Crip Elsewheres: Disability Worldmaking across Borders

Session Submission Type: Paper Session

Abstract

Through transnational collaboration, we aim with this panel to continue the movement in disability and crip theory away from some of the dominant paradigms that have been developed through the vocabularies of U.S. and British disability studies and disability rights movements. Many important modes of thought have been developed in those contexts, but at this point, the interdisciplinary field is increasingly critiqued for its North American and West European dominance. We contend, in part, that this critique is actually a critique of the hegemony of English in the field; disability studies scholars outside the U.S., Canada, and the United Kingdom read the scholarship generated in those locations, but it is rarely true that crip thought in other locations (what we are calling here “crip elsewheres”) is positioned at the forefront of what Kateřina Kolářová calls in her paper “crip horizons”; that is, desired disabled futures and new ways of being-in-common outside of Anglophone models. We pivot to Latin American and Eastern European locations with our panel, questioning—as Natalia Pamuła and Agnieszka Król insist in their abstract—“the utility and legibility of the Western tools to conceptualize events taking place in other cultural, historical, and geographical contexts.” Robert McRuer turns from what he terms “the almost-universally lauded 2020 documentary Crip Camp,” which triumphantly offers a progress narrative toward the Americans with Disabilities Act (often offered as an export to the rest of the world), towards crip activism in Bolivia that could be seen as failing in that it did not achieve its goal of a universal income for all disabled people in the country. La lucha [The Fight] did, however, generate socialist vocabularies for solidarity across difference: disability, gender, sexuality, indigeneity, and class. Kateřina Kolářová rescripts José Esteban Muñoz’s notion of queer horizons to think, particularly in postsocialist locations, about crip horizons that accommodate not the disaster nationalism that has most fully matured in the U.S. (but also Brazil, India, Hungary), but that is germinating everywhere; Kolářová instead looks towards postsocialist imaginaries that imagine other ways of living, including ways of living that are only infrequently taken up in U.S. and British disability studies: “lives not imagined worthy of living, too twisted, too feeble, too disabled, too addicted, too excessive and self-absorbed, too inadaptable, too infectious.” Natalia Pamuła and Agnieszka Król position borders as “population management techniques producing disability through expulsion.” This is arguably true literally at the border they analyze: they study the increasingly-militarized Polish-Belorussian border where disabled, debilitated, and crip bodies are policed (and in the process try to imagine alternative vocabularies). This is arguably also true at the borders of our field, which has arguably expelled thought from crip elsewheres, at times passively, from neglect (etymologically, disregarding, not reading) but at times actively from an ongoing privileging of an Anglophone disability studies that materializes what we might see as “crip somewheres” at the expense of the crip elsewheres we desire.

Sub Unit

• Annual Meeting of the American Studies Association

Individual Presentations

• The Crip Camp Yet to Come: Crossing Borders with Queer/Crip Theory - Robert McRuer, George Washington University

• Yearning for Crip Horizons - Katerina Kolarova, Charles University in Prague, Czech Repu

• Cripping the Polish-Belorussian border? People on the move, disability, and racialization in Eastern Europe - Agnieszka Król, Jagiellonian University Medical College; Natalia Pamula, University of Warsaw

Chair

• Alyson Patsavas, University of Illinois at Chicago

Comment

• Alyson Patsavas, University of Illinois at Chicago

Biographical Information

Alyson Patsavas (Chair and Commentator) is Assistant Professor in the Department of Disability and Human Development at the University of Illinois Chicago (UIC). Her scholarship focuses on cultural discourses of pain, chronic illness, trauma, and disability.

Robert McRuer is Professor of English at the George Washington University where he teaches disability studies, queer studies, and critical theory. He is the author, most recently, of Crip Times: Disability, Globalization, and Resistance.

Kateřina Kolářová teaches at the Faculty of Humanities, Charles University, Prague. Her work has focused on social and cultural imaginaries of otherness and social attitudes towards "disability", mechanisms of exclusion, feminism, and queer/LGBT* identities. Her most recent work explores the bio-social dimensions of metabolism, relationship between human and non human lives, ecological dimensions of digestion and how we coexist with microorganisms, toxic chemicals, and other "unclean" elements/entities. Currently, she is also undertaking a research into HIV/AIDS and politics of collective immunity/susceptibility to viral threats. Her forthcoming monograph Rehabilitative Postsocialism (Michigan University Press, 2025) explores postsocialist transformation and its effects on the so-called minorities and social imaginaries of civil society. Recently, she has edited (with Martina Winkler) Re/imaginations of Disability in State Socialism: Visions, Promises, Frustrations (Campus Verlag/Chicago University Press, 2021).

Dr. Agnieszka Król is a sociologist affiliated at Jagiellonian University in Krakow, Poland. Her research interests revolve around critical disability studies, social inequalities, and gender and sexuality studies. Her recent book Reprodukcja a reżimy sprawności (2022) [Reproduction and ableist regimes] tackles stratified reproduction, negotiating and subverting ableist norms by women with disabilities in Poland. She’s engaged with social justice movements and works with international human rights organizations.

Natalia Pamula is Assistant Professor at the American Studies Center at the U of Warsaw, Poland. Her research focuses on disability studies, gender studies, and Polish socialist and post-socialist culture.