Engaging Diverse Voices through Research & Resources

Critical disability theory refers to a diverse, interdisciplinary set of theoretical approaches. The task of critical disability theory is to analyze disability as a cultural, historical, relative, social, and political phenomenon...The use of “critical disability theory” here intends to capture a broader swath of approaches, including those originating in the field of philosophy. Critical disability theory is a methodology, not a “subject-oriented area of study” (Schalk 2017). As a methodology, the theory "involves scrutinizing not bodily or mental impairments but the social norms that define particular attributes as impairments, as well as the social conditions that concentrate stigmatized attributes in particular populations." (2017) .

Crip theory began to flourish in the interdisciplinary fields of disability studies and queer theory in the early decades of the 21st century. These fields attend to the complex workings of power and normalization in contemporary cultures, particularly to how institutions of modernity have materialized and sedimented a distinction between “normal” and “abnormal” and to how subjects deemed “abnormal” have contested such ideas. Disability studies pluralizes models for thinking about disability: if a culture of normalization reduces disability to lack or loss and positions disability as always in need of cure, disability studies challenges the singularity of this medical model. Disability studies scholars examine how able-bodied ideologies emerge in and through representation, and how such representations result in a culture of ableism that invalidates disabled experiences. Crip theory, in turn, emerged as a particular mode of doing disability studies, deeply in conversation with queer theory. The pride and defiance of queer culture, with its active reclamation or reinvention of language meant to wound, are matched by the pride and defiance of crip culture. Crip theory, however, is generatively paradoxical, working with and against identity and identification simultaneously. Crip theory affirms lived, embodied experiences of disability and the knowledges (or cripistemologies) that emerge from such experiences; at the same time, it is critical of the ways in which certain identities materialize and become representative to the exclusion of others that may not fit neatly within dominant vocabularies of disability. Many works in crip theory focus on the supposed margins of disability identification as well as on the intersections where gender, race, sexuality, and disability come together. Crip theory, additionally, offers an analytic that can be used for thinking about contexts or historical periods that do not seem on the surface to be about disability at all.