crip theory cultural signs of queerness and disability

For example, homosexuality was long considered a mental illness, and today continues to be pathologized by psychiatry under diagnostic categories such as Gender Identity Disorder. Inversely, queerness is not just like disability, but has often been understood as a disability. Even disabled people who are heterosexual defy heteronormativity, since the straight ideal is not crip. Beyond this, he argues that disabled people are, in a sense, sexually queer, since heteronormativity assumes able-bodiedness. In this sense, Dean shows that sexuality and disability are analogous, and LGBTQ activists and theorists and disability activists and theorists have shared political agendas and good reasons to be allies.īuilding on Robert McRuer’s essay that you read above, Dean does not simply argue that disability is like queerness, however.

Non-heterosexual people and disabled people have both been oppressed by the the value that society places on normalcy, and queer and crip theory are both critical of social norms and processes of normalization. As Dean explains, “queer” is not opposed to heterosexuality but to hetero normativity, and similarly, “crip” is not so much opposed to able-bodiedness as it is opposed to the norms of ability or compulsory able-bodiedness. In its derogatory usage, “queer” simply meant that a person deviated from the norm, whether this was in virtue of their body, mind, gender presentation, or sexual orientation.Īs Dean points out, while it is primarily LGBTQ activists and scholars who have transvalued “queer,” taking it up as an identity and a source of pride, disability activists and scholars have done similar work with the term “crip.” Crip theory, like queer theory, is fundamentally anti-normative.

In this short keyword essay, Tim Dean explains that although “queer” is now primarily associated with non-normative sexuality, it was historically a pejorative label applied to disabled as well as non-heterosexual people.

Crip theory cultural signs of queerness and disability