4. Cripping Critique

Crip Negativity as Methodology

The tools I’m referring to are of an affective sort. Consistent with crip negativity’s commitment to holding space for bad crip feelings, its tools can also be described in terms of feeling—not only our own feelings but also those of others, especially those others’ feelings that reciprocally come to shape our feelings toward ourselves. My thinking on this methodology is indebted to Julie Avril Minich, whose “critical disability studies methodology” responds to a question similar to the one driving this chapter: “What do we want our work to do?” (2016). Minich proposes that the answer lies in the absences dotting the field of disability studies, to who and what are missing. For her, the value of a critical disability studies methodology is that it deemphasizes the category of disability in order to interrogate “the social norms that define particular attributes as impairments, as well as the social conditions that concentrate stigmatized attributes in particular populations.” Her methodology attends to the production of disability, to how it is made and sustained across cultures and lines of difference.

A crip negative methodology similarly decenters the category of disability, but it also decenters disability’s analysis. Crip negativity dwells less on the norms structuring disability than on the processes by which the category is secured through its deferrals, through that broad category of debility that names disability’s excesses and residue (Puar 2017). While disability and debility often overlap—sometimes producing each other—their categorical distinction can be useful in order to emphasize the ontological violence entailed by the recuperation of disability into a legible social category. Crip negativity dials in on who is left behind when being disabled becomes a respectable way of being in the world.

While a critical disability studies methodology focuses on the conditions that surround disability, a crip negative methodology zooms out to capture the stratified formation of these conditions, alongside those that regulate or withhold the recognition of some people’s illnesses, traumas, and impairments as disabilities. That is, crip negativity adopts a scalar perspective to show both the norms underpinning the category of disability and the norms preventing the category’s democratization. I find it helpful to think about this methodological distinction through the language of affect: What feelings produce the conditions that shape disability? And how are these feelings tethered to forms of harm, debilitation, and violence that, through their obfuscating power, work to consolidate the category of disability in the moment of its emergence? By shifting toward affect, we can more easily back away from the subject of disability to chart its ontological distribution and distributed effects.

As a methodology, crip negativity encourages us to name the feelings that have historically been projected onto disability—pity, disgust, grief, anger, and resentment, to name a few—alongside those feelings that predict its liberal rehabilitation—pride, love, desire, and contentment, among others. Then, importantly, crip negativity urges us to further consider how these feelings regulate the boundaries of disability, as well as how they coincide or conflict with the feelings that mark its exclusions, such as indifference, apathy, hostility, and fear. These latter feelings are those that subtend others’ fungibility and illegibility—feelings felt toward people living on the bad side of town, people fleeing from bad parts of the world, people rotting in confinement for doing bad things, people hurting as collateral damage in wars against bad regimes, people dying en masse for being dealt a bad hand.

Crip negativity can be about the bad feelings we bear toward a culture of detachment, toward a lack of feelings that precipitates our own bad feelings. Ableism is sometimes just a fancy word for a society that doesn’t give a fuck. Crip negativity is sometimes just a fancy phrase for how it feels to never have been given a fuck about or to know the damage caused to others when no fucks are given. In this sense, a crip negative methodology can sometimes be a mode of critique, a tool for calling out the affective norms that sustain a culture of detachment and for calling in disabled and nondisabled people alike who wield the category of disability to silence others’ bad crip feelings. This is crip negativity as a mode of accountability. Critique toward correction. Using our own bad crip feelings to reveal the conditions that cause them.

This mode of accountability notwithstanding, a crip negative methodology is not reducible to critique. Crip negativity is critical, to be sure, and can at times be called on for the purpose of critique, but crip negativity does not lend itself only to the modes of critique generally espoused under the banner of negativity. I am thinking especially of queer theory’s antisocial thesis introduced in chapter 1, which risks overstating the enlivening possibilities of abjection. Lee Edelman proposes “enlarging the inhuman” as a practice of queer negativity intended to illuminate the violence of humanism (2004, 152). However, the desirability of inhumanity is checked by its implicit ascription to disabled, poor, and racialized people. The antisocial thesis perpetually funnels its post-structuralist critique toward a project of resignifying abjection (as “a haunting, destructive excess”) rather than disavowing abjection altogether (153). Efforts to resignify or reclaim inhumanity inadvertently uphold a plasticized and plasticizing economy of humanness, wherein all variations and degrees of humanity are speciated on a sliding scale toward white cis-hetero-ablenormativity (Jackson 2020). Crip negativity, by contrast, declines to work within this project of intra-human speciation. Instead, the affective spacetimes generated by bad crip feelings make room for refusal on multiple scales, including the refusal of humanist logics and the refusal of the labor of critique.

In much the same way that crip negativity bends its critical eye reflexively toward the category of disability and toward crip, so too does it remain cognizant of the limits of critical negativity as a mode of (dis)engagement. To be clear, there’s no question that sometimes critique is necessary. Critique is foundational to this book, and I remain skeptical of “postcritique” arguments that downplay the importance of critique for challenging systems of power. Critique should not be straw manned into a singular genre and then repudiated without qualification (Lee 2020). Critique can be many things, and my intention is not to flatten the nuance of any of them. When I refer to “the limits of critical negativity,” I’m talking about the value of critique weighed against the value of our labor. Since the work of critique is never over—there will indeed always be more to critique—sometimes the value of a particular criticism is not worth the work of performing the critique.

Sometimes the cost to our emotional, physical, and spiritual health of explaining our bad crip feelings is too high, especially for those of us who routinely play the role of the critic. At times, this role is more or less assigned. Ahmed (2017) likens this assignation to the burden of a “feminist killjoy”—someone who feels compelled to critique injustice because no one else will do it. While critiquing injustice is certainly useful, Ahmed also reminds us to ask “how the requirement to be useful is distributed” (2019, 10). Too often are disabled people tasked with the responsibility of bringing attention to ableism, thereby transforming us into crip killjoys. A common example of this responsibility is produced by retrofit models of access, which provide accommodations only upon request and which remain standard in most institutional settings, including universities (Dolmage 2008). Forcing disabled students, staff, and faculty to secure accommodations through a disability services office, instead of allocating resources to ensure access for everyone regardless of their diagnostic status, is paramount to displacing the labor of creating access back onto those of us who don’t yet have it.

The problem with this displacement is twofold. First, it absolves nondisabled people and institutions of their complicity with ableism because it allows them to ignore disabled people until explicitly instructed otherwise. Second, it demands a tremendous amount of crip labor that is not guaranteed to produce any results. Accommodations can be delayed, and requests can be outright denied. Not to mention, the labor involved in pursuing contingent access can produce “recursive debility,” according to Emily Lim Rogers (2022), among those whose symptoms are exacerbated by extraneous exertion. Sometimes, the labor of critique can cause more bad crip feelings than it excises. Negativity can lead us to critique, but critique can also lead us back to negativity. Once this cycle has been established, it can be difficult to break. Negativity begetting critique begetting negativity and back again.

As if this cycle weren’t concerning enough, there is another form of critique occasioned not by the absence of other critics (e.g., when you have to point out a menu’s inaccessibility because no one else in your family cares to check) but by the inverse. I am referring to a mimetic logic that can make critique feel obligatory when you’re surrounded by others who are being critical. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick ascribes this mimetic logic to a kind of para-political paranoia, which “seems to require being imitated to be understood” (2002, 131). The more often a critique is made, the more important it can seem to make again. Mimesis is especially apparent on social media, where the performance of critique can be linked to the maintenance of a reputation. On Twitter, where I am active in disability, queer, trans, and academic communities, the performance of critique corresponds with the daily discourse, an ever-changing cycle of controversial tweets, articles, or events that dominate the conversation. It is not unusual to encounter dozens of nearly identical tweets all containing some variation of the same critique. In this case, critiquing the problematic object of the day—whether it’s an insensitive tweet by a celebrity, a poorly vetted New York Times article, or a repulsive piece of anti-trans legislation—can feel coerced. The act of critique ultimately becomes not about shifting anyone’s perspective about an object but about reinforcing everyone’s perspective about you. This is critique for the sake of performance, not politics; or rather, critique for the sake of performing politics.

Admittedly, I am generalizing. Not all critique on social media is mimetic, and not all mimetic critique is reducible to virtue signaling. There’s a cathartic quality to being critical, even if your critique isn’t particularly original. Commiseration feels good. It can be a form of sharing bad crip feelings, and it can be an effective way to build crip negative communities. It is important to remember, though, that critique does not need to be the only outlet for our negativity. The reciprocal relationship between critique and bad crip feelings can make performing critique feel compulsory. Since bad crip feelings can produce the exigency for critique, it can also feel like critique is the only route to alleviating our bad crip feelings. But this circular logic is an effect only of negativity’s inertia. Unless alternative vents are made available, the number of bad crip feelings will multiply through critique, not shrink.

Let’s use an example. For those of us who are active in online disability communities, it can feel necessary to comment on each problematic representation of disabled people in media—each casting of a nondisabled actor to play a disabled character, each overcoming trope, each supercrip. This feeling of necessity comes from our “faith in exposure,” our belief that critique will reveal the source of our bad crip feelings and, once revealed, the source of our bad crip feelings will evaporate (Sedgwick 138). But this faith is misplaced. Trusting in exposure presumes that people don’t already know about the problems we’re seeking to expose (141). Often, our critiques don’t reveal anything new to people, such as when they’re broadcast to our friends and followers online. Even when our critiques reach new audiences, making a problem visible is not always a sufficient motivator for change. The persistence of ableist casting decisions and narrative tropes, despite decades of disability criticism, would suggest that perhaps awareness isn’t the only problem. In fact, sometimes exposure can make a problem worse, such as when it draws attention to a vulnerable population who is already a target for state violence (Johnson and Kennedy 2020). If a lack of exposure isn’t always to blame, and if repeated critique can worsen our bad crip feelings, then perhaps critique isn’t always the best use of our limited time and energy.

Fortunately, crip negativity offers more than an invitation to criticism. It operates in an alternative spacetime to paranoia that gives us a way out of the hamster wheel of critique. We might recall from chapter 1 that crip negativity runs on crip/trauma/mad time and, as such, is more concerned about holding space for bad feelings in the present than about making promises to fix the future. As a methodology, crip negativity remains an affective praxis: an expression of bad crip feelings felt cripply. This praxis invites us to sit with people and memories and texts that share in our crip feelings, rather than to position ourselves only and ever against those who do not. To “sit with” is to assume something akin to what Sedgwick calls a “reparative position” (146). In this position, paranoia is relinquished in favor of a different kind of discomfort, not the certain discomfort of negatively charged critique but the uncertain discomfort of surprise and hope. Surprise because you realize for the first time that you aren’t alone in your bad crip feelings. Hope because you begin to wonder, however hesitantly, how feeling bad and feeling crip with someone else might change your feelings entirely.

Typically, hope is cataloged as a good feeling. Crip negativity rightfully leads us to be suspicious of good feelings. It’s no secret that hope has been known to function as tool for placation and avoidance. In its purest form, though, to hope is merely “to entertain expectation of something desired” (OED Online 2022). Hope can be a good feeling, but it’s also and always contiguous with bad feelings because it emerges from lack, from want, and from need. Hope does not require confidence or assurance; it is not faith. Hope is openness to the possibility of the unknown, a willingness “to entertain expectation.” When felt in community, hope—along with surprise—is part of what differentiates crip negativity from other variations of critical negativity. Hope suspends crips, however slightly, above the floor of resignation. It keeps us alert and attentive. It reminds us that our bad crip feelings are worth feeling because they, in turn, remind us of what we’re worth. Hope gives crips a structure for our negativity. One that demands no recognition, no gratitude—only a promise not to dissolve into the abyss of our pain.

In this context, a reparative position does not deny the affective intensity of crip negativity. It is not meant to replace bad crip feelings with good crip feelings. The reparative, to be clear, is not rehabilitative. Unlike Anna Mollow’s (2012) “rehabilitative futurism,” the reparative does not attempt to cure our bad crip feelings or to realign their expression with able-normative expectations for “healthy” and “appropriate” emotional responses. Crip negativity coexists with the reparative because they are both “additive and accretive” (Sedgwick 149). When practiced reparatively, crip negativity gels through the deep affective connections established across crip negative differences—across the range of identities, positionalities, and community affiliations that bear their own bad crip feelings. I don’t need to convince you to see the world like I do because I don’t believe that seeing the world particularly offers any guarantee that the world will change particularly. I do believe, however, in urging you to feel deeply about the world, to attend to others’ feelings about the world, and to map how our differential feelings inform the ways we treat one another. Perhaps by feeling this jumble of feelings together, we won’t feel so alone when we eventually return to the work of changing the world for the better.

Changing the world for the better, after all, remains the ultimate goal. Despite that crip negativity is itself a practice of refusal, including a refusal of the labor of liberation, it is also a practice meant to be taken up in the context of that labor. Meaning: crip negativity is not a permanent bowing out, not a totalizing disavowal, not an isolating position. There is an ethics to crip negativity, to how and for what purpose we indulge our bad crip feelings. Our feelings are our own, and in an ideal world, we’d be able to feel them whenever, wherever, however, and for however long we want. But given the stratification of humanity under liberalism, feelings cannot be disarticulated from power. As such, the expression of bad crip feelings must sometimes be negotiated among crips who all have bad feelings in need of expression. At the end of the day, what matters is our shared commitment to the right of expression and our mutual acknowledgement that one person’s expression can impact the conditions of another’s. Minich reminds us that “the ethical value (or lack thereof) in a disability studies methodology will lie in the form that methodology takes” (2017). The same holds true for a crip negative methodology, which gleans its ethicality from the purposes for which we use it.

Crip negativity is meant for those who have historically been denied the freedom to indulge their bad crip feelings, for those whose forms of crip expression are policed and disciplined, and for those whose bad crip feelings are sidelined by the persistent focus on the feelings of those who more closely approximate normativity. To feel bad crip feelings cripply includes being aware of crip’s contingencies, that is, to feel crip cripply by attending to the power dynamics that determine whose feelings deserve our attention and when. Sorting through the mess of bad crip feelings in community with other crips is where the ethical value of crip negativity lies. It’s the sitting with that makes crip negativity worthwhile. Crip negativity does not orient us toward the future or toward justice or toward measurable, material change, but it does allocate us a spacetime to collectively mourn how much change is needed. We can’t change the world for the better until we allow ourselves to feel the depth of our grief. It is only from those depths—dug further still from the multiplicative effect of crip negative communion—that we can even begin to know what change is needed. Crip negativity jars us loose from the world as we know it, so that later on we can more conscientiously articulate the world as we want it.

Sitting with Crip Negativity

In the spirit of sitting with others’ crip negativity, I want to end by placing one of the awkward poems I wrote in high school into conversation with two other poems—each by an acclaimed poet with whom I have had the pleasure of sharing bad crip feelings. Both of these poets know what it’s like to be overcome by negativity, to be held in its grip, as well as what it feels like to bear that negativity all alone. Their poems, though far superior to my own, carry with them similar scars. I often seek out the work of Travis Chi Wing Lau and Cameron Awkward-Rich to remind me that I am not the only one who feels bad crip feelings. In this final section, I return to their work once again to read their negativity alongside my own.

A part of me does not want to share my old poetry because I am embarrassed by it—no, because I’m embarrassed by the boy who wrote it. I want to love Awkward John; he is me, after all. But after all these years, I still harbor so much pain toward the life that scared boy lived. This pain takes shape as resentment and disgust at the boy himself. (Truthfully, I am shaking as I write these sentences.) I am so ashamed. I wish I didn’t hate the child I once was because that child doesn’t deserve hate, because I am that child, because Awkward Logan doesn’t deserve hate. But I do hate him. I do hate me. I do. I’m so sorry. I—

Breathe. One moment. Bad crip feelings being felt cripply.

Hate, like love, is a practice, not a position.

In an effort to turn my own crip negativity inward, toward the way that ableism lingers in the bad feelings I bear toward myself, I need to share with you who that self once was and maybe still is—in all his/their fragile, earnest, frightened, yearning glory. The poem is fittingly, awkwardly titled “Life on Earth,” and it begins like this:

Reading these stanzas is difficult for me. I feel so deeply the force of the bad feelings that my young self felt. I believed myself to be a fraud because performing cisheteronormativity and neurotypicality felt like lying. My whole life was spent lying, so lying was the only way I knew how to live. It was not just that I struggled to embrace myself but that I could not even fathom the softness that such an embrace would provide. I felt ignored, passed by, doomed, and lost. Not even the Bible, which I held fast against my chest before bed, could reassure me. I was a child who had yet to live but was already prepared to die.

The lines that stand out most to me are the ones that speak to why I was so despondent: “I would attempt to rise up and stand / But reason calls and reason lands.” Reason. A word I thought meant truth but have since come to realize is just what others expect you to endure. A core tenet of Enlightenment thinking, Reason is at the foundation of liberal humanism, taking credit for all it promises and justifying all it withholds. Reason is freedom, autonomy, liberty, and independence, alongside homophobia, cissexism, racism, and ableism. Reason is a Southern Baptist church, an abusive home, a school filled with bullies. Reason purports to jettison feelings in favor of objectivity but, in the process, excises all of us with feelings toward Reason itself.

Awkward John may not have had the words to share his feelings about what Reason was doing to him, how it was fueling his pain and teaching him to turn his bad feelings against himself. But Awkward Logan does have the words, at least some of them, and I am grateful to be in community with others who have more and better words than I do. Words that name hurt and story injury. Lau’s poem “Pithy” and Awkward-Rich’s “Essay on the Awkward / Black / Object” are built with these words. Both have helped me to mine the depths of my own negativity, and they’ve also taken me to new depths, burrowing into dark places I’d never known before. From these depths and dark places, I’ve learned to feel the world differently—in much the same way I hope this book helps you to feel the world differently too. We’re compiling an archive of bad crip feelings, all of us, which is another way of saying we’re building a world on crip/trauma/mad time. We’re feeling together—now and later, here and there—shoveling our way toward a core of pain that many of us have spent our lifetimes avoiding. We’re getting there, though: incrementally, collectively, and cripply.

In his book Paring (2018), Lau paints a world of pain; or at least, a world as it is experienced by a bodymind in perpetual pain. Toward the end of the collection, “Pithy” serves as the clearest articulation of that painful world’s core. The piece comprises fifteen enumerated stanzas, each including a refrain set off by the word “pith,” for terse and tissue. The poem begins,

While the initial line of each stanza describes what is observable about the speaker’s experience of disability—the movements, postures, and lapses that accompany a body in pain—the refrain captures the invisible context boiling the speaker’s negativity beneath their surface.

Bad crip feelings seethe alongside the physicality of disability as unspoken thoughts and fears and fantasies. They are connected, inseparable even, from the experience of living in a particular body, and yet they are stoked by the conditions that surround it. “3. I take a tumble after I miss the curb,” Lau writes. “Pith: had you not caught me by the arm, I would have finally broken my first bone” (23). The speaker is in pain because their body feels like its breaking, but their negativity is fueled by the ableism of a world from which they find themselves breaking away. A world where clarity of thought and speech determines a person’s respectability: “8. I cannot form sentences. Non-sequitur, organic hesitancy. / Pith: I would never wish upon anyone a life in the thickness of fog. The shame of being lost in it” (23). A world where dependence is something to fear: “9. I can’t make it up the stairs while cradling the box. / Pith: I hate admitting that I will have to depend on you more and more. That you will have to lie to me that it’s okay” (23). A world where labor defines who you are: “I look perpetually exhausted. / Pith: pain redefines what labor means” (23). The pith in this poem is the crip negativity burning through the speaker’s veins against Reason. It’s the same negativity that hums a low note to all of us crips, eating away at our meat, as we watch the world go on from our windows and from the other side of our screens—the one that buzzes our crip feelings louder and louder until they rattle our scorched bones, and we feel like we might die.

But we don’t die, usually. Instead, we learn that there’s something rather astonishing about feeling as cripply—as intensely—as we do. There’s a power laden in our negativity that emerges all on its own if we let it. We don’t need to find our power. We just need to let it flow. For Awkward-Rich, the power of bad crip feelings emanates from the interstice of awkwardness and Blackness. In “Essay on the Awkward / Black / Object,” which appears in Sympathetic Little Monster (2018), Awkward-Rich meditates on the racialization of “awkward,” which is both the speaker’s father’s last name and, for the speaker, a mode of Black being. While awkwardness is not a diagnostic category, its adjectival form allegorizes disability, in much the same way that my peers heralded my neurodivergence by calling me Awkward John. As a racialized term, “awkward” reveals the contingence and tension between race and disability: at once overlapping and yet cleaved apart. Reflecting on the history of slavery through which many African Americans received their last names, Awkward-Rich writes, “You already know the story. A man is made into a thing & sutured to it. The name” (18). The name “Awkward” recalls a violent, familial history but also gestures toward an escape from it, a flight from its inheritance: “Awkward as both punishment & method” (23). As method, awkwardness is a form of negativity and refusal. It is, at once, a recognition of the status of Blackness in an antiblack world—“As long as the object works it is bound to its own annihilation” (21)—and a resignification of that status. “The solution?” the poem’s speaker tells us plainly, “Fall. Fall apart. Decay” (21). To fall apart and decay is to allow the wash of negativity to soak you through. It’s to breathe with the chill of your skin as the negativity dries. To adopt such affective stillness, to be held fast in the iciness of bad crip feelings, is to embrace the power of refusal.

This isn’t the reclaimed power of the category of disability, a power bestowed by legibility. This isn’t really empowerment at all. This power is sourced internally by refusing Reason. It’s to refuse the expectation of endurance. It’s to refuse your own instrumentalization—as disabled, as racialized, as queer. Not because you aren’t those things but because you aren’t those things in the way they want you to be. They as family, as employer, as school, as government, as society, as capitalism, as ableism, as white supremacy, as cisheterosexism. To fall. Fall apart. Decay. These things we can do. We do them so very well. So well, in fact, we might call them symptomatic of a debility drive: not ushered into death or disability—contra Edelman and Mollow—but receding back into debility, into fungibility, into the obscurity of invisibility that comes with refusing categorical adherence. This is not a romanticization of abjection nor a negligent omission of people who never had access to the category of disability to begin with; rather, it is a condition of abolition for us all. It’s here in the dark that we can breathe deepest, not because the air is particularly clean, but because there’s no reason to be embarrassed if we cough, choke, or slobber on ourselves. It’s here in the dark that we find one another, each groping our way through our bad feelings. And upon our fingers’ first contact, we break down completely. Because now we can, at last. Because it feels so good to feel this bad with one arm under your neck, another around your waist, and my knees cupped behind your legs: awkward and crippled and together.