Becoming can be originally attributed to theorists Gilles Deleuze and Feliz Guattari but Price is choosing to use the definition offered by Nirmala Erevelles that draws on feminist-of-color and crip-of-color works. Erevelles described becoming by saying that we can understand race and disability as entangled because in the American context the racialized violence and the materiality of that violence that occurred during the Middle Passage, used to describe the forced trafficking of enslaved people from Africa, is seen as the original space of difference, so disability as a construct should be understood as not coming after or as a consequence of Middle Passage but through Middle Passage. Erevelles' theory foregrounds the importance of recognizing specific political, historical, and material contexts. 

Theory of Becoming

Price points out that, in understanding space as political-relational, space is inseparable from time and relations. Price also notes that this inseparability relates to materialist rhetorics and the idea that space is relational if we are not centering humans or animals as the only beings with animacy and agency.

Space as Political-Relational and Time

Kerschbaum argues that discourse extends beyond spoken or written language to encompass material objects, body language, and physical environments. By integrating perspectives from materialist disability studies and critical phenomenology, the author offers a theoretical counterbalance to purely social constructionist models, arguing that the material world serves as an "active co-participant" in the construction of disability. This approach insists on recognizing the "shared world-making" that occurs between material realities and social constructions.

The Material Surround

Material/materiality refers to how we exist in the world and our embodied realities, notably material/materiality is not meant to mention labels put on our experience or how we sort our selves into groups.

University of Wisconsin - Madison

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

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

Crip Spacetime

Material

Relating to discourse consisting of how we define who is part of a group both colloquially and through legal, medical, and other formalized definitions

Discursive

To be legible as being disabled builds off material-discursive existences to explain how someone is seen by the broader world as disabled doesn't only affect whether they are called disabled or the words that are used about their existence, and that others expect them to use about their existence, but it also affects how people get access to medications and treatments, and if someone is seen as deserving of accommodation.

Legibility

Karen Barad uses the term entanglement to describe the coconstitutive nature of material and discursive and uses the idea of entanglement to argue that we don't exist in ways that are fully self-contained and free from interaction with multiple frames of existence.

Learn Before

Related

Learn After