historical and political significance of their experiences
14 as disabled and who want to reclaim a stigmatized term.
Crip
Victoria Ann Lewis
“Crip” is the shortened, informal form of the word
“cripple.” One finds it in slang usage by the early
twentieth century, often in the underworld language
associated with begging—such as “he was a phony crip.”
The word also occurs as a nickname based on a defining
physical characteristic, such as the novelist Owen
Wister’s 1893 reference to a lame character shot in the
leg as Crip Jones (“Crip” 1994, 522). During the 1920s,
“crip” became a slang synonym for “easy,” both in sports
and in collegiate registers: a “baseball crip” was an easy
pitch, while a “crip course” was an easy course in school.
These usages reflect the low social expectations held
for people with disabilities, as in the phrase “to give
someone the cripple’s inch.”
With the emergence of the disability civil rights
movement in the 1970s, “crip” gained wide usage as an
informal, affectionately ironic, and provocative identi-
fication among people with disabilities. The term func-
tions as an alternative to both the old-fashioned and
rejected “handicapped person” and the new, more for-
mal terms “disabled person” or “person with a disabil-
ity,” both of which gained official status as the preferred
terms for standard usage in the mid-1980s. Within the
disability community, it signals in-group status and
solidarity and is intended to deflate mainstream labels
such as “handi-capable,” and “physically challenged,”
terms many activists find patronizing and politically
misleading. “Crip” is most often embraced by educated
disabled people who have some understanding of the
46
Usage of the term in the United Kingdom and Australia
follows a similar pattern to that in the United States.
Since the 1980s, “crip” has become increasingly
prevalent as an adjective/modifier in phrases such as
“crip shots,” “crip moves,” “crip Zen,” and “crip poetry
slam” to identify a sensibility, identity, or activity in op-
position to mainstream assumptions about disability. It
also suggests a relaxed, confident claiming of difference,
what the late disability historian Paul Longmore called
“disability cool.” There also has been some linguistic
confusion because the term is more widely associated
with one of the most notorious Los Angeles gangs, the
Crips. Origin myths for the gang name range from a
journalistic error (confusing “crip for “crib”) to the
common use of canes among some gang members as a
fashion accessory. Leroy Moore, whose Krip Hop Nation
project seeks to highlight the contributions of disabled
artists to the contemporary music scene, spells the word
with a “K” instead of a “C” to avoid gang identification.
While the noun forms of both “cripple” and “crip”
were reclaimed as terms of empowerment rather than
degradation under the aegis of the U.S. disability rights
and culture movements, “cripple” remains a taboo
term in the United States and is marked as derogatory
and substandard in most dictionaries and style guides.
However, as with appropriation of the word “queer” by
many LGBT activists, some disabled artists and activists
have deliberately readopted the term “cripple.” In her
famous essay “On Being a Cripple” (1986), for instance,
Nancy Mairs explains her preference for the term—
citing, among other reasons, its Old English roots, its
freedom from euphemism, and its ability to disturb.
Mairs insists that while “Cripple is the word I use to
name myself,” she never uses it to refer to another per-
son. Meanwhile, other disabled artists have embraced
the term, including Lorenzo Milam in his memoir,
Cripple Liberation Front Marching Band Blues (1983), poet
Cheryl Marie Wade, and activist and radio host Shawn
Casey O’Brien of the 1980s rock band The Cripples. In
Germany, since 1978, a large-scale political movement
has reclaimed the taboo term the Krüppelgruppen (liter-
ally the “Cripples’ Group”), a phrase that deliberately
evokes the eugenic policies of the Nazis, to fight for dis-
ability rights.
With the growth of disability studies as an academic
discipline in the 1990s, “crip” began to appear in a
variety of verb forms. One saw, for example, authors
grappling with what it meant to analyze a topic or
representation and “crip it,” a process through which
one subjects a text or an idea to “cripping” or being
“cripped.” While there are examples of “crip” converted
into a verb as far back as the fourteenth century, where
we read of “a beeste that was broken and Cripped,” our
contemporary usage seems to have originated in aca-
demic discourse as a critical strategy borrowed from
queer studies. Carrie Sandahl’s influential essay “Queer-
ing the Crip or Cripping the Queer? Intersections of
Queer and Crip Identities in Solo Autobiographical
Performance” (2003) and Robert McRuer’s Crip Theory:
Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability (2006) were
among the first texts to introduce the noun-verb con-
version to critical studies. Sandahl notes that the power
of claiming either “crip” or “cripple” comes from the
“sedimented history of its prior usage,” and the capacity
of both words to injure. The terms “disabled person” or
“person with a disability” continue to be preferred in ed-
ucational, professional, legal, and civil rights discourse,
where “crip” may not be understood as either positive or
empowering. Sandahl also notes the two positions share
“a radical stance towards concepts of normalcy” (2003,
26), a position that McRuer describes as a shared “resis-
tance to cultural homogenization” (2006, 33).
crip
While both crip theory and queer theory advocate
for the collapse of the binary division between abnor-
mal and normal, McRuer cautions against development
of a crip theory that would universalize and transcend
activism in the streets. He grounds crip theory in a ma-
terialist analysis that complicates simple disability iden-
tity politics while also depending on it. Both neoliberal
capitalism and antiglobalization movements continue
to enforce a ideology of compulsory able-bodiedness
that, in the case of neoliberalism, valorizes individual
exceptionalism or, in the case of progressive/left move-
ments, uses the degraded disabled body as the oppos-
ing binary term to the free, empowered citizen. Only by
“cripping” the human condition, economically, cultur-
ally, and geographically, according to McRuer, will pro-
gressive social movements be able to “remake the mate-
rial world.”
Both “cripping” and “queering,” as interpretive strat-
egies, spin mainstream representations or practices to re-
veal dominant assumptions and exclusionary effects. It
is important to note that while queer theory originated
in the academy, the practice of “cripping” originated
in the projects of artists and activists. As Ann M. Fox
argues, the process of cripping involves not only mak-
ing the contribution of disabled people to mainstream
culture visible but also revealing how “disability might
have been an integral part of how that knowledge was
produced,” and thus capable of questioning “the privi-
leged position of . . . bodily, cognitive . . . normalcy,”
in cultural production (2010, 39). Fox’s assertion is
demonstrated by the fact that, long before crip theory
appeared, disabled performers, playwrights, and come-
dians were “cripping” mainstream cultural institutions.
One popular target was the telethon, “cripped” by Susan
Nussbaum in her comedic play Telethon (which debuted
in Chicago in 1995), Bill Trzeciak in his 1998 “Telethon”
sketch in the play P.H.*reaks: the hidden history of people
victoria ann lewis 47
 with disabilities, and the Mickee Faust Club’s video send-
up The Scary Lewis Yell-a-Thon (2004).
The popularity of “crip” among certain sectors of the
disability community shows no sign of abating. The
term thrives alongside the more circumspect “disabled
person,” “disability,” or “person with a disability,” ex-
panding a newly minted vocabulary for physical and
mental difference begun in the 1970s. The shape and
sound of the word, with its quick burst of Anglo-Saxon
roughness, forms compound words easily, and, most
important, matches the pride and panache of a grow-
ing, self-defining disability community.
48
15
Deafness
Douglas C. Baynton
Deafness is not what it used to be. Nor has it ever been
just one thing, but many. Typically it refers to those who
cannot understand speech through hearing alone, with
or without amplification. Colloquially, it may also
refer to any hearing impairment, as when a person is
described as “a little deaf.” Professionals in education
and communication sciences distinguish prelingual
from postlingual deafness, in recognition of their
different implications for speech and language learning.
Within the deaf community, in contrast, the term
“deaf,” as well as its signed equivalent, usually refers to
people who identify culturally as deaf, and is sometimes
capitalized (“Deaf”) to distinguish the culture from the
audiological condition.
In the nineteenth-century United States, culturally
deaf people frequently referred to themselves as “mutes,”
while educators used “semi-deaf” as a synonym for hard
of hearing, “semi-mute” for the postlingually deafened
who retained intelligible speech, and “deaf-mute” or
“deaf and dumb” for the prelingually deaf. Deafness also
has long been a common metaphor for a refusal to lis-
ten or to learn, as when the French writer Victor Hugo
declared that “the one true deafness, the incurable deaf-
ness, is that of the mind” (qtd. in Lane 1984, ix).
In 1772, British writer Samuel Johnson called deaf-
ness the “most desperate of human calamities,” a view
expressed more often by hearing than by deaf people.
Deafness acquired after early childhood is usually expe-
rienced as a loss and a sorrow, at least for a time. Of this