The Essential Concept of "Crip Time."

[jesse_the_k]

Disability Studies Quarterly is available free online at dsq-sds.org. The Summer 2017 issue of Disability Studies Quarterly is full of interesting reading that's accessible to folks without a graduate degree.

http://dsq-sds.org/issue/view/184

Acknowledging pain and limitation is a welcome turn in Disability Studies theorizing: a long-term consequence of the intersection of feminism with DS. Women's disability is so often driven by illness, that we've brought willingness to profess that pain.

UW-Madison Prof. Ellen Samuels writes so well, so deeply, so clearly about living as disabled people in time:

When disabled folks talk about crip time, sometimes we just mean that we’re late all the time–maybe because we need more sleep than nondisabled people, maybe because the accessible gate in the train station was locked. But other times, when we talk about crip time, we mean something more beautiful and forgiving. We mean, as my friend Margaret Price explains, we live our lives with a “flexible approach to normative time frames” like work schedules, deadlines, or even just waking and sleeping. My friend Alison Kafer says that “rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds.” I have embraced this beautiful notion for many years, living within the embrace of a crip time that lets me define my own “normal.”

Crip time is time travel. Disability and illness have the power to extract us from linear, progressive time with its normative life stages and cast us into a wormhole of backward and forward acceleration, jerky stops and starts, tedious intervals and abrupt endings. Some of us contend with the impairments of old age while still young; some of us are treated like children no matter how old we get. The medical language of illness tries to reimpose the linear, speaking in terms of the chronic, the progressive, and the terminal, of relapses and stages. But we who occupy the bodies of crip time know that we are never linear, and we rage silently–or not so silently–at the calm straightforwardness of those who live in the sheltered space of normative time.

[…]

For crip time is broken time. It requires us to break in our bodies and minds to new rhythms, new patterns of thinking and feeling and moving through the world. It forces us to take breaks, even when we don’t want to, even when we want to keep going, to move ahead. It insists that we listen to our bodyminds so closely, so attentively, in a culture that tells us to divide the two and push the body away from us while also pushing it beyond its limits. Crip time means listening to the broken languages of our bodies, translating them, honoring their words.

Three more viewpoints on "crip time" in the complete article at

http://dsq-sds.org/article/view/5824/4684

Comments

Although I continue to have issues with the word "crip"

[jesse_the_k]

...as a reclaimed, blanket category parallel to the word "queer." Cripple's origin is in physical, visible disability. I know too many people who feel they don't qualify as "disabled enough because they don't bear visible signs of impairment.