Feminist, Queer, Crip by Alison Kafer is one of my favorite not-explicitly-theological books to recommend serious scholars of disability theology, because of its handling of intersectionality and futurity. The Christian telos – or ultimate ends to which a thing is pointed – and how it informs eschatological thinking is often fundamentally different for disabled people in ways that are unjust. Says Kafer, “How one understands disability in the present determines how one imagines disability in the future; one’s assumptions about the experience of disability create one’s conceptions of a better future.”
All too often in the Christian context, disability is seen as nothing-but-suffering, so the ideal future necessarily involves eradicating disability, either on earth or in heaven. This is the thesis of the book: That we assume we all want the same future, which not only ignores disability but “casts disability as a monolith.” Examining futures necessarily requires dissecting what we believe to be “natural,” “inevitable,” and “good,” an implicitly intersectional quest.
Kafer immediately situates the reader in the binary of the social model – that disability is by definition a social experience informed by oppression – and the medical model – that disability is by definition an embodied, medical experience – and then rejects it. She asserts that this binary creates a false dichotomy that the social model is the inherently political model that grounds political work for disability inclusion when, in fact, only a hybrid model gets to the true political work of medical and educational justice.
Kafer’s is one of the first books to introduce me to the notion of “crip theory” and how it differs from disability work. The reclamation of the word “crip” mirrors the LGBTQ+ reclamation of “queer,” a move which helps situate crip work as an example of “collective affinities.” Crip theory is disability work that recognizes the overlap between other marginalized categories like gender, sexuality, race, and economics.
When we think about futures, Kafer argues that we often start with children! How children develop – the first instances of aging – often prefigure for us how a child’s life will go. Disability inherently challenges these assumptions: Congenitally disabled children do not develop “normatively,” and acquired disability interrupts the “normative” progression of aging. We assume linearity, and disability and illness are anything but linear.
This is related to the paternalistic “little angel” mindset with which we treat disabled people: If children are just “unfinished adults,” until they hit specific milestones, then disabled people are “unfinished” as well, because they have not met the normative social markers of development, either. In this context, the only appropriate future for a disabled person is to eventually meet those milestones.
Because this book is not theological, the proposed solutions to disrupting this mindset are not religious but embodied and practical: The final few chapters of Feminist, Queer, Crip focus on intersectional community coalitions (particularly with the LGBTQ+ community), contemporary technology and cyborg studies (a field in and of itself!), and the relationship between disabled folks and nature. Each of these could be a book in themselves, and would benefit those readers with these niche intersecting interests.