan ⌂

Essays:

May Your Hands Always Be Loud

Sword Canes Aren’t Badass. I am.

What’s So Wrong With Having Heroes?

Unlucky: Protective Factors and Homelessness

Homeless Delicacies and Finding Unhoused Joy

Internalized Ableism As Means For Unhoused Survival

Let People On Food Stamps Eat Hot Meals

Intelligence Doesn't Equal Morality

Homelessness as Trauma: Transitioning Into Housing

Winter Solstice / Homeless Persons Memorial Day

Guides:

Unhoused Solidarity in Action (how to help out unhoused people outside of just care packs)

Coming into Disability (best for newly disabled people)

Interacting with People with Psychosis

How to Support People

Underrepresentation in Homeless Statistics

Houseism

Tags:

Original Posts - #chronically couchbound

Unhoused Joy (Story Series) - #unhoused joy

Informational - #info

Guides - #guides

Reblogs - #rb

Mutual Aid Requests - #Mutual Aid Asks

Asks - #asks

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[haraways-cyborg]

any citations that center a crip-aligned autistic politic? i love neuroqueer heresies and authoring autism. everything else i read these days is emonormative and (WEIRD?!) and makes me.......... feel gross