The Crip Camp Yet to Come: Crossing Borders with Queer/Crip Theory

• In Event: Crip Elsewheres: Disability Worldmaking across Borders

Abstract

This presentation critiques the almost universally-lauded 2020 documentary Crip Camp, particularly attending to the ways in which it reproduces disability rights discourses that are very U.S.-centric and, simultaneously, hetero- and cisnormative. In the process, I work to imagine through my analysis a “crip elsewhere” that approaches disability through different discourses emerging from different locations. Crip Camp, nominated for an Academy Award and co-produced by Barack and Michelle Obama, is a social issue film that begins at a camp for disabled young people (Camp Jened, in upstate New York), proceeds to (successful) disability rights protests in the 1970s, and then generically resolves into incorporation (for some) into the capitalist and work-based system as it currently exists, with the signing of the Americans with Disabilities Act being the triumphant moment marking such incorporation. The film resolves not only into incorporation into the neoliberal capitalist system as it is, but into a heterosexual normalcy that is reinforced through multiple images of heterosexual marriages and (subsequently) children in the documentary’s final moments. I deploy Jacques Derrida’s notion of the “democracy yet to come” (impossible but absolutely necessary) to put forward, through a reading of a very different documentary, the “crip camp yet to come.” The documentary in question is Violeta Ayala and Daniel Fallshaw’s La lucha [The Fight]. La lucha details the 2016 protests in La Paz, Bolivia, put forward by disabled activists, demanding monthly subsidies for all diasabled people in the country. Activists in La Paz occupied a government space demanding these subsidies in the longest disability protest ever. Nonetheless, given its U.S. location, Crip Camp repeatedly and triumphantly stresses that the protests narrated in the documentary represent the longest civil rights protests ever, at least in the history of the United States. I argue that Crip Camp exports a U.S. discourse of rights, incorporation, and heteronormativity that actively obscures crip elsewheres. Reading the supposed “failure” of the La Paz action, I examine how intersectional crip movements elsewhere, refusing U.S.-centric vocabularies, nonetheless offer us “revolutionary” (in Deleuze and Guattari’s sense) alternatives to the hegemonic vocabularies emanating from the U.S. Teoría tullida [crip theory] and “disca” activism, as these have developed in Latin America, actively materialize alternatives to U.S.-based disability rights activism. In particular, these alternatives refuse to dissociate those who are disabled from those who are “sick.” Crip Camp relies upon a narrative that positions disabled people as always and everywhere “not sick.” La lucha and Latin American disability activisms in general refuse this easy assumption of subjectivity in and through (and against) sick people, considering instead ways of being in solidarity that allow for imagining collective, sick and disabled, futures.

Author

• Robert McRuer, George Washington University