–Crip Chick is so right on about intersectionality, there’s nothing left for me to say.

–What I think about the construction of the phrase “R-word” is completely influenced by Emily Bernard’s incredible essay, “Teaching the N-Word.” I’m wildly ambivalent about the turning of hate language into euphemisms–n-word, b-word, f-word, and now r-word–that somehow are to protect marginalized communities from the pain of hearing those words yet again and privileged peoples from having to repeat the violence. There are two pieces to my ambivalence.

1) The violence has already been done. The damage won’t be rectified by a refusal to say the words. In our activism and analysis around hate language, we need to be vigilant and conscious about triggers and re-creating the power dynamics put in motion by hate language, but I’m not sure that euphemistic substitutions for hate language is a good stand-in for vigilance and consciousness. At the bottom of this part of my ambivalence is a sense that the “r-word” construction is designed largely to protect those of of us who have been battered by the word retard and by the institutional, material, and attitudinal realities that come with it. As one of those people bruised by the dismissiveness, hatred, and physical violence of retard, I don’t need protection; rather I need compassion, rage, allies, and an end to ableism.

2) The “r-word” construction mirrors the “n-word” construction, which precedes it. I don’t know from where the “n-word” construction originates nor what mix of opinions/feelings/thoughts Black people have about it. But whatever the origins, the mirroring of the two constructions communicates that retard and nigger function in the same ways as hate language and carry the same violence and that all the repulsion and outrage white people supposedly feel upon hearing the word nigger should also be felt in the same measure by non-disabled people upon hearing retard. Here again is analogy failing to do the deeper work of intersectionality. Certainly racist hate language and ableist hate language share much in common. (The ways the word monkey has been used against disabled people (both poc and white) and people of color (both disabled and non-disabled) highlight these commonalities.) But there is so much historical and present-day difference between the usage of retard and the usage of nigger and such a lack of real anti-racist work among white disability activists that the analogy reads to me like white people appropriating the political work of Black activists yet again. The analogy sidelines Black disabled people’s experience, and assumes that disabled people are white and Black people are non-disabled. And the question isn’t asked: how does the snarl of hate sound in the lives of disabled people of color?

–Call me a crank but the Special Olympics “Stop the R- Word Campaign” makes me pause. Don’t get me wrong, organizing around retard as hate speech and even protesting Tropic Thunder as a specific cultural example of the use of ableist, as well as racist, hate speech is important work. But since when is the Special Olympics about justice for cognitively disabled people? For many years that organization has been one of the biggest creators of super crip images–that is “heroic” disabled people “inspiring” audiences with their “bravery”–and and have often fanned the flames of pity with its charity-model fundraising. Even the name Special Olympics sets up a charity-model context, rather than a social-justice-model context. I believe that an organization that frames disabled people as inspirational and/or objects of pity is also setting the stage for the unquestioned use of retard. If the Special Olympics is serious about its r-word campaign, it has a lot of internal work to do.

–The image below coupled with text from the Special Olympics website that says, “Historically, we have seen the elimination of other negative stigmatizing words through awareness and education campaigns and societal pressure. We no longer tolerate calling blacks, Jews, Chinese, physically handicapped, homosexuals, or Hispanics by the words nigger, kike, chink, crip, faggot, and spic, respectively,” frankly pisses me off. I want to say, “Oh, really.” What presumption to try to persuade people to take action regarding ableist hate speech by claiming that the the struggle against other kinds of hate speech has already been won. Presumptuous, naive, and privileged, I say. And to suggest that the Black, presumably disabled women in this image don’t hear the word nigger, at least occasionally, while using their images in the struggle against retard is so suspect on so many levels.

Two dark skinned young women stand next to each other dressed in shorts and tank tops with medals hanging around their necks and smiles on their faces. The headline next to them reads, 'R-word is hate speech.' Protest poster found at http://www.selfadvocacy.org/pdf/SpecialOlympics_ProtestSigns2.pdf

As a side note, this of course has very little connection to the main topics of my blog–writing, disability, queerness, trans identity, and social justice–except there is a tangent. I cycled hundreds, maybe thousands, of miles on the back roads of Oregon when I was a teenager. I was more or less inseparable from first my single speed upright bike and then my Schwinn ten speed. But when I moved to Portland to go to college, I left my Schwinn behind because I knew my cerebral-palsy-tippy balance wasn’t good enough to safely navigate city streets. Now 25 years later I have a recumbent trike, dubbed the Red Crab, and once again I’m riding the back roads, practically inseparable from the sheer pleasure and motion of pedaling. So I could stretch and say that I’m writing about crip recreation.

Anyway my sweetie Samuel and I have been on several multi-day rides (read about cycling in Oregon and around the northern part of Lake Champlain part 1 and part 2) but never a camping trip where we carried all our gear.

The biggest surprise was how friggin hard the hills were on a trike loaded with 40 pounds of clothes, food, sleeping bag and pad, tent, and sundries. I was huffing and puffing, particularly because our loop took us 80 miles into the Adirondaks, so we had a lot of climbing in the first two days and a lot of descent in our fourth day.

The wackiest campground was Poke-a-Moonshine, a state park that’s squeezed between Interstate 87 and the massive miles-long cliff face of Pokamoonshine Mountain. It had some attributes of a great campground–almost empty, great hot showers, a campsite shielded by a 20 foot high boulder, an easy trail up to the cliff face–and attributes of a lousy campground–freeway noise all night, a park ranger mowing grass for hours near our campsite, mosquitoes galore. At some point I woke up in the night all worried about raccoons and our food until the freeway noise reminded me that of the two problems–coons potentially eating a day-and-a-half worth of food (didn’t happen) and carbon-emitting, planet-destroying vehicles roaring by in astounding numbers even at 2 a.m.–only one (the latter) really warranted worry, and then I fell asleep again.

The best road was a paved logging road called Forestdale–quiet, green, rolling, no traffic–perfect.

The most notable vehicle was the dump truck parked in a ditch, thistle, chickory, and grass grown high around it.

The biggest adventure was when the paved Stracksville Road turned into hard-packed sand and stone, went straight up for a mile, descended a bit, turned softer, then turned to an impassable two-track. We backtracked, took another marginally passable two-track, on a hope and crossed fingers, to avoid a long sandy descent, and two hours and six miles later we were back at the point where we turned on to Stracksville. It was an adventure and demoralizing. I got reminded about how much of long distance, endurance activity–hiking, running, cycling–is mental, how I can psych myself in or out, have fun or be miserable on the same road with the same legs and same weather just depending upon my state of mind.

And the many moments of joy: fresh pumpkin pie, sweet peaches, loons on Buck Pond, rolling along side the Ausable River, dipping my head into an unnamed creek, watching the moon rise over Lake Champlain, sleeping deep in a cocoon of a tent with my sweetie, feeling my quads and gluts work the miles, Ben and Jerry’s ice cream at a Mobil Station in Peaseville, swimming in Buck Pond and Lake Champlain. It was good.

At the same time I kept expecting some queerness to appear in the art, the circus, the politics. I mean, it was all so resistant of capitalism, war, consumerism, greed with such an ethic of outlandish/outrageous creativity, all so bent, so queer in the general sense of the word, that I kept being surprised by the lack of specific queerness. I know white Vermont hippie culture, out of which B&P grows, is quite heterosexual; but probably because of my time with the radical faeries, where queerness, drag, outdoor community, and theater merge in a myriad of ways; I really did expect some flavor of queerness to rise to the surface. It didn’t.

On the other hand, I’ve come to practically expect racism and ableism at these kinds of events, and unfortunately my expectations were met in this regard. One of the performers in the circus yesterday was a woman of color and manual wheelchair user. Her roles–passive, limited, using her so clearly as a token woc–had me just shaking my head in disgust. For one, there were no attempts at creating any access in the performing space–a bumpy, slightly soggy pasture–leaving her to wheel over the lumps and softness and perform all at the same time. For two, she was totally not present in the big group song and dance numbers. (Has no one from B&P heard of or seen integrated dance?) For three, in one number she rolled out, followed by a white guy who held a sign saying “Ethiopia” over her head, while other white people in masks performed a dance about how the U.S. gives much more military aid than food aid to Ethiopia, and then at the end when she spoke about this disproportionate aid, the sign holder repeated her, as if the audience might not have understood or heard her. Arg! It was simply a big tangled wad of ableism and racism. And I was dismayed but not surprised.

I’m struck by the contrast between the ways I was surprised by the lack of queerness and the ways I was not surprised by the racism and ableism.

That said, I have been so caught by Neil and Petra’s conversation about the word cripple in Cripple Poetics. The book starts with these wonderful lines from Neil:

“How can I speak of cripple and not mention the wind.
How can I speak of crippled and not mention the heart.
Heart, wind, song, flower, space, time, love. To leave
these absent is to leave cripple in stark terms.
As if we were made of medical parts and not flesh and bone.

There is always wind in my cripple….

Cripple is not extraordinary or ordinary.
Cripple is a full plate….”

Cripple is such an an ambivalent word, ugly word, a bully’s word, an insider’s word, a word that’s used as metaphor all the time. (For instance, after 9/11 we heard repeatedly how the attacks were meant to cripple the U.S. The examples of this kind of metaphoric usage abound.) Neil and Petra take all of this up.

The poet who writes, “There is always wind in my cripple,” later says “I don’t use the word crip to describe myself. I don’t wish to take on its painful history.”

Petra’s poem “Crip Language” addresses the stark violence of that word:

“Kruppel Cripple Fickle Tickle
playground ground go round again
last out on the line
Cripple Fucking Kruppel Madchen
tickle fickle root…
Cripple Ripple Cripple Ripple
stick that stick across your feet
fall on down
fall on down
that stick is harder than your bone”

Yet–and because–Petra also says, “In terms of word sound, I personally do not like crip–I like cripple, rippling across my tongue, little explosions, waves in my mouth. Liquid, and reminding me of Kruppel, my German word…. I am not sure the English crip has the same richness, at least not for me: it’s too short, too hip.”

I adore this tangle, dipping down into association, emotion, history, metaphor, not arriving at any one question or answer. At the same time Neil uses an analogy to explain some of what he’s thinking/feeling about cripple that makes me stop and and need to expand a dialogue that’s fairly single issue and narrowly focused. Neil writes, “is our [disability] history similarly known to ourselves or to the public as african americans [history] is known. not yet. then why do we borrow a nigger equivalent–is it?–use of oppressive term for ownership of power.”

Leslie wrote to me in her e-mail: “What that question [about African-American history] assumes: that African Americans’ histories of oppression and resistance are known, acknowledged, and, to some degree, understood. It also implies that crip history is not, in part, African American history; it erases the stories of African Americans with dis/abilities. The inclusion of both of these questions–the broad assumptive question [about history] and the delicate truth-seeking question [about the relationship between cripple and nigger]–could be read as documenting a specific moment in both Neil’s internal dialog and discussions happening across Disability Studies. Or, it could be read as an irresponsible choice to reinforce the perception that intersectionality of race, ethnicity, and dis/ability is merely tangential to dis/ability culture, and to crip-culture building.”

I so want it to be the former–a moment in a bigger dialogue that’s moving toward deep intersectionality. But for it to cleanly and clearly be that moment, I would need the book to be more intentionally multi-issued; for issues of race to be woven into who the “our” of “our [disability] history” is (white disabled people?) and who the “we” of “why do we borrow a nigger equivalent” is (white disabled people?); for acknowledgment of white privilege to be part of the finding of connection between different kinds of ugly words that arise from different histories and systems of oppression. I need Petra and Neil and white disability culture (myself included) to really explore Neil’s two word question: why do we borrow a nigger equivalent–is it?. And analogy and metaphor doesn’t in any way function in this context as deep exploration.

I want to pause here and reflect upon how miserably often white activists make analogy to African-American community, culture, and activist struggle as if the Black Civil Rights movement was entirely successful and is essentially finished and is now simply the measure of other social justice movements. This dynamic serves both deflect attention away from present-day racism and mask the actual role the Black Civil Rights movement had in giving rise to and feeding other liberation movements in the U.S. Of course this reflection isn’t directed specifically at Cripple Poetics, even as it is one of the perspectives through which I’m reading the dialogue about cripple.

I mean these criticisms in the best possible way. As Leslie wrote near the end of her e-mail: “Oh there’s so much to love in this book! Space travel. Disabled food, disabled clothes. ‘Bad crips’ making out under the guise of dance performance…. But isn’t it also a gesture of love for the community and culture that Neil and Petra co-create to keep pushing, asking questions, calling one another on our shit?”

In the end, I can easily say Cripple Poetics provokes me, and that’s a good thing

Early in the book in the form of a personal ad, Neil describes himself as a “handsome romantic 53 yr old spastic revolutionary with vision.” The pairing of the words spastic and revolutionary has made me catch my breath and hold it, letting it out ever so slowly, as I roll those words around. Spastic is one of those one word metaphors: the phrases “spazing out” or “he’s such a spaz”–meaning uncoordinated, incompetent, foolish, to be discounted–have currency because of cultural and institutional assumptions about bodies that are spastic, bodies that move in uncontrolled, jerky ways, muscles tense, constricted, spasming. If those bodies were appreciated as sexy, beautiful, desirable, then “she’s so spastic” would be a compliment rather than a put down.

The words lame, black, crazy, gay, retarded, fag function in the same way. They have become generalized put downs or associations with badness/negativity precisely because the bodies they describe are pitied, marginalized, and/or hated. Of course many of these words are also used as slurs in primary ways: fag used to bully/harass gay and bi men/boys specifically, crazy used specifically to shame people who have psych disabilities.

A slogan like “Lame is sexy” or “Black is beautiful” takes much of its power from not only an affirmation of identity but also from reversing the metaphor. This is the context and function of “handsome spastic revolutionary” and has struck me so because it strikes so close. Even with all my politics about using the ugly words as insider language (LGBT peoples using queer, disabled people using crip, Black people using nigga, however ambivalently with a lot of community disagreement in all these examples), I have always ducked spastic. I’ve tried not to pay attention to it; I’ve not challenged its metaphoric use; I’ve always felt raw in its presence. And so the identity affirmation and the metaphor reversal feel particularly potent to me who lives in a body full of tremors, tics, spasms, tension: spastic revolutionary.

For next time, more about Cripple Poetics and the word cripple itself and what it means for a white person to think about race and ugly language (I certainly paused long and hard before I wrote the n-word).

In their excellent presentation/paper “How Disability Studies Stays White and What Kind of White It Stays: A Call for Intersectionality within Disability Studies,” Nwadiogo Ejiogu and Syrus Marcus Ware challenge the metaphoric use of the word colonize to describe the ableist marginalization of disabled bodies/minds, which are often presumed both in Disability Studies and the Disability Rights Movement to be white. Ejiogu and Ware write: “While it’s necessary to pay close attention to the many violences done onto particular bodies in order to maintain notions of able-bodiedness, intelligence, sanity, and productivity within a capitalist market, the appropriation of the term colonialism erases violent histories and contemporary realities. As people who carry with us transgenerational injuries as a result of legacies of colonialism and slavery, but who also benefit from ongoing gendered colonial violence enacted onto First Nations peoples in Canada, this (mis)use erases these violences while ignoring the messy ways in which power, privilege, and domination work.” What do white disability activists and academics gain by using the concept/metaphor of colonialism to describe ableism’s impact on disabled people without exploring the specificities, histories, and lived realities of colonialism? Do we (ie white disability activists and academics) think we gain legitimacy? Do we believe colonialism is actually understood in all its horror? Are we trying to disown the ways in which we’re complicit with and privileged by colonialism? What are the ways of talking about the shared forces that insist on owning a multitude of different peoples’ bodies, cultures, and cultures? The answer is certainly not through analogy. As an activist, I am suspicious of metaphor.

The next day at the conference, Riva Lehrer, Sunny Taylor, and Katherine Sherwood spoke at a plenary panel about disability and visual art. In her presentation about her new work, Riva talked about metaphor as a way to communicate bodily experiences, which she framed as ultimately individual experiences of aloneness. She called metaphor a “method of being porous to each other.” I know in my work as much as I rail against disability being transformed into metaphors and signifiers (Peter Pan’s Captain Hook being marked as evil by, among other things, his prosthetic device, to give an easy example), I return repeatedly to metaphor to describe and engage bodily experience. I’m not sure I could abandon metaphor, even if I wanted.

All of which leads me to the complex work of evaluating each metaphor as it appears. Does it appropriate experience? Does it run roughshod over specific histories? Does it ignore, rewrite, or simplify certain kinds of specificity? Does it open a door or close it? Is it a shorthand for analysis or feeling? Does that shorthand hold legitimacy or not and with whom?

I have no conclusions, just a slosh of thoughts.

The website is both a kind of extended business card and advertisement for what I do and hopefully a bit of a resource for issues around queerness and disability/Deafness. To that end, I’m developing a Queer and Trans Disability/Deafness Resources Page. I want to make it as comprehensive as possible. It’s being interesting to figure out what the boundaries of this webpage are:

*what about AIDS writing and cancer writing that don’t name disability or Deafness but are intensely about bodily difference
*what about queer folks whose impairments influence their work but who rarely or never reflect upon disability or Deafness directly
*what about communities and cultures that frame disability in ways very different from the mostly white, mostly physical disability perspective of the disability rights movement
*what about issues of outness both around queerness and disability and Deafness
*how to include Deaf resources without conflating Deafness and disability.

I have few answers but am enjoying working through the layers.

The page is far from comprehensive yet. If you have resources you’d like to add, please drop me a comment or e-mail

On a side note about the odd quirks of how self esteem works: The book was also nominated in the LGBT poetry category but didn’t make the finalists there. It was a much bigger, more competitive field, and my I-can’t-just-be-happy-and-assured brain wants to say, “But if the book was really good, it would have been a poetry finalist.” And I want to say to that brain, “Shut up!”

And finally, which books become Lammie finalists and which don’t has always puzzled me. This year in the trans category, neither Julia Serano’s book nor Helen Boyd’s made the cut. Both omissions make no sense.