A subsection of disability studies theory, whose name was inspired by queer theory, that emphasizes creating a theoretical approach to disability that looks at how disability functions as an ideology, a paradigm, an epistemology, and a system of oppression in addition to an identity experience.

Crip Theory 

It is important to note that crip, similar to the term queer which was theorized to operate in a similar way to disrupt cis-hetero normativity, is based on the reclamation of a derogatory term. In this case, the term crip is a reclamation of the terms crip and cripple which have historically been used as derogatory terms to describe people with disabilities. 

Crip and Reclamation of Language

Whereas disability can be viewed as an identity group formed out of political definitions in the United States with people of various different lived and embodied experiences getting rights under the same law and protected class, crip does not aim to shore up disability rights but to disrupt the category of "ability" and the ideas based on that category.

Difference between Crip and Disability

The term psychocrip seems to have originated with Ephemeral Theory Collective member James Overboe who collaborated with Richard Ingram on a series of workshops entitled PsychoCrips the point of the workshop was to draw attention to the commonalities in experiences between those who have experienced disabling effects of psychiatric treatment and those who have experienced the traumatizing effects of medicalizing disability. The term was turned into an identity term - similar to the reclaiming of crip - by Erick Fabris who used the term to reclaim crip for individuals historically described by the word crip but who also identify with identities of madness and psychiatric survivorship. 

Psychocrip

Price uses the term crip as defined in her work "The Bodymind Problem and the Possibilities of Pain" to describe someone who engages in the act of cripping which is to use the disruptive potential of disability to call into question normative spaces, positionalities, and interactions. 

University of Wisconsin - Madison

Crip spacetime is a material-discursive reality situated in the pluriverse and experienced by disabled people.

Crip Spacetime

Price, M. (2024). Crip Spacetime. Duke University Press.

The theory of crip spacetime was developed through data from the Disabled Academics Study which is a multi-year study drawing on a survey with more than 250 disabled respondents, interviews conducted with thirty eight disabled academics and published accounts by disabled academics. The study launched in 2012. 

Methodology of Crip Spacetime

Crip spacetime is a form of pluriversal politics. Arturo Escobar defined pluriversal politics as recognizing that the realities of oppressed groups are tangibly different from those of the privileged group and that there is no singular subaltern or marginalized reality, so to exist as someone from an oppressed group you recognize existence is made up of many realities.

Pluriversal politics

Material-discursive refers to how crip spacetime is made up of how individuals interact with the material world and discourse. The hyphen between material and discursive shows that there is not a neat dividing line between material and discursive since they are both coconstitutive. 

Material-discursive

Crip

Price situates crip spacetime as a distinct reality that is often not perceptible to those not experiencing it.  Perceptibility is defined by Kerschbaum to not simply look at misunderstanding or omission but rather to encapsulate a process of attention and dis-attention.

Perceptibility

Price outlines the following as the scholarship and ways of knowing Price has drawn from in theorizing Crip Spacetime:
- Critical Disability Studies
- Crip-of-Color Critique
- Material Rhetorics

Learn Before

Related

Learn After