Feminist queer crip

For Kafer, ‘[h]ow one understands disability in the present determines how one imagines disability in the future’ (2). By attending not only to emergences, but also to silences around ‘disability’, through Feminist Queer Crip Kafer makes political the often implicit belief that we all desire the same future; namely, one without disability. She challenges us, therefore, to imagine the future otherwise. There are themes of refusing futures set out, community and possibility running through the book; importantly, in line with her feminist, queer, crip approach (which, she makes clear is methodology as much as content) Kafer is not afraid to confront paradox and contradiction. Although she challenges the reader to consider the ‘ableist failure of imagination’ (4), she acknowledges the difficulty of this, and notes it is a failure she herself holds. Kafer therefore aids the reader by taking us on a feminist, crip, queer journey through a range of what she exposes as a set of seemingly diverse but ‘not-really-so-disparate’ (169) texts. Over seven chapters the book cleverly and unsentimentally entwines personal narrative, stories previously told in the media, and activist endeavours with deep theoretical engagement. She challenges us to consider and contest how the binaries of disabled/non-disabled fit into discourses of abnormal/normal; body/mind; same/different; public/private; hope/despair; natural/unnatural; pure/impure; natural/technological; nature/human; and them/us.

At no point is Kafer afraid to ask and grapple with hard questions. In the introductory chapter she asks, for example, ‘who can “claim crip”?’ Recognising the difficulties of terminology, she points out that most disabled people do not claim crip (nor disability as a political identity). Some have therefore criticised crip/queer approaches for forgetting the ‘real’ lives of disabled people (see, for example, Sherry’s [2013] piece in The Feminist Wire). This book, however, disputes such an assertion: embodied lived experiences of crip/queer are at its heart. ‘To claim crip critically’, writes Kafer, ‘is to recognize the ethical, epistemic, and political responsibilities behind such claims; deconstructing the binary between disabled and able-bodied/able-minded requires more attention to how bodies/minds are treated differently, not less’ (13). To this end, in Chapter One she importantly asks ‘[h]ow do I respond to the fact that the theories we deploy, the speculations we engage, play out across different bodies differently?’ (44). To respond to her own question, Kafer’s theoretical engagement is always cutting across movements and disciplines; bringing in arguments from disability studies and activism, alongside black feminist texts, queer theories, environmental movements and ecofeminism, amongst others. Furthermore, she is not only interested in places in which disability emerges, but (perhaps more so) in places where it remains an unspoken silence.

To this end, Chapter One is about time. Here, by engaging with both the more established critiques of heteronormative time coming from queer studies (Edelman 2004; Halberstam 2005) and the newer accounts of ‘crip time’ (for example, Chandler 2010), Kafer asks: ‘can we crip queer time?’ (27). Disabled people, she points out, are always a threat to the future. Yet, recognising the importance of coalition, she also points out that ‘[q]ueer kids, kids of color, street kids – all of the kids cast out of reproductive futurism – have been and continue to be framed as sick, as pathological, as contagious’ (32). She therefore argues the importance of dialogue between movements and experiences in order to challenge ableist heteronormative time. Neither, however, is Kafer afraid to point out moments of departure; and she highlights ‘longevity’ as an important departure to be examined between the queer and crip critiques of time. Whereas queer theorists have responded to ‘the future’ through refusal (‘Fuck the Future’, as Carla Freccero puts it; 28), Kafer wants to imagine futures in which disabled people are valued. Through a discussion of ‘diagnosis and undiagnosis as strange temporalities’ (37) she challenges us to imagine a time and place that ‘cultivates disability’.

Once again starting with embodied lived-experiences, in Chapter Two Kafer puts Ashley X¹ at the centre of her desirably disabled future. She argues that it is those most peripheral, often considered as ‘exceptional cases’, such as Ashley X, whom need to be at the centre of crip/queer activism. Continuing her interrogation of ‘time’, Kafer argues the fear of/for Ashley X was her ‘embodied asynchrony’ – the claim of ‘grotesque’ being put on Ashley for having ‘the mind of a baby, in the body of a child’ . The ‘cure’ sought, therefore, was to ‘re-synchronise’ Ashley by ensuring her body remained childlike. Kafer also points out, however, that it was not just adulthood that was feared of/for Ashley; femaleness – particularly the possibility of pleasure within this femaleness – was seen as especially grotesque. The story of Ashley X therefore haunts Kafer. She is haunted through anger (that it happened, and probably will again), through shame (that Ashley could not be saved or reached out to), but also through betrayal – why, she asks, did feminists not speak up?

The lack of attention paid to disability within feminist movements is a continuing concern in the book. Chapter Three thinks this through by addressing the place of ‘disability’ within feminist utopian visions. Kafer cleverly reads Piercy’s (1979) novel, Woman on the Edge of Time, alongside the case of Candy McCullough and Sharon Duchesneau, a deaf/Deaf lesbian couple who actively sought a deaf baby. Pointing out the eugenic tendencies in much utopian writing (feminist and otherwise) and the criticism directed at McCullough and Duchesneau, Kafer once again highlights disabilities perceived threat to the future. Rather than stopping there, however, she suggests the importance of ‘counternarratives to mainstream stories about the necessity of a cure for deafness and disability, about the dangers of nonnormative queer parents having children’ (84).

The imaginings of these counternarratives continue into Chapter Four. In this chapter Kafer tackles one way disability is thought about in relation to the future – as something to be overcome. She does this through interrogation of billboards erected by the Foundation for a Better Life. Kafer points out that these billboards used a variety of images of disabled people to remind an assumed non-disabled audience that ‘it would be worse, you could be disabled’. The strength of the normative, ableist imagination, Kafer points out, make this campaign hard to challenge; ‘As one of my students said when I mentioned this campaign to her, “What kind of person says bad things about a billboard praising a little girl with cancer?”‘ (94). Challenging these harmful, individualistic narratives, however, Kafer re-imagines the mantras of ‘courage’, ‘determination’ and ‘opportunity’ to ‘envision a media campaign that favours dissent at least as much as unity, that recognizes political protest and activism as signs of courage, that is as concerned with collective responsibility and accountability as personal’ (100). To give us an example of this, Kafer ends this chapter with a tail of her own crip activism.

Chapter Five engages with Haraway’s (1990) ‘Cyborg Manifesto’. Although she points out that cyborg theory is not necessary, she asks how it could be useful to disability studies scholars. Furthermore, she argues that as discussions of the cyborg are one of the rare places in which disability continually appears within feminist texts, disability scholars need to attend to it. Critically reading not just the cyborg manifesto, but also critiques of it, Kafer highlights that disabled people are separated from non-disabled people as an essentialist state of cyborg that non-disabled people will not achieve. Imagining an alternative non-ableist cyborg politics, Kafer argues, would mean refusing ‘to isolate those of us cyborged through illness of disability from other cyborgs’ (118). Resisting any fetishisation of the disabled body, Kafer calls for attention to the ‘material realities’ of those implicated through conversation; she stresses thinking of the cyborg as about relational political practices, rather than essentialist readings of abnormal/normal bodies/minds.

Chapter Five, Kafer tells us, is ‘an intervention in disability studies, one that recognizes key texts and terms in feminist theory, such as feminist commentary on the cyborg as part of the archive of disability studies’ (105). Chapter Six does similarly important ‘interventionist’ work; this time, however, Kafer places disability within environmental politics. Again challenging what is often taken as implicit, Kafer interrogates what is meant by the ‘natural environment’. She points out that the natural is also built – both through built trails (which are only taken notice of when made accessible), but also through the constructions and deployments of language of ‘nature’, ‘natural’, and ‘the environment’ (129). Drawing on the work of Eli Clare (1999), Kafer asks how we can ‘crip the trail map’ (140) through stories of crip embodiment in nature.

The final Chapter Seven connects feminist queer crip writing and movements through three points of concern: bathroom politics, environmental justice, and reproductive justice. Kafer tells us that she is interested not only ‘in pushing the parameters of disability studies to include these not-really-so-disparate sites, [… but also] making clear this work is already happening’ (169). The blurring activism and the academy is, for me, one of the most exciting points of this book. Rather than a conclusion as such, three appendices accompany this chapter. The first is a checklist put together by People In Search of Safe and Accessible Restrooms, a campaigning group that explicitly links disability and gender access. Second is a leaflet distributed by activists with multiple chemical sensitivities, which explains ‘going scent free’ as an access issue. Kafer points out that campaigns such as this link access, space and body politic to disability studies and environmental justice. The final appendix is a letter written by a group of ‘people committed to both disability rights and reproductive rights’ (177). This letter attempts to break down a pro-choice/pro-life dichotomy that, Kafer explains, can set feminist and disability activists in opposition to one another.

Through Feminist Queer Crip, Kafer makes clear that none of her analyses can be considered a ‘conclusion’; rather, they are always incomplete. She terms her work as ‘answers in progress, partial attempts to think disability otherwise’ (171), which she hopes will continue discussion and debate – ‘generating alternate histories and futures’ (171). Indeed, this book will be of interest to activists, students and academics, working along feminist, queer, crip lines, who want to imagine futures otherwise. Some chapters may be tricky for those unfamiliar with the texts discussed. However, every chapter – not least the activist presents – provide a starting place for much needed dialogue of subjects that are too often silent.

Jenny Slater
Sheffield Hallam University, Sheffield, UK
[email protected]
© 2014, Jenny Slater
http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/09687599.2013.888850

Notes

1. In 2007 news broke that disabled nine-year-old Ashley X had three years earlier been subject to medical intervention to stop her growth and ‘development’ through hysterectomy, the removal of breast buds, and high doses of oestrogen to stop growth.