colin_cox's review
4.0
Originally published in 2006, Robert McRuer's Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability remains indispensable for its scholarly exploration of able-bodiedness and heteronormativity. For example, in the introduction, McRuer writes, "Able-bodiedness, even more than heterosexuality, still largely masquerades as a nonidentity, as the natural order of things" (1). As this passage suggests, McRuer explores compulsory behaviors and ideas in Crip Theory. Later in the introduction, he writes, "I put forward here a theory of what I call 'compulsory able-bodiedness' and argue that the system of compulsory able-bodiedness, which in a sense produces disability, is thoroughly interwoven with the system of compulsory heterosexuality that produces queerness" (2). McRuer wants to understand how systemic hierarchies, while expressed and exercised differently, have a similar structural bent. That is to say, the structural injunction called compulsory heterosexuality carries the same structural mechanics as compulsory able-bodiedness. The remains me of a wonderful book on race and racism called Race Craft by Barbara J. Fields and Karen E. Fields. In it, they argue against a pearl of conventional wisdom that suggests racism emerged from race to argue the opposite: race as a construct emerged as a justification for racism. Similarly, I would argue, the disabled or "crip" body emerged not from able-bodiedness, but instead, the notion of the abled body emerged as a justification for disabled prejudice. In short, disabled prejudice preceded the construction of the normative body.
It should come as no surprise that McRuer connects hegemonic concepts like compulsory heterosexuality and compulsory able-bodiedness to capitalism. McRuer writes, "in the emergent industrial capitalist system, free to sell one's labor but not free to do anything else effectively meant free to have an able body but not particularly free to have anything else" (8). McRuer continues, "Like compulsory heterosexuality, then, compulsory able-bodiedness functions by covering over, with the appearance of choice, a system in which there actually is no choice" (8). We see the irony of what McRuer suggests in the COVID-19 pandemic. Before the pandemic, bosses and the capitalist class often scoffed at the idea of alternatives to traditional work environments, such as remote work or hybrid work schedules. Of course, remote work existed before the pandemic, but as the pandemic revealed, moving most, if not all, traditional, computer-based office work remote was not as disruptive as the capitalist class historically suggested it would be. Therefore, the pandemic disclosed what many disabilities scholars have argued for years; the reticence to reimagine work disproportionately affected people with disabilities or "crip" bodies, which simultaneously reaffirmed our system as one "in which there actually is no choice."
But McRuer's articulation of the problems with flexibility, as both a practice and a concept, is when, I argue, he sounds the most psychoanalytic. Whether by accepting someone as queer in the workplace (moments of heteronormative or able-bodied epiphany) or by adapting to scheduling changes, the flexible subject "is successful precisely because he or she can perform wholeness through each recurring crisis" (17). What I like here is McRuer's emphasis on "performative wholeness," which borrows from figures like Judith Butler quite heavily. But when I read "performative wholeness," I think of the big Other. Slavoj Žižek, for example, describes the big Other as "the order of appearances." Similar to how performative wholeness exists for no one, in particular, so too does one perform particular appearances for the big Other. But he extends our understanding of the big Other to suggest the big Other is not simply some controlling symbolic mechanism. Instead, the big Other is an audience for the transgressiveness housed within, in this case, the order of heteronormativity and able-bodiedness. However, since the big Other does not and cannot exist, no one or nothing exists to register this transgressiveness. Therefore, when we perform wholeness, when we behave flexibly in the face of a crisis, no one exists to register the elements of our performative wholeness that are, in fact, not whole.
McRuer's larger point about flexibility matters because it suggests that flexibility, as a concept, is, ironically, flexible, especially as it relates to queer and disabled subjects. He writes, "heterosexual, able-bodied characters...work with queer and disabled minorities, flexibly contracting and expanding, while queer, disabled minorities flexibly comply" (17-18). Therefore, far too often, queerness and disability become part of a hegemonic system instead of offering a challenge to it.
There's more to Crip Theory than I address here. As a piece of scholarship, Crip Theory is a tour de force. I would, however, feel remiss if I did not address McRuer's use of language. Too often, McRuer's prose, perhaps in an attempt to situate itself in a history of dense, syntactically-challenging critical theory (a critical theoretical tradition embodied by figures like Judith Butler), is unnecessarily clumsy while, admittedly, retaining its sophisticated theoretical profundity. Okay, I hope you see what I did there.
It should come as no surprise that McRuer connects hegemonic concepts like compulsory heterosexuality and compulsory able-bodiedness to capitalism. McRuer writes, "in the emergent industrial capitalist system, free to sell one's labor but not free to do anything else effectively meant free to have an able body but not particularly free to have anything else" (8). McRuer continues, "Like compulsory heterosexuality, then, compulsory able-bodiedness functions by covering over, with the appearance of choice, a system in which there actually is no choice" (8). We see the irony of what McRuer suggests in the COVID-19 pandemic. Before the pandemic, bosses and the capitalist class often scoffed at the idea of alternatives to traditional work environments, such as remote work or hybrid work schedules. Of course, remote work existed before the pandemic, but as the pandemic revealed, moving most, if not all, traditional, computer-based office work remote was not as disruptive as the capitalist class historically suggested it would be. Therefore, the pandemic disclosed what many disabilities scholars have argued for years; the reticence to reimagine work disproportionately affected people with disabilities or "crip" bodies, which simultaneously reaffirmed our system as one "in which there actually is no choice."
But McRuer's articulation of the problems with flexibility, as both a practice and a concept, is when, I argue, he sounds the most psychoanalytic. Whether by accepting someone as queer in the workplace (moments of heteronormative or able-bodied epiphany) or by adapting to scheduling changes, the flexible subject "is successful precisely because he or she can perform wholeness through each recurring crisis" (17). What I like here is McRuer's emphasis on "performative wholeness," which borrows from figures like Judith Butler quite heavily. But when I read "performative wholeness," I think of the big Other. Slavoj Žižek, for example, describes the big Other as "the order of appearances." Similar to how performative wholeness exists for no one, in particular, so too does one perform particular appearances for the big Other. But he extends our understanding of the big Other to suggest the big Other is not simply some controlling symbolic mechanism. Instead, the big Other is an audience for the transgressiveness housed within, in this case, the order of heteronormativity and able-bodiedness. However, since the big Other does not and cannot exist, no one or nothing exists to register this transgressiveness. Therefore, when we perform wholeness, when we behave flexibly in the face of a crisis, no one exists to register the elements of our performative wholeness that are, in fact, not whole.
McRuer's larger point about flexibility matters because it suggests that flexibility, as a concept, is, ironically, flexible, especially as it relates to queer and disabled subjects. He writes, "heterosexual, able-bodied characters...work with queer and disabled minorities, flexibly contracting and expanding, while queer, disabled minorities flexibly comply" (17-18). Therefore, far too often, queerness and disability become part of a hegemonic system instead of offering a challenge to it.
There's more to Crip Theory than I address here. As a piece of scholarship, Crip Theory is a tour de force. I would, however, feel remiss if I did not address McRuer's use of language. Too often, McRuer's prose, perhaps in an attempt to situate itself in a history of dense, syntactically-challenging critical theory (a critical theoretical tradition embodied by figures like Judith Butler), is unnecessarily clumsy while, admittedly, retaining its sophisticated theoretical profundity. Okay, I hope you see what I did there.
anjumstar's review
1.0
I finished this book exclusively so that I could get all my feelings out in a truly scathing review, so let's not waste any time, shall we?
Honestly, I have no idea how this book comes so highly recommended when it seems as though it's unedited. Frequent typos aside, this books reads like a college paper that an overly enthusiastic teacher's pet wrote about something that they've been dying to talk about but no one ever listens to them. And look, I'm all for passion in a subject. It's clear that Mr. McRuer is passionate. But GOD, this book reads like shit.
First of all, I swear the sentences in this book are written to be intentionally obtuse. They're long and winding with lots of parenthetical inserts and vocabulary used just to sound smart. I swear, if I hear the word 'hegemony' again (a good word, to be fair), it'll be too soon. He frequently loses himself halfway through one of these winding sentences and I'm left thinking, wait, does this have anything to do with disability or queerness? Did it ever? He gets so far away from his supposed theses so many times that now, at the end of the book, I'm not really certain I can say that he ever had one.
And you know what, I get it. This is an academic text and, truly, I'm dying to know how it's taught by teachers who use this book. Do they dare use the whole thing? Or are there particular passages that they see as gems and highlight for their students. Because honestly, at the end of this book, I'm struggling to pan for any gold. BUT the issue with this book to that end, the part that REALLY grinds my gears, is the fact that this book RAILS about accessibility. Shouts that the capitalistic "neoliberal" world that we live in is so inaccessible to the disabled, and then he puts out This Book. This book, that is nearly impossible for me to read, when I have the privilege of a college degree, and other academics who were reading this book with me. This book, that I had to rent, because buying a new hard copy would have been WAY out of my price range. This book, in how it's presented, is the antithesis of accessibility. Only the most privileged would be likely to even come /across/ this book, much less be able to afford it and pinch out any meaning from it. It's absolutely ludicrous and truly hypocrisy at its finest, and the fact that the author doesn't seem to notice makes it hard for me to believe a single word that he says.
What I gather from this book, is that Mr. McRuer had a list of, I don't know, 10 books and movies that he really liked, and wanted to write book reports on, but never got the chance, boo hoo. And so, for our pathetic reading pleasure, he decided to give us full synopses of these books and movies, so that I know more about As Good As It Gets than I do about my own life now. He spent so long giving us an in depth analysis of this movie as well as a handful of others that he seems to have lost the forest for the trees. Because look, I mention that movie in particular because it was at the beginning of the book, where I was still trying /really hard/ to glean whatever I could from the unfamiliar theories being posited in this book. And he brought up good points about the movie's success or lack thereof. The idea of a character being cured of OCD by love is not only ridiculous but harmful. And a stereotype we continued to see in media long after the publishing of this book, like in Glee. But is that something I need to spend nearly an entire intro of a textbook on. NO. IT'S NOT.
This whole thing was a glorified book report at best, rarely giving any /actual/ theory besides whining to us when media said something that he found offensive. Queer Eye said the R slur. Yeah, that freaking sucks. And yeah, the acknowledgement that marginalized groups piggyback on making fun of other marginalized groups is a great observation, super important, but did he actually spend much time delving into that? No. Instead, he spent his pages making fun of how the theme song isn't appropriate. So sorry, Mr. McRuer, it turns out that most songs speak in hyperbole. I'll go have a chat with Los Angeles about it.
And then the epilogue. This guy's like, "hmm, I've spent a whole book theoretically talking about the intersection of queer theory and disability theory (but not actually talking about it) and now I'm gonna tackle illegal immigration. Yeah, I think 10 pages should do the trick!" WHAT? Why??? You didn't NEED to use people who died crossing the border to illustrate your line of "all people become disabled if they live long enough." WE KNOW WHAT IT MEANS. It doesn't NEED names on a sign to become more clear. It's just Mr. McRuer trying to cover way too much and failing because he gets too in the weeds with his fantasy book reports.
What I will acknowledge is that for being written in 2006, most of this ages pretty well. There are a few terms that have definitely changed, but I appreciate the sensitivity with which he attempted to approach these topics. The fact that he was always trying to remind us of intersectionality was great and, I recognize, probably somewhat uncommon for the time.
He tried. He clearly cared and he tried. But he needed some collaborators to reel him in because on his own, this was a whole ass mess.
Honestly, I have no idea how this book comes so highly recommended when it seems as though it's unedited. Frequent typos aside, this books reads like a college paper that an overly enthusiastic teacher's pet wrote about something that they've been dying to talk about but no one ever listens to them. And look, I'm all for passion in a subject. It's clear that Mr. McRuer is passionate. But GOD, this book reads like shit.
First of all, I swear the sentences in this book are written to be intentionally obtuse. They're long and winding with lots of parenthetical inserts and vocabulary used just to sound smart. I swear, if I hear the word 'hegemony' again (a good word, to be fair), it'll be too soon. He frequently loses himself halfway through one of these winding sentences and I'm left thinking, wait, does this have anything to do with disability or queerness? Did it ever? He gets so far away from his supposed theses so many times that now, at the end of the book, I'm not really certain I can say that he ever had one.
And you know what, I get it. This is an academic text and, truly, I'm dying to know how it's taught by teachers who use this book. Do they dare use the whole thing? Or are there particular passages that they see as gems and highlight for their students. Because honestly, at the end of this book, I'm struggling to pan for any gold. BUT the issue with this book to that end, the part that REALLY grinds my gears, is the fact that this book RAILS about accessibility. Shouts that the capitalistic "neoliberal" world that we live in is so inaccessible to the disabled, and then he puts out This Book. This book, that is nearly impossible for me to read, when I have the privilege of a college degree, and other academics who were reading this book with me. This book, that I had to rent, because buying a new hard copy would have been WAY out of my price range. This book, in how it's presented, is the antithesis of accessibility. Only the most privileged would be likely to even come /across/ this book, much less be able to afford it and pinch out any meaning from it. It's absolutely ludicrous and truly hypocrisy at its finest, and the fact that the author doesn't seem to notice makes it hard for me to believe a single word that he says.
What I gather from this book, is that Mr. McRuer had a list of, I don't know, 10 books and movies that he really liked, and wanted to write book reports on, but never got the chance, boo hoo. And so, for our pathetic reading pleasure, he decided to give us full synopses of these books and movies, so that I know more about As Good As It Gets than I do about my own life now. He spent so long giving us an in depth analysis of this movie as well as a handful of others that he seems to have lost the forest for the trees. Because look, I mention that movie in particular because it was at the beginning of the book, where I was still trying /really hard/ to glean whatever I could from the unfamiliar theories being posited in this book. And he brought up good points about the movie's success or lack thereof. The idea of a character being cured of OCD by love is not only ridiculous but harmful. And a stereotype we continued to see in media long after the publishing of this book, like in Glee. But is that something I need to spend nearly an entire intro of a textbook on. NO. IT'S NOT.
This whole thing was a glorified book report at best, rarely giving any /actual/ theory besides whining to us when media said something that he found offensive. Queer Eye said the R slur. Yeah, that freaking sucks. And yeah, the acknowledgement that marginalized groups piggyback on making fun of other marginalized groups is a great observation, super important, but did he actually spend much time delving into that? No. Instead, he spent his pages making fun of how the theme song isn't appropriate. So sorry, Mr. McRuer, it turns out that most songs speak in hyperbole. I'll go have a chat with Los Angeles about it.
And then the epilogue. This guy's like, "hmm, I've spent a whole book theoretically talking about the intersection of queer theory and disability theory (but not actually talking about it) and now I'm gonna tackle illegal immigration. Yeah, I think 10 pages should do the trick!" WHAT? Why??? You didn't NEED to use people who died crossing the border to illustrate your line of "all people become disabled if they live long enough." WE KNOW WHAT IT MEANS. It doesn't NEED names on a sign to become more clear. It's just Mr. McRuer trying to cover way too much and failing because he gets too in the weeds with his fantasy book reports.
What I will acknowledge is that for being written in 2006, most of this ages pretty well. There are a few terms that have definitely changed, but I appreciate the sensitivity with which he attempted to approach these topics. The fact that he was always trying to remind us of intersectionality was great and, I recognize, probably somewhat uncommon for the time.
He tried. He clearly cared and he tried. But he needed some collaborators to reel him in because on his own, this was a whole ass mess.
thedisabledreader's review
challenging
informative
reflective
4.75
Content Warnings
Graphic: Ableism, Body horror, and Medical content
tdwightdavis's review
5.0
A fascinating work at the intersection of queer theory and disability studies that makes use of a wide range of cultural texts to argue for a more accessible world. McRuer argues that just as compulsory heterosexuality functions as a norm in American society to the exclusion of queer folks, compulsory able-bodiedness also functions as an extension of capital to subjugate the disabled. McRuer both crips queer theory and queers disability studies, offering a view of embodiment that challenges notions of rehabilitation and compliance.
bajoranjay's review
5.0
I really appreciated the insights and analysis, if at times it feels a bit stuck on particular sources.
McRuer weaves Derrida with Walmart ads, Bob Flanagan with Queer Eye, and Judy Heuman with As Good As it Gets within the project of highlighting the paradox of increased visibility and the allure of normativity. Drawing on queer theories and traditions, McRuer raises questions and complexities in postmodern identities and experiences. The voice of crip culture has largely been missing from this level of theory and analysis, and McRuer effectively draws it into the conversations while problematizing their analyses.
While this academic style may be inaccessible in some ways, it draws on popular cultures and arts opening the theories.
McRuer weaves Derrida with Walmart ads, Bob Flanagan with Queer Eye, and Judy Heuman with As Good As it Gets within the project of highlighting the paradox of increased visibility and the allure of normativity. Drawing on queer theories and traditions, McRuer raises questions and complexities in postmodern identities and experiences. The voice of crip culture has largely been missing from this level of theory and analysis, and McRuer effectively draws it into the conversations while problematizing their analyses.
While this academic style may be inaccessible in some ways, it draws on popular cultures and arts opening the theories.
morgandhu's review
4.0
As a disabled person, a queer person, and a freelance cultural studies scholar, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability, by Robert McRuer is exactly the sort of book you’d expect to find me reading sooner or later. There are many reasons to consider the relationship between crip theory and queer theory, and how they relate to other bodies of theory - feminist studies, race theory among them. Disability and alternative sexualities are situated in the body, they share a history of being pathologised, and seen as states requiring medicalisation, rehabilitation, and isolation. They carry high risks of stigmatisation. They challenge and subvert narratives of normality in a way that gender and race do not. As McRuer notes, “Able-bodiedness, even more than heterosexuality, still largely masquerades as a nonidentity, as the natural order of things.”
The book is structured as a series of essays examining various aspects of disability theory, or “crip theory” with particular attention to how they intersect with queer conceptualisations and experiences. The first chapter focuses on ways of “coming out” and becoming identified as disabled. McRuer points out that self-identification as disabled is something that occurs in opposition to a compulsory ablebodiedness inherent in society, much as coming out as queer occurs in opposition to compulsory heterosexuality.
“In many ways, the system of compulsory able-bodiedness I analyzed in the introduction militates against crip identifications and practices, even as it inevitably generates them. Certainly, disabled activists, artists, and others who have come out crip have done so in response to systemic able-bodied subordination and oppression. Stigmatized in and by a culture that will not or cannot accommodate their presence, crip performers (in several senses of the word and in many different performance venues, from the stage to the street to the conference hall) have proudly and collectively shaped stigmaphilic alternatives in, through, and around that abjection. At the same time, if the constraints of compulsory able-bodiedness push some politicized activists and artists with disabilities to come out crip, those constraints simultaneously keep many other disabled and nondisabled people from doing so.”
The next section of McRuer’s book is titled “Capitalism and Disabled Identity: Sharon Kowalski, Interdependency, and Queer Domesticity” and is centered around the case of Sharon Kowalski and the disability-informed strategies utilised by proponents of same-sex marriage. He argues in particular that “...intracommunity debates over gay marriage and other “normalizing” issues are centrally about disability and disability oppression.”
“...the lesbian and gay emphasis on normalizing issues such as marriage deploys a fundamentally “stigmaphobic” strategy, “where conformity is ensured through fear of stigma” (Trouble with Normal 43). The stigmaphobic strategy is most troubling, for Warner and other queers, because it proscribes larger discussions of social justice and queer cultural generativity. To cite just one crucial example: most of the complaints about lesbian and gay partners not being able to get health insurance through their spouse have not included an acknowledgement of how many people in general don’t have adequate health insurance, let alone a broader critique of the corporate health insurance industry (a critique that was fairly basic to earlier gay liberationist and feminist writing).”
He further discusses ways in which the heterosexual nuclear family, constructed under capitalism as a means of reproduction of (able-bodied) workers, is inimical to disabled domesticity. As a site of (re)production, the disabled are increasingly moved out of the home and into institutions.
As a personal sidenote on this point, when I arrive at a hospital to receive medical care, I am generally assumed to be a transfer patient from a longterm care facility. The idea that I live at home in my condition is not considered. One side effect of this is that ambulance services, which are normally required only in emergency situations by able-bodied people, but which are necessary for me to travel anywhere, are covered by various forms of government or private insurance for disabled people being transferred from institution to institution, but not for me if I travel from home to a medical facility for non-emergency care, a “loophole” which has increasingly placed me in debt. Disability and domesticity are viewed are mutually incompatible and no provision is made for those who insist that it is not.
In the third section of his book, “Noncompliance: The Transformation, Gary Fisher, and the Limits of Rehabilitation,” McRuer starts by discussing the idea of rehabilitation as reflected in the situation of Sharon Kowalski. Where Thompson and Kowalski perceived the possibility of a rehabilitation that involved a return to the home for care, and encompassed the idea of home as a queer and crip space, Kowalski’s parents could only understand rehabilitation as a return to the compulsory state of heterosexual ablebodiedness: “for them, able-bodied/heterosexual normalcy began at home, and if Sharon could not return to such a state of normalcy, then she would have to remain incarcerated in nursing homes.” With this as a starting point, McRuer goes on to “... address disability studies critiques of ideologies of rehabilitation more directly, through consideration of a few texts produced in the normalizing decade after Sharon Kowalski did, in fact, return home to live with Thompson and Patty Bresser.”
The first of these texts is a documentary, The Transformation, which chronicles the intervention of a fundamentalist Christian mission in a community of Black and Latinx transfolk; the film follows the recruitment of Sara, a trans woman, into the ministry and her transformation into Ricardo, showing “...[the] journey from the transgender streets of New York to a housed, married, and Fundamentalist Christian life in Dallas.” The second text is the journals and short stories of black writer Gary Fisher, Gary in Your Pocket: Stories and Notebooks of Gary Fisher, edited and published by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick three years after Fisher’s death from complications of AIDS. McRuer also discusses Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals.
McRuer presents mainstream concepts of rehabilitation as focused on repairing and removing alterity and recreating homogeneity. It implies that “...the rehabilitative contract (“everyone agrees”), then, essentially stipulates that, in return for integration, no complaints will be made, no suggestions for how the world, and not the disabled body or mind, might be molded differently. No complaints will be made even if the contract in effect relegates disabled people to the margins.”
Rehabilitation becomes a process of normalisation, of demanding that the queer, disabled, damaged, different, degraded self be made normal, or be excluded, institutionalised, outcast. Narratives that bring the subject home, render them as able, acceptable, capable, while remaining a queer and disabled person still are seen as resistant, non-compliant.
The fourth essay in McRuer’s examination of crip theory, “Composing Queerness and Disability: The Corporate Universality and Alternative Corporealities,” is an exploration of composition, corporations, and corporeality:
“Chapters 2 and 3 focused on highly charged institutional and institutionalized sites where cultural signs of queerness and disability appear and where, in many ways, they are made to disappear to shore up dominant forms of domesticity and rehabilitation, respectively. In this chapter, I turn to another institutional site, the contemporary university, where anxieties about disability and queerness are likewise legible. In particular, I extend the critical dialogue on composition and the contemporary university by arguing for alternative, and multiple, corporealities. I contend that recentering our attention on the composing bodies in our classrooms can inaugurate and work to sustain a process of “de-composition”—that is, a process that provides an ongoing critique of both the corporate models into which we, as students and teachers of composition, are interpellated and the concomitant disciplinary compulsion to produce only dis- embodied, efficient writers. Most important, I make the somewhat polemical claim that bringing back in composing bodies means, inevitably, placing queer theory and disability studies at the center of composition theory.”
As McRuer notes, one consequence of compulsory heterosexuality and ablebodiedness is that social and cultural institutions are constantly engaged in a process of composing straight, able bodies capable of production and reproduction within the corporate, capitalist system.The teaching of language usage, of composition, is a part of that process, of creating bodies fit to serve corporate needs through their uniform skills of composition and communication.
The fifth section, “Crip Eye fir the Normate Guy: Queer Theory, Bob Flanagan, and the Disciplining of Disability Studies” begins with a discussion of the politics of how society sees - and represents for others to see - the disabled. Taking the media text Queer Eye for the Straight Guy as a point of departure, McRuer examines the ways in which representations of disability rooted in a model of progress and normalisation fail to serve the disabled but instead support the narrative of compulsory ablebodiedness: “In other words, some things don’t keep getting better; visual rhetorics of disability do not necessarily improve over time, nor do they posit (or construct, instruct, or assure) a disabled viewer.” McRuer offers a counterpoint in the masochistic performance art of Bob Flanagan, who incorporates both bdsm and his cystic fibrosis into his work, to the point if titling one performance piece “Bob Flanagan’s Sick” - suggesting “In a moment of danger and noncompliance, however, “some future person” or collectivity might detect in that sick message the seemingly incomprehensible way to survive, and survive well, at the margins of time, space, and representation (they might, in fact, detect that surviving well can paradoxically mean surviving sick).”
Taken as a whole, McRuer’s book interrogates and challenges assumptions, constructions and representations of disability, showing how disability queers the master cultural narrative if productive, corporatised, consumerist normality. It raises questions, and dies not always offer answers, only new ways of considering the disability identity and its relation to the social structures that surround it. It’s not an easy book, but it is a most thought-provoking one.
The book is structured as a series of essays examining various aspects of disability theory, or “crip theory” with particular attention to how they intersect with queer conceptualisations and experiences. The first chapter focuses on ways of “coming out” and becoming identified as disabled. McRuer points out that self-identification as disabled is something that occurs in opposition to a compulsory ablebodiedness inherent in society, much as coming out as queer occurs in opposition to compulsory heterosexuality.
“In many ways, the system of compulsory able-bodiedness I analyzed in the introduction militates against crip identifications and practices, even as it inevitably generates them. Certainly, disabled activists, artists, and others who have come out crip have done so in response to systemic able-bodied subordination and oppression. Stigmatized in and by a culture that will not or cannot accommodate their presence, crip performers (in several senses of the word and in many different performance venues, from the stage to the street to the conference hall) have proudly and collectively shaped stigmaphilic alternatives in, through, and around that abjection. At the same time, if the constraints of compulsory able-bodiedness push some politicized activists and artists with disabilities to come out crip, those constraints simultaneously keep many other disabled and nondisabled people from doing so.”
The next section of McRuer’s book is titled “Capitalism and Disabled Identity: Sharon Kowalski, Interdependency, and Queer Domesticity” and is centered around the case of Sharon Kowalski and the disability-informed strategies utilised by proponents of same-sex marriage. He argues in particular that “...intracommunity debates over gay marriage and other “normalizing” issues are centrally about disability and disability oppression.”
“...the lesbian and gay emphasis on normalizing issues such as marriage deploys a fundamentally “stigmaphobic” strategy, “where conformity is ensured through fear of stigma” (Trouble with Normal 43). The stigmaphobic strategy is most troubling, for Warner and other queers, because it proscribes larger discussions of social justice and queer cultural generativity. To cite just one crucial example: most of the complaints about lesbian and gay partners not being able to get health insurance through their spouse have not included an acknowledgement of how many people in general don’t have adequate health insurance, let alone a broader critique of the corporate health insurance industry (a critique that was fairly basic to earlier gay liberationist and feminist writing).”
He further discusses ways in which the heterosexual nuclear family, constructed under capitalism as a means of reproduction of (able-bodied) workers, is inimical to disabled domesticity. As a site of (re)production, the disabled are increasingly moved out of the home and into institutions.
As a personal sidenote on this point, when I arrive at a hospital to receive medical care, I am generally assumed to be a transfer patient from a longterm care facility. The idea that I live at home in my condition is not considered. One side effect of this is that ambulance services, which are normally required only in emergency situations by able-bodied people, but which are necessary for me to travel anywhere, are covered by various forms of government or private insurance for disabled people being transferred from institution to institution, but not for me if I travel from home to a medical facility for non-emergency care, a “loophole” which has increasingly placed me in debt. Disability and domesticity are viewed are mutually incompatible and no provision is made for those who insist that it is not.
In the third section of his book, “Noncompliance: The Transformation, Gary Fisher, and the Limits of Rehabilitation,” McRuer starts by discussing the idea of rehabilitation as reflected in the situation of Sharon Kowalski. Where Thompson and Kowalski perceived the possibility of a rehabilitation that involved a return to the home for care, and encompassed the idea of home as a queer and crip space, Kowalski’s parents could only understand rehabilitation as a return to the compulsory state of heterosexual ablebodiedness: “for them, able-bodied/heterosexual normalcy began at home, and if Sharon could not return to such a state of normalcy, then she would have to remain incarcerated in nursing homes.” With this as a starting point, McRuer goes on to “... address disability studies critiques of ideologies of rehabilitation more directly, through consideration of a few texts produced in the normalizing decade after Sharon Kowalski did, in fact, return home to live with Thompson and Patty Bresser.”
The first of these texts is a documentary, The Transformation, which chronicles the intervention of a fundamentalist Christian mission in a community of Black and Latinx transfolk; the film follows the recruitment of Sara, a trans woman, into the ministry and her transformation into Ricardo, showing “...[the] journey from the transgender streets of New York to a housed, married, and Fundamentalist Christian life in Dallas.” The second text is the journals and short stories of black writer Gary Fisher, Gary in Your Pocket: Stories and Notebooks of Gary Fisher, edited and published by Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick three years after Fisher’s death from complications of AIDS. McRuer also discusses Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journals.
McRuer presents mainstream concepts of rehabilitation as focused on repairing and removing alterity and recreating homogeneity. It implies that “...the rehabilitative contract (“everyone agrees”), then, essentially stipulates that, in return for integration, no complaints will be made, no suggestions for how the world, and not the disabled body or mind, might be molded differently. No complaints will be made even if the contract in effect relegates disabled people to the margins.”
Rehabilitation becomes a process of normalisation, of demanding that the queer, disabled, damaged, different, degraded self be made normal, or be excluded, institutionalised, outcast. Narratives that bring the subject home, render them as able, acceptable, capable, while remaining a queer and disabled person still are seen as resistant, non-compliant.
The fourth essay in McRuer’s examination of crip theory, “Composing Queerness and Disability: The Corporate Universality and Alternative Corporealities,” is an exploration of composition, corporations, and corporeality:
“Chapters 2 and 3 focused on highly charged institutional and institutionalized sites where cultural signs of queerness and disability appear and where, in many ways, they are made to disappear to shore up dominant forms of domesticity and rehabilitation, respectively. In this chapter, I turn to another institutional site, the contemporary university, where anxieties about disability and queerness are likewise legible. In particular, I extend the critical dialogue on composition and the contemporary university by arguing for alternative, and multiple, corporealities. I contend that recentering our attention on the composing bodies in our classrooms can inaugurate and work to sustain a process of “de-composition”—that is, a process that provides an ongoing critique of both the corporate models into which we, as students and teachers of composition, are interpellated and the concomitant disciplinary compulsion to produce only dis- embodied, efficient writers. Most important, I make the somewhat polemical claim that bringing back in composing bodies means, inevitably, placing queer theory and disability studies at the center of composition theory.”
As McRuer notes, one consequence of compulsory heterosexuality and ablebodiedness is that social and cultural institutions are constantly engaged in a process of composing straight, able bodies capable of production and reproduction within the corporate, capitalist system.The teaching of language usage, of composition, is a part of that process, of creating bodies fit to serve corporate needs through their uniform skills of composition and communication.
The fifth section, “Crip Eye fir the Normate Guy: Queer Theory, Bob Flanagan, and the Disciplining of Disability Studies” begins with a discussion of the politics of how society sees - and represents for others to see - the disabled. Taking the media text Queer Eye for the Straight Guy as a point of departure, McRuer examines the ways in which representations of disability rooted in a model of progress and normalisation fail to serve the disabled but instead support the narrative of compulsory ablebodiedness: “In other words, some things don’t keep getting better; visual rhetorics of disability do not necessarily improve over time, nor do they posit (or construct, instruct, or assure) a disabled viewer.” McRuer offers a counterpoint in the masochistic performance art of Bob Flanagan, who incorporates both bdsm and his cystic fibrosis into his work, to the point if titling one performance piece “Bob Flanagan’s Sick” - suggesting “In a moment of danger and noncompliance, however, “some future person” or collectivity might detect in that sick message the seemingly incomprehensible way to survive, and survive well, at the margins of time, space, and representation (they might, in fact, detect that surviving well can paradoxically mean surviving sick).”
Taken as a whole, McRuer’s book interrogates and challenges assumptions, constructions and representations of disability, showing how disability queers the master cultural narrative if productive, corporatised, consumerist normality. It raises questions, and dies not always offer answers, only new ways of considering the disability identity and its relation to the social structures that surround it. It’s not an easy book, but it is a most thought-provoking one.
More...