#crip negativity

[1000rh]

It is with this appreciation for the way negativity holds open crip, trauma, and mad time that I find myself unable to part with Edelman, even as I acknowledge the flaws in his thinking. The antisocial thesis allows me to indulge my negativity without demanding justification or immediate political application. Sometimes I just want to be sad! I just want to be mad! I just want to be disappointed. My intention is not to reclaim the antisocial thesis so much as it is to expand it, to turn its negativity back on itself—that is, to add queer theory’s embedded racism and ableism to the list of reasons I’m grieving. In some ways, I am parroting Muñoz’s own methodological reasoning in Cruising Utopia, where he chooses to cite Martin Heidegger, a philosopher with debated Nazi sympathies, over other thinkers who are more frequently cited in queer studies. Muñoz writes, “Although I too have a great disdain for what Heidegger’s writing became, I nonetheless look on it as a failure worth knowing, a potential that faltered but can be nonetheless reworked in the service of a different politics and understanding of the world”. No Future and the antisocial thesis are, for me, failures worth knowing. They offer errors to learn from, certainly, but they also offer a temporal structure in which that learning can occur.

– J. Logan Smilges, Crip Negativity (2023)

[smokey-eyes-and-bright-ties]

I’m trying to finish Smilges’ Crip Negativity, it’s an academic slog in a lot of ways, but it’s a short read. He talks about this idea of labor normativity within our ableist society. Labor normativity is the idea that someone’s worth is defined by their capacity to work/ do “productive” labor. How it’s ableist against disabled people, and criticizes disability activism for making inclusion into the capitalist working world the focal point of disability politics to our detriment.

He brings up how labor normativity produces labor living, which we are all extremely familiar with. It’s a system that disguises laboring as living, our lives become the labor we do, where we have no identity outside of working and outside of the things we buy/distract ourselves with to replace our social needs (ex- social media addictions instead of building community, etc).

Anyway, I just thought that was interesting.

[nothingbutsunflowers]

"Loneliness is unpleasant for everyone, but it takes on especial horror for disabled people who live so much of our lives in isolation. Unless you have experienced it yourself, it's hard to understand fully the ache of watching others live their lives while it feels as though you are merely aging. It's not the fear of missing out; it's just missing out. Day after day, season after season, year after year of not being healthy enough, not being strong enough, not being smart enough, not being attractive enough, not being happy enough, not being enough of anything to be enough. So when you finally secure access to something for the first time—maybe a concert, a graduate program, a job, a relationship, a surgery—and you realize that you are still feeling all alone, and that no one seems to care... well, devastating doesn't begin to cover it."

— J. Logan Smilges, Crip Negativity (University of Minnesota Press, 2023), pp. 7-8.

[lesbianboyfriend]

When infused with crip negativity, anti-ableism further reveals that the category of disability is itself often both an effect and a weapon of ableism, simultaneously its product and instrument. To be sure, some people are thrust into the category of disability against their will, and I am certainly not suggesting such people are inherently ableist. Rather, I'm pointing to the tricky rhetorical machinery that drives and disguises ableism: how we've come to believe it is fueled by the selective marginalization of disabled people when it is more accurately fueled by the dispossession of all bodyminds believed to be undesirable, unproductive, and disposable. While disabled people often take on connotations of undesirability, unproductivity, and disposability, we are not their exclusive terrain. Ableism can dramatically shape the lives of people without access to the category of disability, and ableism routinely operates in conjunction with racism, colonialism, classism, and cisheterosexism in ways that remain illegible under the rubric of disability.

Crip Negativity, J. Logan Smilges

[1000rh]

The social model […] promotes the idea that disability is a product of the built environment, that disability is not reducible to “flaws” in an individual’s body or mind but is produced by the “misfit” between an individual’s impairments and an environment that was not designed for them. While this model does an excellent job of interrogating the individualizing impulse of the medical model, it does little to contest the criteria by which we recognize an impairment as an impairment. In other words, the social model interrogates the cause of disability phenomenology but not the assumption of a stable disability ontology, leaving unchecked the medical model’s implicit assertion that disabled, as a subject position, is primordial.

– J. Logan Smilges, Crip Negativity (2023)

[1000rh]

The field of disability studies and the wider terrain of disability activism often frame ableism as a collection of access problems. If a person can’t enter a room because there is no ramp, if they can’t participate in a conversation because there is no sign language interpreter, or if they can’t understand a contract because it is too full of unnecessary jargon, then that room, conversation, and contract are inaccessible. Inaccessibility occurs when disabled people and our needs are intentionally dismissed or accidentally overlooked. Either way, ableism is at work, barring disabled people from full participation. But as my high school experience demonstrates, ableism casts a wider net than the language of access is able to capture. In my case, nothing about my education was inaccessible. I could get into the building and to all of my classes. I could understand the lessons and complete the assignments. I had a range of extracurricular activities I could choose from and participate in if I wanted. I had teachers who offered a variety of formal and informal accommodations to help me fulfill course objectives. And yet despite all this access, ableism still managed to make my life absolutely fucking miserable. If anything, I wanted less access, less contact with ableds, less time spent in spaces structured by neurotypicality, and less energy expended accommodating me into a community that exploited my neuroqueerness as an opportunity to ossify its superiority. Access didn’t eliminate ableism; it enabled ableism to bare its teeth.

– J. Logan Smilges, Crip Negativity (2023)

[1000rh]

Typically, hope is catalogued as a good feeling. Crip negativity rightfully leads us to be suspicious of good feelings. It’s no secret that hope has been known to function as tool for placation and avoidance. In its purest form, though, to hope is merely “to entertain expectation of something desired”. Hope can be a good feeling, but it’s also and always contiguous with bad feelings because it emerges from lack, from want, and from need. Hope does not require confidence or assurance; it is not faith. Hope is openness to the possibility of the unknown, a willingness “to entertain expectation.” When felt in community, hope—along with surprise—is part of what differentiates crip negativity from other variations of critical negativity. Hope suspends crips, however slightly, above the floor of resignation. It keeps us alert and attentive. It reminds us that our bad crip feelings are worth feeling because they, in turn, remind us of what we’re worth. Hope gives crips a structure for our negativity. One that demands no recognition, no gratitude—only a promise not to dissolve into the abyss of our pain.

– J. Logan Smilges, Crip Negativity (2023)

[1000rh]

...the core problem with Edelman’s No Future and with the antisocial thesis more generally is not that they are too negative but that they are not negative enough. Edelman’s failure to account for the dispossessed futurities of queer, trans, poor, racialized, and disabled kids was a symptom of his broader failure of imagination. It’s easier to refuse the social when you can only imagine an existence in which the social has already been offered to you. It is much harder, Jack Halberstam insists, to refuse “that which was first refused to us”. The antisocial thesis is limited by two, related assumptions: first, that reproductive futurism is a birthright and, second, that negativity emerges from deciding that the birthright is insufficient and choosing to relinquish it. There’s no doubt that it is insufficient—reproductive and rehabilitative futurisms are not ones I have interest in pursuing—but there is a privilege laden in the capacity to indulge this kind of refusal: to be able to say “no” and yet always retain the possibility of saying “yes” at a later time. The birthright remains, no matter how often or how loudly you disavow it. For those who exist beyond the edges of society or whose entrance to society is predicated on their ontological plasticity, refusal is another game entirely.

– J. Logan Smilges, Crip Negativity (2023)