Yearning for Crip Horizons

• In Event: Crip Elsewheres: Disability Worldmaking across Borders

Abstract

Against the atmosphere of growing despair at the persistent and increasing inequalities, violence, war devastation and divestment, I propose to cruise crip horizons, from postsocialist elsewheres. I adapt the queer-of-color theorist José Muñoz’s notion of utopian horizon and—by bringing in critical disability epistemologies, feminist intersectional theorizing and critiques of neoliberalism borne from postsocialist “peripheries”—imagine what is im/possible, what expands and what breaks through pragmatic, rational, and linearly curative political horizons.

US imperial narratives have had a particularly-vested interest in (post)socialist histories -- either to position the (post)socialist subject as the source of knowledge about totalitarianism/authoritarianism and fascism/nationalism—as if these particular(ly) bad “-isms” had some intrinsic link to Eastern Europe—or to look there for a possible “prefiguration of the future of the West” (Dzenovska, Kurtović 2018). The newest political developments seem to complicate these predictions as we see the nationalist movements in (Eastern) Europe invigorated by US developments. Seemingly counterintuitively, some modulations of nationalist conservativism accomodates disability as a form of legitimisation. Similarly, disability nationalism coexists alongside and within ablenationalisms.

Building off of my forthcoming book Rehabilitative Postsocialism (2025) that explores political horizons of postsocialist social imaginaries, I explore the concept of crip horizon and its capacity to accommodate voices of the unheard, lives not imagined worthy of living, too twisted, too feeble, too disabled, too addicted, too excessive and self-absorbed, too inadaptable, too infectious. The usage of crip here is not a move away from disability. Rather, I understand and use both terms as conjoined and inseparable—and this does include mutual tensions and conflicts—attempts at imagining the world otherwise. Disability and crip, each in its own way, yet referencing each other, contribute to making the world more encompassing to lives often seen as too troublesome, too demanding of resources while contributing too little to society, lives assumed to be lived in a perpetual (economic, moral, and symbolic) “debt to society.” Crip horizon opens space for “political orientations, affiliations, and solidarities still emerging” (Chen et al. 3), ones that are built across forms of (ableist, sexist, racialised, classed) marginalization and abandonment. I explore the political and conceptual strength of crip horizon, forms of coalitions and bonds that gesture towards it, and how crip horizons carry resistance, desire and joy in worlds that feel too hard for living.

Author

• Katerina Kolarova, Charles University in Prague, Czech Repu