3. Life Strike

You should know before reading this chapter that I have put off writing it as long as possible. While I do not typically procrastinate, this chapter has been an exception because I feel guilty writing it. I feel guilty because what I’m writing is as much a lesson I need to learn as it is an argument I believe others need to read.

This chapter is largely about the labor of crip life, the work of living with disability, and I will be the first to admit that I am not proud of my relationships with labor or work. It’s not only that I work too much but also that I struggle to know myself outside of my labor. It’s embarrassing, honestly, how little I know about myself beyond the labor I do. When I strip away the pages I’ve read this week, the words I’ve typed since breakfast, the lessons I’ve planned so far this semester, the conferences I’ve attended, the committees I’ve sat on, the faculty meetings I’ve endured, the office hours I’ve held—what’s left?

Part of me wants to insist that quite a lot is left. I have a vigorous exercise routine. I have a partner I love, and we have a home and dog we care for. I have friends. I have recipes I enjoy following and television shows I watch. I have a meticulous skin care routine. I have a farmer’s market I visit on Saturdays. I have a life, flourishing and full. But another part of me, the more candid part that my crip negativity is drudging up—kicking and screaming from the pit of my stomach—is less certain about the quality of my life outside of my labor. This candid part of me feels compelled to admit that the majority of my exercise is dedicated to detoxifying my body from the stress of my job. My partner has threatened to leave me numerous times because he says I spend too much time at the office. I rarely see my friends, and I can barely keep up with their texts. I haven’t made any of my favorite recipes in months because I’ve been too tired, and I often fall asleep midway through trying to watch an episode of anything. My skin is breaking out constantly, regardless of what I lather on top of it. The farmer’s market is actually a Costco. I have a life, but it is sad and hanging on by a thread. I’m sad and hanging on by a thread. I’m working too much, but I don’t know how to stop. Not really, truly stop. I’m not even sure I know what stopping would look like. This chapter is meant to be a move in the right direction—a move toward saying “enough is enough,” a move toward tapping out until the conditions change, a move toward striking on life as I know it.

In the previous chapter, I proposed access thievery as a daily praxis, a way of orienting ourselves toward others and mobbing through the world together to ensure our collective access needs are met. Access thievery is about scavenging ways to make life work when there’s no other option. Sometimes we have to do less-than-respectable things in order to make do with the conditions of our life as it is. This chapter, though, leans more deeply into the grim absolution of crip negativity. Here I want to consider what happens when life isn’t working or can’t work any longer. By “life,” I am referring to the assemblage of activities that occupy our time. For many of us, the majority of life’s activities are in some way related to labor, whether paid labor (e.g., working a job and keeping up a side hustle) or unpaid labor (e.g., caregiving and domestic responsibilities). There is also the labor of life itself: our bodyminds require labor to sustain themselves over time. Feeding them, bathing them, keeping them warm and dry, offering them rest, exercising them, caring for them when they are injured or in pain are all forms of life’s labor. Much like the heart organ must labor continuously to pump the body with fresh blood, so too must each of us labor on our bodies in order to keep ourselves alive.

For crips, the labor of our living takes on additional, rhetorical heft because of the stigma surrounding our “special needs.” Despite the fact that all people, disabled and nondisabled alike, require labor to live, disabled people shoulder an especial burden for the labor that goes into our maintenance, and we are made aware of our own burdensomeness every day. From the sympathetic looks we watch our parents receive while we’re growing up, to the human resource manager begrudgingly offering us our accommodations, to the televised politicians blaming the national debt on our measly welfare checks, we are well aware of how others perceive the labor that keeps us alive. It is perceived as too much labor, unnecessary labor, labor with a poor rate of return, wasted labor.

We are aware, also, of how much unrecognized labor we take on as a result of these perceptions: the endless paperwork to secure benefits, unending calls to the insurance company, frequent trips to the disability services office, requests to move pharmacies, upping the number of appointments with our therapists, and stints in the hospital or rehab occasioned by the intensified stress on our bodyminds. Plus, there are all of the minor inconveniences—the time-sucks—that accompany being disabled in a world built for ableds, such as waiting on an accessible parking spot to open up, having to roll around to the back of the building to find a ramp, charging the batteries for a hearing aid or prosthetic, delaying a meeting until the interpreter arrives, asking people to repeat themselves multiple times because they’re speaking too quickly or with an affective intensity that doesn’t register, needing to clean the desk a second time before lunch because your coworker used it without asking, or demanding virtual options for an event (yet again) because there’s a goddamn pandemic. The great irony of people blaming disabled folks for requiring too much labor is that those people don’t know half of the labor we actually require or that much of it is a direct result of the obstacles they put in front of us. There is so much crip labor wrapped up in being disabled, and much of it is just navigating different shades of ableism.

When I say that I want to consider in this chapter what happens when life isn’t working, part of what I’m referring to is the overwhelming amount of uniquely crip labor that disabled people find themselves performing. It’s so much; it’s too much. But the clause “life isn’t working” refers also to how the labor of life can infringe on parts of our lives that are not meant to be work, that were not originally labor but have come to adopt its qualities. This infringement often takes shape as exhaustion, overstimulation, or irritability that makes it difficult for us to give time and attention to the things we care about without feeling like we are laboring even more. The laboriousness of life turning life itself into labor until we can’t even distinguish between the two. It’s a degree of overwork that plasters work over everything we do.

It’s as if we have clocked into a job called living and don’t know how to go on break or head home for the night. Everything feels like a chore. Every conversation becomes an item on a to-do list. Every text, an obligation. Every walk or roll outside, an insult to an already tired body. Every meal, an annoying interruption of the day’s agenda. On and on. It becomes increasingly difficult to differentiate between labor and nonlabor when everything makes you feel the same way: tired, sad, indifferent, empty, lonely, bored, frustrated, anxious, angry, overwhelmed, or any of the crip negative feelings that limn the experience of disability. The flavor of labor intensifies until you can’t taste anything else. The labor required to sustain your life dissolves into a pool of labor-living that makes it nearly impossible to recognize life outside your labor. This is when you know your life can’t work any longer as it is. Life isn’t working when life itself feels like work.

A life strike is a crip negative response to the work of life or to chronic labor-living. Inspired by anti-work politics and labor movement rhetoric, a life strike pursues a total relinquishing of all labor beyond what is required for our sustenance. Life striking may include refusing waged work, but such a refusal is neither required nor sufficient. Life striking is a broader bowing out, a spiritual retrenchment, a pulling back into oneself as a way to call oneself forth again. To strike from life is to strike from the modes of relation and integration organized around labor that claim to know us, to define us, and to make us whole. To strike from life is to die to the world as it’s extracted and sold back to us, so we might find in ourselves another life—another way to live—that is more attuned to the bodyminds we have, to how we want to occupy them, and to how we want them to occupy the world.

Cripping Labor Politics

Bringing questions about disability and labor together, as a life strike does, is a well-established practice in the disability community. Labor politics have been at the center of disability activism in the United States since the latter’s inception. As I describe in the first chapter, much of the impetus behind the disability rights movement in the 1970s was to advance educational and career opportunities for disabled people, thereby providing more accessible pathways to enter the workforce. As Tanya Aho argues, however, disability’s labor politics have historically done less to radicalize either labor or the category of disability than it has to produce variations of “labor-normativity” that domesticate the disabled citizen through waged work. Labor-normativity instrumentalizes the language of access and accessibility to secure disabled people’s employment “as a driving force of one’s life, a significant site of identity construction, and the major influence on one’s life cycle, daily rhythm, and imagined future” (2017, 322). By consistently centering issues of labor access and workplace accessibility without attending to the violence of labor-normativity, much of disability rights activism has embraced labor-living as necessary to our liberal citizenship and to our legibility as subjects.

Despite the importance of securing equitable opportunities and protections for disabled workers, we cannot forget that neither opportunities nor protections within neoliberal capitalism address the fundamental problem of liberal humanism—the true target of crip negativity’s bad feelings. Regardless of the efforts we make toward more and better jobs for disabled people, it remains the case that labor-normativity is designed to produce labor-living; that is, to induct disabled people into a socioeconomic system that disguises labor as life. This disguise works effectively so long as some forms of difference can be recuperated as marketable commodities while others continue to mark fungible populations for targeted debilitation. In the context of disability, access to labor cannot be achieved under capitalism without crystalizing the boundaries around the category of disability. Such crystallization ultimately obfuscates people’s crip labor, which does not aid the means of production, and further ossifies the disposability of people living on or beyond the margins of disability. In other words, it becomes more difficult to adduce the debilitating, stratified violence of labor-living when laboring itself is cited as evidence only of a person’s successful rehabilitation into social and civic life. How can we recognize when life isn’t working, for ourselves or others, if work is meant to make life worth living?

Unfortunately, answering this question becomes all the more challenging when we begin to unpack the layers of labor-normativity that have come to structure the scope and terms of contemporary disability politics. Some layers are relatively easy to parse, such as those commercialized variations of disability activism that trade in representation and visibility. A recent Victoria’s Secret ad campaign featuring multiple disabled models comes to mind (Miranda 2022). Efforts such as these are typically engineered to demonstrate a company’s or institution’s inclusivity by displaying disabled workers (e.g., lingerie models) or by acknowledging disabled people as a contingent of consumers (e.g., lingerie buyers). Bestowed with the capacity to both produce and consume, labor-normativity suggests, disabled people can effectively fold themselves into the social citizenship of neoliberal capitalism.

Other layers of labor-normativity can be trickier to identify. Consider, for instance, the forms of disability advocacy that aim to broaden the horizon of employment opportunities for disabled people (Owen and Harris 2012). Since many welfare programs, excluding the dramatically underfunded Supplemental Security Income (SSI), require a current or recent employment record, disabled people are often forced to compete for unsafe and underpaid jobs. Even with antidiscrimination laws in place, many disabled people struggle to find work, especially work that is relevant to their passions and interests. As a result, those who do secure employment wind up hesitant to raise concerns about the conditions of their labor for fear of retaliation (Kumar, Sonpal, and Hiranandani 2012). Expanding employment opportunities promises to alleviate the pressure placed onto disabled workers to settle for undesirable jobs, and it shifts the burden of competition to employers, encouraging them to improve working conditions to attract and retain employees. Within this framework, the law of supply and demand is reappropriated to demonstrate a demand for work among disabled people with the hopes of stimulating a rise in the supply of accessible and desirable jobs.

The problem with reappropriating the law of supply and demand is that it acquiesces to capitalism as a necessary condition for achieving equity for disabled people. As Nirmala Erevelles argues, creating more jobs neglects to address the fact that access to waged work is an individual solution to a systemic problem. Increasing employment opportunities may extend social citizenship to some disabled people, but it also reinforces the contingence of social citizenship on employment—a contingence that capitalism weaponizes against the most vulnerable populations. Under capitalism, there will never be enough work to go around; labor must remain competitive. Those individuals deemed least likely to aid in “the accumulation of profit,” which generally include people with intellectual disabilities, folks with limited access to education, people with a history of incarceration, and undocumented people, will never be offered safe and reliable employment—at least, not until another fungible population comes to take their place (2002, 19). People occupying this category of state-sponsored precarity become “immaterial citizens” whose primary function is to bear the brunt of capitalism’s failures (21). Since it is an essential condition of capitalism that demand outpace supply, an entire class of individuals must remain out of work in order for the total supply of jobs to remain lower than the demand for them. The resulting, requisite class of nonworkers is not only blamed for failing to fulfill their civic-qua-consumer responsibilities under neoliberalism but also strategically excluded from social citizenship in order to preserve the currency of citizenship itself.

Efforts to improve employment opportunities for disabled people are steeped in the rhetoric of integrative access that fuels labor-normativity. Entrance to the workforce only appears liberatory in a context in which labor remains a metric for human valuation. It seems to me that the most productive—by which I mean politically generative—relationship between disability and labor is one that refuses to be such a metric. Rather than wedging the category of disability into neoliberalism as a meager modification to capitalism, it is worth asking whether disability might launch a more fundamental challenge to labor-normativity. What if there were a crip labor politics that cared less about disabled people’s employment or employability than about cripping labor and interrogating the ableist conditions under which labor-living is rendered quotidian?

This question has already been answered in part by disability justice activists who have imagined models of care, mutual aid, and interdependence that sidestep the compulsory nature of work under capitalism to embrace community networks that celebrate each person’s unique strengths and capacities. I am especially fond of Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha’s thinking on “care webs” that proposes care as a “collective responsibility,” a social mapping of what people need and what they can offer (2018, 33). The metaphor of a web gestures toward care’s scope and complexity. Care should not be reducible to static roles of giver and receiver, nor should only one person be responsible for all of the care that another person needs. Instead, care should be distributed across a community. We each maintain different skillsets, privileges, and levels of access to resources that others need at different times, in different ways, and to different degrees. The care that my lover offers me is different from the care I offer him; likewise, the care I offer my lover is not the same that I offer my friend Gavin—nor is the care he gives me the same that I pay my therapist to provide. Care takes as many shapes as the bodyminds that require it. Similar to bodyminds, care is fluid, situated, personalized, and sometimes intimate. Care can also be exhausting, frustrating, laced with jealousy or resentment, and at times overwhelming.

Another reason I admire Piepzna-Samarasinha on the topic of care is their willingness to wrestle with the challenges that accompany sustaining care webs in a society that remains unsuited to such community-based forms. Caregiving burnout can happen. Access friction is real. What I need and what others have to offer do not always align. What I have to give isn’t always what others demand. Sometimes two people’s needs rub up against each other in a way that hurts our hearts. “I’ve often seen crip-only spaces fill with feelings of betrayal and hopelessness when we cannot fulfill some of our friends’ needs,” Piepzna-Samarasinha admits (65). It’s easy to feel let down by our communities when our care needs go unmet. It’s even easier to feel angry when others ask us for care while we’re still waiting to receive care ourselves. The challenge of care webs is not building them but maintaining them through the rain, dust, and wind that are grief, difference, and change. This maintenance is its own kind of crip labor that, while necessary in the long battle against neoliberal capitalism, comes at a steep cost. The cost is labor-living: feeling like the care we are meant to gladly give is yet another form of work. Extractive. Depletive. Debilitative. Sometimes even our efforts to liberate ourselves from work can feel like more of the same. Sometimes the work of cripping labor ends up crippling us.

How to Strike a Life

It is in recognition of life’s many, overlapping labors—waged and unwaged, economic and relational, social and personal—that I am convinced of the need for a life strike. As an intentional and temporary lapse of labor, a life strike erects boundaries around oneself in order to heal from the wounds of labor-living. Admittedly, a life strike is unsustainable and, not unlike efforts to create more jobs, an individualistic response to a systemic problem. However, unlike the individualism of waged work, which is meant to conceal the structural flaws of capitalism, the individualism of a life strike empowers each of us to honor our unique needs to ensure the long-term sustainability of care-based communities. It is a way for me to acknowledge when the life I’m living has become too laborious, perhaps so much so that it doesn’t feel much like a life at all anymore.

A life strike could take many forms, depending on the severity of a person’s labor wounds and the material conditions of their lives. In an ideal world, people could strike from life quite literally and hibernate like bears for months at a time. I wish people could quit their jobs and delete their email accounts and hole up in a cabin in the woods or spread out on a beach or hike an entire continent with no timeline or schedule. For some folks, these kinds of strikes are possible, and for those folks, I am genuinely so happy. But the reality is that most of us cannot afford to strike from life in such a way because we have laborious responsibilities that cannot be feasibly or ethically avoided. I’m thinking of parents with young children. I’m thinking of disabled adults who require assistance with one or more daily tasks. I’m thinking of people with limited incomes or who have frequent doctors’ appointments or who are incarcerated or who are the primary caregivers for a partner, family member, or friend. I’m thinking of most of us, for whom the possibility of a consummate life strike just isn’t going to happen.

I would like to believe, nevertheless, that life striking does not need to be totalizing in order to be valuable. As Kathi Weeks explains in her crucial book The Problem with Work, a refusal of work according to an anti-work politics “is not a renunciation of labor tout court, but rather a refusal of the ideology of work” (2011, 99). Life striking is not only about ending the practice of labor-living but also about revising our orientation to labor-normativity. Crip negativity exposes labor-normativity for what it is: a prime example of the fundamental failures of liberal humanism expressed through neoliberal capitalism. Crip negativity invites our bad feelings toward the ideology of work. It also recognizes our collective existence in relation to this ideology, as well as the ways this ideology shapes and delimits the feasible refusals at our disposal. Crip negativity allows us to reject the world as it is and yet remain cognizant of our place in it. Life striking, as a practice of crip negativity, is no exception: it is at once ambitious in its intention and flexible in its terms. A life strike might mean quitting a job, but it might also mean cutting back your hours. A life strike could include a lengthy getaway to a remote location, but it could also be a long weekend in your apartment with no scheduled events. A life strike might be cutting ties with someone, but it might also be a series of honest conversations that clarify your boundaries. Borrowing from Sunaura Taylor, a life strike “implies a right not to work as well as a right to live,” which is to say that the purpose of striking isn’t only to refuse labor but also to allow our festering bad crip feelings to break open a new life (2004, 11). A new life unbound or undefined by the labor we perform. A new life that is irreducible to our labor, whether that labor is work or care or self-sustenance. A new life that “challenges the mode of life now defined by and subordinated to work” (Weeks 99). A new life that is filled with living.

As I admit earlier in this chapter, I make no claim to knowing what a living-filled life is like. I am still in pursuit of it, still in the process of renegotiating my relationship with labor. I’m still figuring out how to strike from my own life. At the moment, I am learning how to rest, utterly and deeply. I am taking comfort in the guidance of Tricia Hersey’s Nap Ministry, which explains, despite its name, that rest is “about more than naps” (2020b). Rest, which is one form that a life strike might take, is inventive. Situated at the nexus of Black liberation theology, womanism, Afrofuturism, reparations theory, somatics, and community organizing, the Nap Ministry theorizes rest as “layered, nuanced and an experimentation” that lends itself to improving the conditions of our world by giving us the time and space to imagine it differently (Hersey 2021). By envisioning my life strike as a restful experimentation, I can admit that I don’t know what its results will be or how it will end for me. Bowing out from labor-living doesn’t always require a plan for ducking back in. Sometimes deciding to strike is enough for now; deciding to rest is enough for now; choosing to experiment with your “enough!” can be enough for now. And then in time . . .

Perhaps my strike will encourage someone else to strike as well—in their own way and suited to their own labor-living injuries. Life striking, like all crip negative practices, is most powerful when it encourages our bad crip feelings to be felt collectively. While there is value laden in each of our individual strikes, a single strike does not harness the communal energy that crip negativity promises. It is only “when we stand in the gaps for each other and decide to be relentless in our support and witness,” Hersey writes of rest, that “we can shift community” (2020a). Standing in the gaps means listening when someone says they’re too tired or trusting that others will listen when you admit you’re exhausted. It means taking over when someone says they can’t make it or being gentle with yourself when you’re the one who doesn’t come. It means showing up when someone says they need you and being brave enough to ask for help when you need it. It means expecting that sometimes everyone in your care web will need life strikes at once and being willing to stick it out through conversations after midnight to ensure everyone gets what they need.

Life striking, though demanded individually, is practiced in community. It is with “a radical understanding of interconnectedness,” says Hersey (2020a), that we can collectively negotiate refusal. Both one at a time and all together, we insist that we are not doing this anymore. We will not take part. We will not give more of ourselves. We refuse the access we’ve been given. It is not enough; it is too late; it is to a room we don’t want to occupy. We are taking a nap. We are breaking up. We are leaving. We are done for now, for today, for forever. We are indulging our bad crip feelings. We are on strike.

4. Cripping Critique