What I mean by cripping

Reflections on defining 'to crip' in February 2025 from Char Heather.

While writing an upcoming piece for the newsletter on crip fragmentation I started to define what I meant by crip. I was using crip as a verb, a ‘doing’ word, as in to crip narrative or to crip form or to crip grammar. As I started on this working definition, one that I have turned over like a precious and complex pebble in my hands, worn smooth by my thumbs, the piece started to grow. I cut the paragraph and opened a new document. The document that became this newsletter. Something I can refer back to and potentially update as my own understanding of what cripping might be changes and grows.

You may not need or want a working definition, you may have a deep understanding already alive inside your bones. This short piece of writing is not an exhaustive definition on the uses and meanings of crip, nor on its complicated, rich history and roots. There is a great deal of wonderful writing about what crip means in different contexts and to different people, alongside variations on the term. For example, some people use krip, rather than crip, where the ‘k’ spelling works to both differentiate it from The Crips, and highlight the links between disability and black identity under oppressive structures of white supremacy and colonialism. There’s an amazing book, Crip Genealogies, in which contributors ‘reorient the field of disability studies by centering the work of transnational feminism, queer of color critique, and trans scholarship and activism. They challenge the white, Western, and Northern rights-based genealogy of disability studies, showing how a single coherent narrative of the field is a mode of exclusion that relies on logics of whiteness and imperialism’ (Duke Press). If you would like to get stuck into a much broader examination of crip and its various histories and contexts, this is a great place to look.

Here, permit me to share some of the places I find comfort and understanding in using the term crip as an active word, where crip does something to other words or forms or orientations. You may have your own formations of crip, your own definitions. You may find that crip resists set definitions and that it is a feeling or an atmosphere, not something that can be caught in language. You may have a fixed idea of what crip is and that may be resistant to what I have collected here. I will set out what I mean when I say ‘to crip’, at least for now. I accept that language and contexts change over time and this may become outmoded. I may make mistakes and want to edit this soon after posting. I hope it is something I can refer back to in other writings. Perhaps that’s how you got here, through a time-travelling hyperlink, in which case, hello from a more distant past. I will try to use direct language here, not because I am trying to be an authority but with the aim of clarity.

For something to be crip it is, in part, informed by Disability Justice, or read through a Disability Justice lens, and might reflect several or all of the 10 Principles of Disability Justice as set out by Sins Invalid. If you’re unfamiliar with either these principles or Sins Invalid’s work, I encourage you to get familiar!

Though crip is an identity marker that many of us use, to crip is not. As Margaret Price writes, ‘crip theory works with identity but is primarily methodological rather than identitarian’ (11). Let’s unpack that a little. Crip theory is something that discusses identity, often, but that is not its main focus. The main focus is about the ways in which things are done, how things can be done in a crip way, or how we can do cripping. We are looking at methodologies, approaches.

So how does one do cripping?

Price also writes that to crip, or to perform cripping, is ‘infusing the disruptive potential of disability into normative spaces and interactions’ (11). So, if I’m talking about crip narrative (as I often am), I am thinking about the conventions of narrative and looking at how disability and its experience can open up other approaches, approaches that might fly in the face of convention. For example, if a narrative convention is to have a plot that arcs, then I could infuse my story with the disruptive potential of disability by finding a different shape to work to.

In Robert McRuer’s Crip Theory, the author demonstrates how crip theory and cripping questions the order of things, especially in ‘compulsory able-bodiedness’ and its relationship to neoliberalism (2). Sami Schalk and Jina B. Kim write that ‘Crip theorists shift focus from a politics of disability representation to the violent operations enabled through ideologies of ability, or the implicit and often compulsory favoring of ablebodiedness and able-mindedness’ (38-9). The focus is on revealing, unpacking or disrupting structures that enforce ablebodiesness and able-mindedness, rather than simply representing disability.

Back to my example, when we are cripping narrative, by using a different shape that is not the arc, we are doing this in a way that is questioning the order of things.

We might ask: Why do I have to use an arc? This question relates to compulsory able-bodiedness when we find the arc does not fit how we need to tell stories as disabled people, or the stories we need to tell that are informed by disability. We might find that trying to fit a chronic illness story into a traditional arc structure means discomfort – this story does not resolve, so why should we try to resolve it?

Why do I have to use an arc? Is a question that can also question neoliberalism. You might be resisting the conventional shape that is demanded by the book market – you want to write a story in a way that reflects your style, not the style that the market dictates is the one that sells books, for example.

These examples are a simplification, and but one of thousands of examples that could be used, but happen to be the ones I am most familiar with. I would also add that you can write crip stories and still use an arc! There are plenty of other ways to disrupt narrative.

To recap then, to crip (as I am using it), is to disrupt and question particular conventions of being or making that repeat the logic of compulsory able-bodiedness and neoliberal capitalism. This form of cripping is informed by the principles of Disability Justice, so it may also reflect ideas of interconnectedness, intersectionality or collective access. This often infuses cripping with a sense of care, for others and for the self. Think of what a cripped form of self-care might be. It is more than buying a bath bomb. The idea that buying a bath bomb alone could be self-care is a neoliberal idea, purchasing something for a quick fix. Don’t get me wrong, I love a bath bomb. A cripped form of self-care might be prioritizing rest and pleasure, doing what we can to disrupt capitalist notions of productivity by nurturing ourselves and the care connections in our lives.

It is not easy work.

To crip as an approach, as a way of doing things, can be both essential, integral, impossible not to do, while also being very difficult.

I will end on an attempt at one sentence, to sum up my current working definition of cripping.

By cripping something, we unearth different approaches to being, making and doing, that are informed by disability and work to question and disrupt structures of compulsary ablebodiedness and able-mindedness.

With disruption, with questions, with care,

Char x

Works cited:

Margaret Price, Crip Spacetime: Access, Failure, and Accountability in Academic Life. (Duke University Press, 2024), 11.

Robert McRuer, Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability. (NYU Press, 2006), 2.

Jina B. Kim and Sami Schalk, Integrating Race, Transforming Feminist Disability Studies, (English Language and Literature: Faculty Publications, Smith College, 2020), 38-9.