Learning Objectives
By the end of this section, participants will be able to:
- Identify crip cultural practices and understand how they disrupt normative culture
- Explain the connection between disability community and crip cultural practices
- Understand the political nature of access in relation to arts and culture
- Describe different kinds of access frameworks
- Apply concepts and practices of critical access in a way that centres disabled people and disability communities
This section will introduce concepts and practices related to disability culture and crip cultural practices, highlighting the connections between disability politics, access, and arts and culture. It will also introduce access as a political and relational act and instruct participants on different frameworks related to access.
What is Disability Culture?
It’s a strange (and twisting) thing to call into being. What is disability culture? Is there one, are there many? Who calls cultures into being? […] [T]he impossibly possible culture that emerges when crips, disabled people, cripples, people with disabilities (for we all use different terms) come together.
(Kuppers, 2011, p. 2)
While there is no single definition of disability culture, it grows out of a shared understanding of disability as a social and political phenomenon, rather than an individualized or medical experience. Disability culture is about pride, community, identity, connection, visibility, art, language, and kinship. It is what emerges when disabled people come together and resist the normalizing impulse of mainstream culture and its imperative to fix, rehabilitate, or cure impairment. Although people’s experiences of disability and impairment might be different, they can locate a shared culture that acknowledges the intrinsic value of disabled people, the generative creativity of disability experience, and the important ways that “disability generates circuits of meaning making in the world” (Garland-Thomson, 2012, p. 344).
Disability culture is understood, experienced, and described differently by different people and in different contexts. Below are a few examples—what else would you add to these descriptions?
Cheryl Wade
“So what’s this disability culture stuff all about? It’s simple; it’s just ‘This is disability. From the inside out.’” “Disability Culture Rap,” The Ragged Edge, 1992: available as text or in performance on YouTube.
Carrie Sandahl
“[D]isability art contributes to the deliberate building of disability culture, which is an expression of disability community values and aesthetics whether in the arts, activism, or daily life (e.g. interdependence and self-determination rather than the typical American notion of independence)” (2018, p. 86).
Carol Gill
“It is not simply the shared experience of oppression. If that were all our culture was, I would agree with those who doubt the probability of a disability culture.
The elements of our culture include, certainly, our longstanding social oppression, but also our emerging art and humor, our piecing together of our history, our evolving language and symbols, our remarkably unified worldview, beliefs and values, and our strategies for surviving and thriving.
I use the word ‘remarkable’ because I find that the most compelling evidence of a disability culture is the vitality and universality of these elements despite generations of crushing poverty, social isolation, lack of education, silencing, imposed immobility, and relentless instruction in hating ourselves and each other” (1995, p. 18).
Petra Kuppers
“At disability culture events, many of us wait while the speech paragraph we’ve just given is typed out and appears on a screen, we interact respectfully with the ASL transcriber, and ensure that there is good lighting on our faces and mouths for those in our audience who read our lips. We shuffle wheelchairs, seats and move guide dogs to ensure that we can all participate.
This spatial and sensory awareness of difference has always been a delight (and necessity) to me, and is significantly different from the atmosphere at most non-disability-led events I participate in” (2007, p. 128).
Neil Marcus
If there was a country called disabled, I would be from there.
I live disabled culture, eat disabled food, make disabled love,
cry disabled tears, climb disabled mountains and tell disabled stories.
If there was a country called disabled,
Then I am one of its citizens. I came there at age 8. I tried to leave.
Was encouraged by doctors to leave. I tried to surgically remove myself from disabled country but found myself, in the end,
staying and living there.
If there was a country called disabled,
I would always have to remind myself that I am from there. I often want to forget. I would have to remember…to remember.
In my life’s journey I am making myself
At home in my country.
What are Crip Cultural Practices?
Crip cultural practices are cultural practices that are rooted in disability culture and the experience of disability. They centre disabled people, disability communities, and disability politics. These practices are typically accessible, creative, and often feature a “one-size-fits-one” approach (Derbyshire, 2016, p. 264).
We can understand crip cultural practices as micro-acts of world-making focused on “rendering material a crip knowledge and value system” (Chandler et al., 2023). In other words, these practices emerge out of disability culture and seek to foreground crip knowledge in order to influence broader mainstream culture in both small and large ways. Though crip cultural practices can happen in many contexts, in large part they seek to make arts and culture more accessible to disabled people and to support disabled people in being both consumers and producers of artistic and cultural work.
Crip cultural practices are often a response to the experience of misfitting.
This term comes from disability studies scholar Rosemarie Garland-Thomson, who developed the idea of the “misfit” to describe how particular embodiments interact with environments.
Crip cultural practices engage with and are borne from crip wisdom.
This term has been articulated by the disability performance collective Sins Invalid and describes the embodied and experiential knowledge of disabled people, shared in and across disability community.
Though crip cultural practices are focused on accessibility for disabled people, one of their major distinguishing factors from inclusion-focused access practices is that they are rooted in anti-assimilationist disability politics. Crip cultural practices resist depoliticized notions of “access” and “inclusion” which tolerate disability and difference and seek to assimilate disabled people into normative culture, but do so without enacting meaningful structural change. Crip cultural practices recognize the need to disrupt a normative culture that prioritizes individualism, efficiency, and profit; they welcome the ways that disability can intervene in those systems. By bringing together disability cultural practices, crip wisdom, and elements of co-design, they innovate access practices which centre disabled people and work towards cultural transformation and social change.
As disability activist and researcher Catherine Frazee argues, “Disabled people don’t want to simply participate in Canadian culture. We want to create it, shape it, and stretch it beyond its tidy edges” (as cited in Royal Ontario Museum, 2008, para. 7). In this way crip cultural practices hold a “desire for the disruption that disability makes” (Fritsch, 2012).
Crip cultural practices draw on crip wisdom and engage critical forms of access (described below) as a response to the experience of misfitting within normative culture, and as a means to intervene into or disrupt normative culture.
Activity #1
Imagine you are organizing a public art or culture event like a dance performance, an art exhibit, a music festival, or a poetry slam.
Sketch out the details of the event, including elements such as where it will take place, how many people you expect to attend, the timeline of activities, etc.
Review these details and consider if there are any parts of the event that could be inaccessible to someone with a disability. What kinds of barriers can you identify? These might include physical, social, sensory, or other barriers.
List the access measures that would be important to include to help mitigate or remove the barriers you identified in step 3. Try to come up with at least 4-5 potential barriers and potential access solutions.
Hold onto your list as you work through this submodule–we’ll return to it in Activity #3!
Tip: If you get stuck, check out the document Vital Practices in the Arts which contains many examples of access practices (especially in sections 3, 4, and 5).
Authors
Eliza Chandler and Megan Johnson
Contributors
- Jodie Salter
- Lisa East
- Carla Rice
- Rana El Kadi
A brightly collage-style illustration by Josephine Guan featuring hands signing “access”; a talking mouth; a body that misfits with the environment; a cursor hovering over a photo to reveal its image description; seating inside an art gallery; and a quotation by Petra Kuppers that reads, “We wait while the speech paragraph we’ve just given is typed out.”
