Robert McRuer: Crip Theory
Feb. 8th, 2018 12:02 pmAs 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 mist thought-provoking one.