crip time is soft and tender
for me, crip time meant lots of gentle making time.
I spent the spring and summer deeply ill, unable to do much more than walk a block or two, work an hour or two, and spend many hours lying on the couch. Time felt both stagnant and passing in dollops, indicative of a standstill of a life and a very broken memory.
So, time changed for me, and I found crip* time. The concept of crip time comes from disability justice, a movement and a practice and a human rights framework that has saved me again and again. Crip time means we (disabled and chronically ill people) conceive of time differently than abled people do. We break and bend it. It means that some days, a brisk walk can be a few miles in an hour; other days, a loop to the mailbox takes us that long. Some days, falling asleep is as easy as collapsing into bed; other days, it takes an hour-long routine that includes a hot salt bath and lavender spritzed on pillows and a popped melatonin. Some weeks, this essay writes itself; other weeks, it takes a full day of brain energy.
Rather than bend disabled bodies and minds to meet the clock, crip time bends the clock to meet disabled bodies and minds. — Alison Kafer
“Crip time is broken time” — and broken means something different here, because disability requires a radical reimagining of brokenness. Not always something jagged and angular, but something soft and yielding — something to embrace and cherish. We break time to make it flexible, to bring ease and movement and fluidity.
I find that crip time can apply to all kinds of bodies and minds — for don’t we all experience pain, illness, injuries, trauma, brokenness? Isn’t ability the temporary state? Don’t we all usually have something just beneath the surface, or times when it feels like our bodies are fighting us, and we can choose to fight back or avoid it or surrender to it? Perhaps crip time is even so expansive as to allow us permission to rest, when a daylight savings time change or a lunar eclipse full moon wreaks havoc on our bodies. Perhaps a season of rest and surrendering, with these early nights and this soft gentle time, is exactly what these tender strong broken bodies need.
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*nb: crip is a word that has been used to discriminate against disabled people and has since been reclaimed by some in the community — much like queer. Similarly, it should only be used by those within the community or with permission from the person who chooses it as a self-descriptor.
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a few medicines, or an intro to disability justice:
the disability justice primer, here and here, with full credit to Sins Invalid for incubating much of this work.
Dr. Sami Schalk and Leah Lakshmi Piepzna-Samarasinha both just published seminal works. Dr. Schalk’s is available open source here, and she recently did an interview on JVN’s podcast.
while not explicitly disability justice works, The Body Is Not an Apology and Pleasure Activism were my entry points into this world. A few of my favorites can be found on my Bookshop (affiliate link).
there is (of course) much overlap between the reproductive and the disability justice movements — with some key nuanced conversations about forced sterilization and eugenics. I disagree with the framing in this CAP piece, as well as the gendered language — the movements have interacted deeply, and both justice frameworks were created and have always been led by QPOC — but the article one of the more comprehensive overviews I’ve seen. Here is the Sins Invalid statement after Roe was overturned.
remember to vote tomorrow!
until next time.