“Crip” reclaims the word “cripple.”
“Cripping” means applying a disability justice lens to something usually understood from an ableist norm. Like resilience. Or time.
What might it mean to rethink time from a disability standpoint?
From a book review in Disability Studies Quarterly (DSQ) — the first academic journal of its kind — Sami Schalk discusses Alison Kafer‘s book, Feminist, Queer, Crip:
Crip time is flex time not just expanded but exploded; it requires re-imagining our notions of what can and should happen in time, or recognizing how expectations of ‘how long things take’ are based on very particular minds and bodies. Rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds.
Sami Schalk, “Moving Feminist Disability Studies into the Crip Future“
Also in DSQ, Ellen Samuels has a wonderful and very readable essay with a lot of personal storytelling called “Six Ways of Looking at Crip Time” if you’d like to dig deeper.
H/t Sentiers and Ann Helen Petersen‘s Substack, Culture Study:
What would a calendar look like that prioritized and protected caregiving? What about one that understood crip time, or different types of relationships and the soft but consistent focus they demand? That understood creativity, and children, or grief? What would a family calendar look like that made its primary steward and their needs as visible as others? Kids make weird and wondrous calendars all the time; why don’t we ever try them? What if the stubborn professors making power plays with their resistance to digital calendars were trying to preserve something worth preserving — but going about it in a way that just made everyone even more reliant and insistent on calendars. How, in other words, would you make a calendar that accommodated “the life of the mind” but also respected and equalized that work with those who foster the environment that makes that life possible? What about a calendar rooted in solidarity instead of individuality, or community instead of the family unit?
Or what about a calendar that was simply, as one reader imagined, oriented around protecting time, instead of filling it? What would an un-calendar be?
The Diminishing Returns of Calendar Culture: Or, The Misery of Monochronic Time
Petersen links to another great article by Srinidhi Raghavan — “The value of ‘crip time’: Discarding notions of productivity and guilt, to listen to the rhythms of our bodies.”
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