Disability Studies: Theory

Disability Studies & Crip Theory

What is "crip theory"?

CRIP THEORY: a strand of critical cultural analysis that, alongside ‘queer perspectives and practices’, has ‘been deployed to resist the contemporary spectacle of able-bodied heteronormativity’, as Robert McCruer (Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability, 2006) puts it... The term ‘crip’ emerged in disability movements, as an adaptation and reworking of the derogatory word ‘cripple’; as McCruer states, the term's ‘positive valences are…multiple’. Crip theory and practice entails sustained forms of coming out, and the recognition that another, more accessible world is possible in which disability is no longer the raw material against which imagined and sometimes liberationist worlds are formed. Crip theory has its own radical and critical agenda, draws much upon personalized narratives, and has generated illuminating readings of films and other popular cultural forms.

From: "Crip Theory," in A Dictionary of Sports Studies, in Oxford Reference. Retrieved December 2022