Price pulls on the work of Chen et. al. who situate crip in relation to disability studies as a disruptor with crip disrupting the mythos and imagined futures of disability studies by bringing into conversation positions, subjects, acts, and sites of study not all of which are purely academic. 

Crip and Disability Studies

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.

University of Wisconsin - Madison

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. 

Crip

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

Crip Spacetime

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

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. 

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